Is Old Music Killing New Music?
I ran across this Atlantic magazine article on another music forum. It asks the question if old music is killing new music. I didn't realize that older music represents 70% of the music market according to this article. I know I use Qobuz and Tidal to find new music and new artists for my collection, but I don't know how common that actually is for most people. I think that a lot of people that listen to services like Spotify and Apple Music probably don't keep track of what the algorithms are queuing up in their playlists. Perhaps it's all becoming elevator music.
@dabel That is a great experience. The talent is absolutely out there. I love that they did a tribute to Prince. Phenomenal musician.
@wolf_garcia life as a musician is a tough gig. My brother used to tour the country as an Opera singer. He loved it, but it was a rough life being on the road almost all year. |
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 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. |
+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. |
