The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse!!

@celtic66 +1 Seekers are the few and far between, artists and consumers have to put in the work to discover one another.

I find plenty of new interesting artists, and I still listen to old favorites. I like to read the comments with youtube videos of the oldie acts, generally the comments betray youthful reminiscing and bashing of contemporary music.  Seems to me, these people lament their loss of youth, when one can no longer find pleasure in new and exciting things they certainly have lost their youth.

@mahgister

Well... I went back and watched the whole video. Twelve minutes I will not get back. Let me paraphrase... "Wahhhh, things are changing and I don’t like it. Wahhhhh." The old days were so much better... I was so privileged to not be able to buy much music. Yes and a bowl of gruel will taste oh so much better if I am starving to death. Darn... I loved to old days when I was starving to death... I just don’t appreciate food like I used to.

I, and I think most of the people here, are not just random listeners of music and actually don’t just follow whatever is released. We don’t just consume what is put in front of use and love it. Sure that is true for the general public...for thousands of years they have been told what to think and fed what they should like and have been taken advantage of... nothing new here.

Great art requires great artists, they find the tools to create it. Appreciators of art will find it and appreciate it.

This and several other recent threads beg to be answered with, "OK, Boomer." 

I get how it's harder to accept change with age, but to assume the present isn't as good as the past is to simply increase the pressure that leads to fossilization. 

This and several other recent threads beg to be answered with, "OK, Boomer." 

This has lost you all your credibility.  I'm not a boomer.

And the kids (or even adults) who start or finish their phrases with insult for the previous generations have no credibility to their arguments because at that point it degenerates to name calling.
There are a lot of valid points in the video and in here.  And make no mistake, today's music is absolute crap 99% of the time for many of the reasons cited in the video.  The biggest culprits to me are the new -tech "tools" that are abused and misused.  The tools are:

Auto-tune, pitch correction, quantization, Pro-Tools (and it's million plugins) and GarageBand, which makes every rank amateur musician a worse recording artist and even worse studio producer.

Think about it, most charting songs today are assembled in the studio as fragments from hundreds of takes, often times taking single notes from a take to insert into other takes and those songs are more assemblages of blocks than they are performances.  Every edit subtracts from the whole.  This has been the case since some clever studio engineer figured out how to splice tape.

In general, while I agree with much of Beato’s argument (’technical’ perfection and ease of use vs. skill, inspiration and ’selection’), I also think there is a lot of survivor bias whenever one is comparing ’the great music of the past’ to the ’poor music of the present’. A lot of past stuff has rightly been consigned to the bin of history.

@gordon 

The arc of music like literature, art, and architecture has been bending upward since the dawn of time, so I don’t understand the premise of the video.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean (i.e. ’things have always got better since the beginning of time’ or ’things have got better on average over time’), but either way I disagree with it. Bach is pretty old, and Hildegard von Bingen is even older, but they didn’t write bad music; neither is ’worse’ than anything - and I mean anything - written today. At best, it’s incomparable. Just like at best Damien Hirst and Mark Rothko are incomparable to Vermeer and Piero della Francesca. At best.

Engineering to some extent has been progressing, but architecture hasn’t necessarily "progressed" - Hagia Sophia is an architectural masterpiece, as is the Pantheon, as are Palladio’s villas. Not much designed today is ’better’ - even if it is bigger and has more functionality (not least because we can provide more functionality).

The Mahabharata; Greek myth written down by ’Homer’ (or many Homer); Aristophanes; Cicero, Livy, Caesar and Martial; the Edda; Dante; Shakespeare - all on an ascending arc to ’Butter’ by Asako Yuzuki (no offense meant; current bestseller at Waterstones UK).

Or did I misunderstand your point?