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I used to feel the same way but I eventually came to realise that there’s tons of good music being created, it’s the social aspect of music that has been destroyed. Individual algorithm recommendations have subsumed sub cultures. Music used to be part of both your individual and group identity, it would influence what your wore, what you read, what you thought, who you hanged out with and what bars you visited. Technology has eroded the music press and sky high rents and fitness culture (not as many people drinking) means lots of gig venues and bars have closed down. These were the glue that built the subcultures up. You used to have the mainstream plus a few sub cultures that would evolve each decade e.g mods, rockers, hippies, metal heads, punks, new wave, hair metal, brit pop, emos, indie rockers etc. All of these ended up getting absorbed into the long tail so you now have the main stream and then everything else, with nothing in the everything else category really able to attract enough people to it in order to form era defining subculture like the days of old. Combined with the sheer amount of music being created, all of this makes it harder to find music you actually want to hear. Your friends are all listening to different stuff so you don’t get many good in person recommendations anymore and what’s left of the music media are struggling to stay afloat and resorting to all kinds of stuff like NME doing movie reviews. The algorithms are hit and miss and search engines are getting worse and worse. So you become more and more at the mercy of chance, hoping that somewhere you stumble upon a review or a blog post, a subreddit or a song that somehow leads you to some good new music. But the reward to effort ratio often makes it harder to justify the time investment. And however good the music is, it’s not as enjoyable when you don’t have a group of people to share it with. |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/dec/05/has-spotify-re...