Why does all new pop music sound the same?

For all you old folks holding on to your walkers, complaining about contemporary music, and wondering why your kids don't like Rush, John Denver and Motorhead, you need to get your head out of the sand, see some new shows and quit talking about your musical aches and pains:

New Pornographers
Beck
LCD Soundsystem
Arcade Fire
Neko Case
Vampire Weekend
St Vincent
Angel Olsen
Glass Animals
Tame Impala
Cage the Elephant
Green Day
Arctic Monkeys
Cold Play
U2
Franz Ferdinand
The Killers
Group Love
The Kooks
Mac DeMarco
MGMT
Modest Mouse
Matt and Kim
The Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs
OK GO
TV on the Radio
Passion Pit
Phoenix
Peter Bjorn and John
The Shins
Spoon
The Strokes
Two Door Cinema Club
Weezer
Jack White
Black Keys
Courtney Barnett
Kurt Vile
The Lumineers
The War on Drugs
My Chemical Romance
Cold War Kids
Foster the People

All new, rock and pop music, as good as any old fogy music and available everywhere.  Ever hear of the internet?




 

@sevs 

Geat point regarding “The Song Machine: Inside the hit factory “.   — John Seabrook.

Computers, neuroscientists, algorithmic brainwave exploitation,  Popmusic is the domain of the machine.  There are long lists of exceptions to pop dreck listed here,  support them

I fall between the extremes here, for several reasons. First, I think "pop" music was always cotton candy to some degree (though there was material I liked and still pull out occasionally). The major labels were dragged into the "youth explosion" (say, post-Monterey Pop Festival) only because there was money there and a big market to be satisfied. A few savvy A & R people got it, but apart from The Beatles, which were kind of sui generis and acts that followed the British Invasion template -Sir Douglas Quintet anyone?- much of what was released in coming years followed trends. Psych- yeah, that lasted a couple years- not enough there to hold the mainstream (much as I love it). Prog- died pretty fast, wasn’t radio friendly, and the formalistic faux classical stuff just didn’t work for a lot of people (e.g., I dug ELP’s first album, but Pictures left me cold- I only revisited it in the last year or so, largely due to Greg Lake’s wonderful voice and acoustic playing).
The Band got some radio play, but were regarded at the time as under appreciated. (Their work didn’t really lead to a wholesale discovery of "roots/Americana" until the last few years). Disco and punk--some fun stuff, but kind of limited.
The ’80s had a sound all its own, much of it dated today. Then "grunge" with Nirvana, and a lot of follow on acts, some of which were pretty good.
Lurking on the sidelines, below the top 40, was the stuff people "discovered" for themselves, by word of mouth, through reviews, etc.
I think there’s good stuff out there today, but it may be harder than ever to sort through it-- very little money to promote coming from record companies and the splintering of so many different sub-genres that people follow through the Internet, much of it free. The flip side is that the Internet can give you access to a huge pool of talent if you are willing to do some digging.
Consider whether you were an adventurous listener at the age of 13-16, or whether you wound up listening to a lot of what your friends were into.
Some of the urban/hip-hop isn’t bad, though there are only a handful of those acts that I find musically interesting. Just like the ’80s sound, today’s "neo-soul" follows a template. Very little of it is innovative or engaging. But, I think the same could be said for almost any decade of popular music. You have to dig deeper to find joy.

FWIW, and this may be heresy, but I never really "got" Sgt. Pepper’s at the time of release and still don’t play it that often; when I do, it is a few discrete tracks rather than the whole album. Granted, it has been hyped as the best album ever made if you believe in such stuff, but my musical interests are diverse enough, as is my willingness to explore beyond the boundaries of convention, to find satisfaction in a variety of music, old and new.
+1 to @kennovak for throwing down some newer acts even if not all of them are appealing to me.

All new, rock and pop music, as good as any old fogy music

Will anyone still be listening to those groups in 40 to 50 years? Probably not, but it could happen.  Will anyone get out their old rap records when they're 50 and play them for the grandkids?  Not likely.

The comparison of today’s hit factories to Motown is a little off target. Does anyone think that those two guys that write so much of today’s pop have the songwriting talent of Smokey Robinson and Holland - Dozier - Holland?

Motown didn’t use autotune. Smokey, Marvin Gaye, David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, Diana Ross, Martha Reeves and Gladys Knight, to name just a few, all had the ability to sing a song all the way through without overdubs or sweetening. The house band, The Funk Brothers, could play at a level and with a variety I don’t think many of today’s hit factory bands could match.

Humanity is being taken out of music today and being replaced with computer generated effects. As Bob Seger put it, "Today’s music ain’t got the same soul."

I understand that young people want their own music, not their parents’ music and that there is plenty of good music being made today, as there always is, but I think musical quality has kind of been on a downward trend since Mozart and Beethoven, and the downward trend is picking up speed.

@whart +1