I find most modern music to be degenerate and ugly. There are of course exceptions, but the to my ears with pitch correction being used as a production feature rather than a fix for poor vocals means that a lot of music now sounds like a robot singing over a simple beat. Much new music seems to be made to be played over phone speakers, probably the very worst sound reproduction equipment after the AM radio in your granddaddy’s Corvair. Music production and engineering has suffered terribly with the advent of DAWs and the loudness wars. Not to mention the "musician" has been replaced by the "artist" as in no way could you call these "artists" "musicians". They can’t sing, don’t play an instrument, don’t write songs, just shake their asses on stage while fireworks go off. For me music production peaked in the 1970s, when producers poured almost unlimited funds into an album, and featured actual song writers and musicians. Deutsche Grammophon in the 1970s somehow managed to capture every element of an orchestra through multiple microphone placements and mixing to draw out individual sections of the orchestra, especially the woodwinds which tend to be drowned out by modern massive string sections. Their use of giant resonators in the basement of their concert hall gave the Berlin Philharmonic’s brass section a wonderful power and edge to the sound. Modern classical recording tend to suffer from what I call "the blob" where a single microphone reduces the textures and separation of the orchestra to a single blob in the middle of the stereo image. Computer production now means that there is really no need for audio engineers to get creative in the studio like The Beatles, Brian Eno and Bowie used to do, and it shows. Again there are of course exceptions. Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories for example, they spent a million dollars of their own money to produce it on analog tape and digital and spent months mixing and mastering it, it is a triumph of music production. And the songs are wonderful, they tell stories. Tame Impala and War on Drugs are some other bands that sound great on record.
