Is Old Music Killing New Music?

@tgilb 

Top 40 music may be controlled and commercialized but I wouldn’t say that about the music out of the mainstream.

Agree. With the ease of recording nowadays, the selection is gargantuan. The problem is sifting through all the crap. It requires work to find them. As always, the Top whatever lists drive the marketing. Those don't require sifting and are therefore favored by people less obsessed with music. Just go to the Spotify Top Ten and hit Play.

Speaking to your "out of the mainstream", metal has seen a similar negative shift in quality. If you go to Spotify's top lists the metal is either unoriginal, unimaginative, monotonous or not metal. There's even a song called Call Me Little Sunshine. Can you imagine a metal song being called that? Even worse, it has never-ending repetitive lyrics just like pop.

You will never walk alone
You can always reach me
You will never ever walk alone
You will never walk alone
You can always reach me
You will never ever walk alone
You will never walk alone
You can always reach me
You will never ever walk alone

And the even more out of the mainstream extreme metal has gone from having groove and melody to favoring dissonance. It's like they're doing the opposite of pop and trying to be so different that they've left the realm of listenable. So the quality issue may be generational and not limited to pop.

@femoore12

Well ... one could always become the next Vanilla Ice without the cream with a one hitter ;-)

+1 @jssmith  An insightful post.

As the parent of a 20-something year old musician, my son says if there is a music industry, it's nothing like it was when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s.  FM radio was king.  If your music was played on the radio, people went out and bought the physical media.  That meant that a few executives decided what new music people heard.  There are tens of thousands of hours of new music uploaded to the internet every week.  How do you listen to all that and say there are "no good musicians" anymore?  That's not true.  There are so many who never get championed by someone already famous to promote them. If you want your music heard, you pay big money for your music to get promoted.  Also, young people rarely listen to the FM radio.  My son doesn't listen to FM radio.

I’m a boomer that grew up in New York and was a fan of WNEW FM and got to see all the great concerts.   I got interested in Jazz while still in High School. 
Fast forward to 2002, I started taking my daughters to the Baker Street concerts every Friday night in Atlanta. 
it gave me a whole new appreciation for Alternative Rock so I’ve managed to maintain an appreciation for many eras. 

Bottom line for me is that I enjoy several genres of music and try to keep current using Sirrus XM.