Why Music Has Lost it’s Charms (Article)

Forrest for the trees.

Commerical music now and then ... Has always been commercial (sellable) because it was what people wanted to listen to of what was available.

Music of romance died for "music"  of lust and dope which has done much evil to our society  , been there KNOW  that !

Not LUST!  No.......  Cats and Dogs living together!

This concludes your anti puritanical laugh fest. We now return to your regular ranting.

P.s. ... We live longer, we have less violent crime, we steal less,  we have less war, and we are more altruistic as a society than those "romance" times.

Operas and classical was the commercial music of it's time.

They made music because they were paid to whether by church or as often nobility. For money, the definition of commercial. No one else could afford such frivolities to commission work. However, it was also consumed by the masses .. so popular and commercial though of what competition I can't speak. 

Hard to face the fact the type of music we grew up with and love is not the most popular music any more. That does not mean that new music in that genre is no longer created, it just is not the dominant mainstream any more. If you grew up and loved rock, you should at least be able to appreciate the likes of Twenty One Pilots, One Republic, even Imagine Dragons.

People forget that the Beatles came on the scene only 15 year after the release of the LP. Having recorded music in the home was not even common place till well into the 50's.

Music for the Courts of Nobility is NOT the music we hear today. We hear the major works for the masters, which was commissioned by nobility and religious leaders, the latter which obviously had wide distribution, but the former also was used to appease the "masses" at least the much lesser nobles, merchants, etc.  There was little music for the masses at all then.

YOU may want to learn a little about say "Mozart" and what a patronage meant back then. Today's equivalent is employee with a rather defined salary whether for nobleman or religious leader, the definition of "commercial".  He eventually struck out on his own .... again commercial ... and then went back to employment.  It was called "patronage" back then, as unlike say a blacksmith, there was no inherent value or output you were being paid for, a frivolity so to speak, but absolutely his commercial paid career was making music, complete with the influence of his "patron".

Again, mahgister, sheet music was around way before Edison. Commercially available sheet music...hit songs of the time...

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Much of the music from the 60's is long lost in our memories (ditto the 70's). We remember the good stuff, or more specifically, we remember the stuff that generates the highest emotional engagement, which does not need to be the highest emotional engagement in everyone, but a high enough emotional engagement in enough people to keep the memory alive:

On the other hand, if you take away the recency effect it’s hard to see which albums from the last 20 years will make the cut a century from now.

I copied a list from Wikipedia of the top songs of 1969. How many of those do you remember clearly? "I can't get next to you" by the Temptations I had no memory of. Same for "I'll never fall in love again". "Sugar Sugar", "Everyday People" .... will never forgot those songs, and can sing word for word. They generate strong positive emotions. It was a particularly good year though. Go to a bar and watch what songs younger people are emotionally engaging with when played. Those will last.

If is is great music, why are none of those awful media people trying to promote it and make money off of it?  

Commercial music of today is horrible... Uglier than possible...

As music is nothing ever more than a personal experience, this is your opinion, not fact.

It probably has to do with the limited market for foreign language elevator music though with that shrieking in the middle it could have people reaching for the stop button. 

If you are on the web, an older individual (I consider myself somewhat in that vein) wasting both time and mental energy to rant about the quality of music made today, while extolling the virtues of your personally favourite time and genre, then  ...... oh heck, if you can't figure out the conclusion to this sentence, nothing I say is going to change anything :-)