[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.