[randomsearch]

You’re projecting your free time / dedication to discovery on other people and that’s unfair. Spotify’s discovery tools for example are a real boon to many.

That said, I do feel the same as you about the “good old days”. Owning music was a very different experience. It doesn’t help that streaming apps haven’t worked out the UX yet (god knows why, they’ve had long enough).

But... flip side... if I could time travel back to being a teenager and say “for £10 a month (even in that money) you can have access to pretty much all music commercially released” I would have cried with joy at the thought of it. There are so many bands I probably wouldn’t have worked through the catalogue of because they weren’t on my radar or popular within my social circles - even major artists like Bowie or Queen - and Spotify has enabled me to work through most of the great 20th century pop/rock/indie music, plus explore a lot of dance and electro I wouldn’t have.

Problem is I think it’s (the?) jam today and bread tomorrow... I think popular music peaked just before the internet arrived. A good tell is the many festival line ups full of very old bands. If you make a list of the greatest bands/artists of the latest 10 years and compare it to any decade since pop music got going, it doesn’t compare. I don’t think that’s the commercialisation of music (that hasn’t changed so much) rather the financial incentives are no longer there. Appropriately for HN, a lot of kids dream of a building a startup instead of making music.

[jon-wood]

The cynic in me thinks that the abundance of old bands on festival line ups is probably more focused on targeting people with disposable income, rather than a young audience who may be very enthusiastic, but are also broke.

[thrav]

I think this has more to do with our culture making everything about the individual. You can’t name bands anymore, because explosive popularity is the realm of the individual artist.

Even massive individual artists, disappear into relative obscurity when they move into a band format (John Mayer).

Kanye, Taylor, Nicki, Lizzo, Justin, Drake, Ariana, Billie, Miley...

Even hip-hop, which seems like a distinctly individual genre, used to be ruled by groups. NWA, Wu-Tang, Roots, etc.

Our current culture over-values individuals and loves the myth of the one wo/man show. Teams are boring. Give us someone to follow.

You see this with founders too. Even if the company was created by a team, there must be one figurehead.

I guess this is because so much of marketing is aspirational. Most people try to purchase the identity they want. It’s easier to sell an identity with an actual person.

[tyu2]

> Our current culture over-values individuals and loves the myth of the one wo/man show. Teams are boring. Give us someone to follow.

People repeat it often, but it's not true, it can't explain Blankpink, BTS, Twice, Red Velvet, etc. It's probably just americanism to emphasize individuals, but big music is produced by teams (and not small teams) regardless whether it appears to look like an individual.

[4dregress]

I think its more about Culture being driven buy corporate profits. Pop music made by people who don't own their masters seem to be slaves of streaming. If you like underground music or music by people who do own their masters then the experience is very different.

For example Greg Pucaito is killing it. Amazing debut album doing really well in all the charts. 100% in control of his and can anything he wants like his recent "Fuck Content" event

[Multiplayer]

You see this with... Countries of hundreds of millions of people. The idea that one person is running the United States is ludicrous. The amount of over-attention on the current president is just an amazing case in point. This approach doesn't scale and the resulting lack of progress is holding us all hostage. /rant

[syshum]

Where you see over valuing of the individual, I see a massive about of Tribalism, and collectivism. Maybe not in music I admit I am not following music culture very closely but just about every other aspect of human society today (and I suspect music is as well) is deeply steeped in the tribe/group/collective

[ubercow13]

>If you make a list of the greatest bands/artists of the latest 10 years and compare it to any decade since pop music got going, it doesn’t compare

Ah, a classic meme: https://old.reddit.com/r/lewronggeneration/

[hedora]

I definitely agree with the GP. Here’s a list of top ten songs by year:

http://www.billyjamesmusic.com/erasongs.htm

This is an old meme because it’s been arguably been true since the 90’s.

According to that list, the sixties, seventies and eighties clearly beat the nineties in my biased opinion.

Part of it might just be a genre shift: The only rock songs that made the cut in the 90s were one each from Meat Loaf, Aerosmith, Eric Clapton, and Nirvana.

I think there’s a paradox where more excellent music is being produced every year, but genre fragmentation and the sheer diversity of it means the stuff that bubbles to the top gets more and more generic.

It’s like we used to get brie and roquefort, but now we have a larger vat, and velveeta is what floats to the top.

[ubercow13]

Hmm, yes I think if you interpret GP saying 'greatest bands' to mean the most popular charting artists, it's more agreeable.

>I think there’s a paradox where more excellent music is being produced every year, but genre fragmentation and the sheer diversity of it means the stuff that bubbles to the top gets more and more generic.

This is very true and likely part of it. Streaming services and the proliferation of headphones probably exacerbate the effect.

I think the genre/taste aspect is significant. Yes, rock is a great genre, but maybe it is not really possible for a great rock band to achieve mainstream appeal or even critical acclaim just on the back of good songwriting and great musicianship today, because that is not novel or interesting like it was in the 70s.

Personally I find just the sound of Sia's voice makes her much more interesting than a lot of the more generic rock songs from the 70s in that list.