[Retric]

Internet DJ’s can’t feed off each other to produce regional music. It’s all one big blob available anywhere which drowns diversity in a sea of mediocrity.

College radio stations aren’t dramatically increasing to make up for the vast consolidation that removed something like 80-90% of radio DJ’s.

40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s flowed into each other but the stuff was all very distinct in a way that 2000’s vs 2010’s isn’t.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> It’s all one big blob available anywhere which drowns diversity in a sea of mediocrity.

I'm not interested in regional music or a regional scene.

The music on any given SomaFM station is not "a sea of mediocrity". It's generally excellent genre-specific stuff (old and new), and I love it (if I'm somewhat into the genre).

I can appreciate that others may not, but please don't over-generalize or assert that your preferences are the only ones out there.

[goosejuice]

So the problem is globalization? What do you mean by regional music?

Genres span borders now. Look at the Midwest emo / mathrock scene and how it made its way to Japan and Taiwan.

We can romanticise the old days of radio but local scenes aren't dead and these little genres are still going and new ones are popping up.

[Retric]

> Local scenes aren’t dead.

I might just be out of touch, so show me the innovation.

Rap simply didn’t exist in the 60’s. What’s around today that wasn’t in the late 90’s? Not just minor evolution but new ideas. It’s been 25 years any other stretch of that length since 1900 had several radical new ideas.

[goosejuice]

You can say this about innovation for all art forms. Art evolves it doesn't just come out of thin air. The consumer also has to evolve.

Even if you just look at popular artists: Mk.gee, Collier, Domi and jdbeck, Beyonce are some examples of mold breaking.

What exactly are you expecting, cantina jizz? If so there's no shortage of extremely out there stuff.

[Retric]

I’m expecting something to add to this sort of list:

Rap, Country, Electronic, Funk, Hip hop, Jazz, Latin, Pop, Punk, Reggae, Rock, Heavy Metal, Soul music and R&B

I’d even take Polka. My argument is we’re missing the kind of regional cross pollination that gives rise to such things.

[goosejuice]

All of those genres can be linked to one another and you can continue on down to extreme levels. Rock, punk, metal, funk, country, soul, and reggae alone barely touches on the diversity of string instrument based music. Is this a naming problem for you?

Every noise at once attempts to show the extremes to which music can be classified if you haven't seen it.

I don't see any signs that this evolution has ever stopped or will stop. Artists are obviously limited by physics, what sounds pleasant to us, the instruments that are available, and what is currently in fashion. That we'd have more unique music in a more isolated world seems like a pretty crazy claim to me.

[Retric]

There’s definitely relationships and cross pollination between genres, but that’s why the lack is concerning to me. It doesn’t directly matter to me if little new shows up, but indirectly I’ll be worse off.

> I don’t see any signs that this evaluation has ever stopped or will stop.

It wouldn’t be difficult to name something as new if there was a lot of meaningfully different new things to name.

Now I’m not saying things will be static, obviously we people will create. But I think it’s clear things have slowed down noticeably, and that means something really has been lost.