[MrBlueIncognito]

I don’t understand what is so surprising about this. The world has been producing high-quality music for decades. The catalog of old music will always grow in size relative to the catalog of new music. Were we expecting the dominance of old music to decline for no reason?

[svantana]

This is it. Music production technology made incredible strides from 1960-1990, as well as new ideas around production that the new equipment enabled. Thus, in that period, pop music sounded "old" very quickly. This all culminated with a computer-driven "we can do anything" style in the late 90's, where people like BT made awful hi-tech productions. Now, with hindsight, we see that 40-year old albums like Thriller still sound amazing, there simply is no new tech that can improve it.

[ghaff]

While I personally don't much care for much new music I hear, I'm hesitant to chalk it up to music being worse rather than I'm somewhat set in my preferences. That said, pre-COVID I had definitely reached the point where I had never heard of the bands playing trade show parties and the like and, when I did hear them, my impression was somewhere between meh and it's noise.

[svantana]

Hold up, I certainly didn't mean to imply that music has gotten worse - only that it stopped getting better (from a purely sonic perspective). There's lots of great new music coming out, but a lot of it has a retro sound anyway.

[winternett]

People mostly play old and familiar content likely because it's totally exhausting now to find favorable new content.

Too many of my older favorite artists like Tracy Chapman don't even release music any more because of the lack of reward and respect involved in releasing music now, it's disheartening to post your hard work and not get any notable views, especially when they're a grammy winner. Even notable musicians from the past don't get views now, not because the music isn't good, they don't get views because often the music isn't "TikTok Clip Worthy".

If TikTok only had a tool to scroll through songs (music videos), with a much better method of preventing spam, playing everything uploaded fairly, and that was better at preventing repetitive plays, that's likely what would make new music discovery far far easier for everyone.

[seydor]

you could have said the same in the 40s , 50s , 60s etc. A lot of new music was made in reaction to what was considered very formulaic old music.