Is Old Music Killing New Music?

Perhaps a many bad things in our world can be blamed on the greed & short sightedness of my (boomer) generation. But we can also proudly take the credit for by far the best rock music ever! It’s not even close.

it’s survival of the fittest!  How many new rock bands have come out in the past 25 years that will still be remembered & listened to often in 25 more years? Very few because most have little talent & creativity. The Dead, the Stones, cream, Allmans & course the Beatles etc. live on because of the quality of their music & their innate artistic talents. Everything eventually seeks its own level & the auto tuned junk will & has wound up near the bottom. 

@fleschler 

 (I have 28,500 LPs, 7,000 78s and 7,000 CDs with all these types of music)

Wow! That is an impressive collection. Especially the 78s. 

Yes, I've sold 18,000 records in the past 35 years.   I have a rule for myself, if I don't potentially want to listen to a recording 3 times a year, out it goes (except for ethnic music which I have 3,500 records/78s/cds).  I have about 5,000 LPs to listen to still and decide to keep or toss.  I stopped purchasing 78s (except ethnic music) 20 years ago.   So many of the vocal, violin and piano recordings have been wonderfully remastered by Ward Marston, Obert-Thorn and Andreas Meyer to CD.

@limomangus 

I dont believe the statement that buy age 30 your set in your musical choice

I do. I'll go so far as to say by age 22 or so. I think you and I are outliers. I don't know of or have heard of anyone middle age or older in my local sphere, at work, at the gym, or really anywhere except the Web who listens to new artists.

There was a thread here recently called "Share albums where EVERY SINGLE song is good". I commented that almost every album mentioned was 45-50 years old. Nostalgia is a powerful thing.

Occasionally you'll see audiophiles scoot into some other genre on a temporary adventure, but it doesn't suddenly displace their favorites. You rarely see experimentation with non-audiophiles.

You also see "getting stuck" as I call it, in the guitar community. You'll see guitarists consistently stuck playing songs from a 5-7 year period that aligns with their late teens and early twenties.

This isn't just about music. Look at technology. How many people over 40 outside the computer profession (and even inside)  understand things like cryptocurrency or the internal workings of blockchain? Blockchain is the future. Eventually all immutable documents will be stored on a blockchain. All your contracts, your deed, your loan agreements, etc. will be on a blockchain. Yet no one over 30 outside work knows what the heck I'm talking about. At most they think blockchain is Bitcoin.

One of my theories for "getting stuck" in the music of your youth is personality type. Without getting too deep into clinical terms or study citations, it's well known that some personality types are more curious than others. For instance, Sigmas have a very strong curiosity trait. Elon Musk is probably the most famous Sigma. No surprise there. Sigmas will do stuff like start new technology companies, dream up high-speed tunnels, commercial space travel and even have the cojones (or naivete, or both) to think he could start a successful car company where all others had failed. But Sigmas only make up 6% of the population.

Is breaking out of "getting stuck" in the music of your youth only limited to Sigmas? Could Sigmas be the outlier in this regard?  Or might it have something to do with people who work in professions that require constant change develop an immunity to fear of change? Or something else? I don't know. But I do know that I've tested as a Sigma and I'm one of those people who never got stuck.

Coming back to Op's title, with benefit of hindsight I am not surprised that old music is more prevalent than new music simply because there is far less original material in new music (its all been done before).  Early indicators of this trend is when some time ago a few 'Rap' artists would use old hits to put in their own lyrics (or is it speech?), obviously no new originality.  There was 'Grunge Rock' which really was a poor man's version of Rock, I have more regard to Punk which tried to be more 'to the point' music without the frills, but the Punk artists fell in the trend of the time of trying to be offensive, bad boys and totally radical (sadly just an act).  There is a lot of modern 'good' music about, not original but certainly musical gems.  However music companies trying to nurture and invest in young talent have long gone.  Now focus is on more 'what will make it go viral' on internet.  Think of a tune which will 'hook' the listener on first time because otherwise listener will be instantly bored and has the instant access to other tunes.  Also there is a growing trend of artists just doing their own websites selling their own music without any band involvement eg Justin Johnson.  He is very talented guitarists but eventually the listener will get bored just listening him on his own doing eg remake of Stairways To heaven.  On rare situations when he does play in the band; musically it gets far more interesting!