The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse!!


I'm not a big Beato fan but he makes some good points at time. This is one of those times IMO. I know some of the younger generation will disagree with the whole premise. Being born in 1951 the boomer gen was hit with the same  indictment about the new Rock & Roll music. There was some truth in it. But we didn't care because we liked R&R. I expect the same from some today who like today's music. but I think if you listen you may find some morsels which can be enlightening. This is especially true for musicians who may find they agree wholeheartedly..

The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse

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This and several other recent threads beg to be answered with, "OK, Boomer." 

I get how it's harder to accept change with age, but to assume the present isn't as good as the past is to simply increase the pressure that leads to fossilization. 

 

This and several other recent threads beg to be answered with, "OK, Boomer." 

 

This has lost you all your credibility.  I'm not a boomer.

And the kids (or even adults) who start or finish their phrases with insult for the previous generations have no credibility to their arguments because at that point it degenerates to name calling.
There are a lot of valid points in the video and in here.  And make no mistake, today's music is absolute crap 99% of the time for many of the reasons cited in the video.  The biggest culprits to me are the new -tech "tools" that are abused and misused.  The tools are:

Auto-tune, pitch correction, quantization, Pro-Tools (and it's million plugins) and GarageBand, which makes every rank amateur musician a worse recording artist and even worse studio producer.

Think about it, most charting songs today are assembled in the studio as fragments from hundreds of takes, often times taking single notes from a take to insert into other takes and those songs are more assemblages of blocks than they are performances.  Every edit subtracts from the whole.  This has been the case since some clever studio engineer figured out how to splice tape.

In general, while I agree with much of Beato’s argument (’technical’ perfection and ease of use vs. skill, inspiration and ’selection’), I also think there is a lot of survivor bias whenever one is comparing ’the great music of the past’ to the ’poor music of the present’. A lot of past stuff has rightly been consigned to the bin of history.

@gordon 

The arc of music like literature, art, and architecture has been bending upward since the dawn of time, so I don’t understand the premise of the video.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean (i.e. ’things have always got better since the beginning of time’ or ’things have got better on average over time’), but either way I disagree with it. Bach is pretty old, and Hildegard von Bingen is even older, but they didn’t write bad music; neither is ’worse’ than anything - and I mean anything - written today. At best, it’s incomparable. Just like at best Damien Hirst and Mark Rothko are incomparable to Vermeer and Piero della Francesca. At best.

Engineering to some extent has been progressing, but architecture hasn’t necessarily "progressed" - Hagia Sophia is an architectural masterpiece, as is the Pantheon, as are Palladio’s villas. Not much designed today is ’better’ - even if it is bigger and has more functionality (not least because we can provide more functionality).

The Mahabharata; Greek myth written down by ’Homer’ (or many Homer); Aristophanes; Cicero, Livy, Caesar and Martial; the Edda; Dante; Shakespeare - all on an ascending arc to ’Butter’ by Asako Yuzuki (no offense meant; current bestseller at Waterstones UK).

Or did I misunderstand your point?

In this video Beato said something obvious about technology use in music his "perfection" versus human gestures and "imperfections"...

This point is made even clearer with A.I. coming...

 

And many here instead of seeing his point dismiss it as an old dude bias about new music... ( probably a case of seeing in the eyes of others the big biases in our own eyes as the ignorant claim above about music value always going upward in "progress")

 

Are you able to understand a book if you are not able to get the main point of a 12 minutes video without attacking the man who did it as biased ?

Beato is a pro musician and only spell evidences in this video ...

it is useless to go further in this matter, and we can dig in it way deeper , because it seems many here dont get a simple point , they need a straw man argument to feel better instead of thinking ..

 

 

 

We did not like our parents music and born 1951 and they did not like ours.

But today I have a tube amp that produces so much detail from a songs that I never knew existed in all the years listening to them..So at 73 since all I do is stream and go back and listen to what my dad would listen to on a Reel to Reel he had .

And you know I can listen to some of it now , not all but some .

I look at reviews of equipment and they mention songs that bring out detail for you to hear and most newer songs they mention I can not stand to listen to..

I hear new artist and ask who is that and give them a try and 98% of time can not play their music.. So 73 yrs old I listen to Peter White LOL and oldies and some of Dads old music...But each has to decide to their own beat what you listen to.

Not Worse but age has so much to do with it for sure...LOL