We’ve spent a lot of time charting the crisis besetting the modern music industry. And one of the best professionals who’s undertaken the project of plumbing the problem is Rick Beato.
Now, the veteran producer and studio musician does a deep dive into why music has gotten worse since Cultural Ground Zero. Hint: One reason is that the record industry can’t stop the rock faucet.
It’s been said that quantity can have a quality all its own.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that 90 percent of everything is crap.
So we have to consider that the decline in quality of the average song could be due to the fact that listeners are inundated with far more music than ever before in human history.
It is hard to argue against Rick’s point that by and large, most people don’t consume music the same way they used to in the 90s. It’s not as if you have to wait for your favorite act’s new album to come out, drive to the record store, buy their new CD, throw it on your home sound system, and spend a solid hour drinking it in.
Instead, today’s listeners are almost constantly awash in endless YouTube, Spotify, and mp3 playlists.
Related: Who Killed Rock and Roll?
Another aspect of the issue that’s not to be overlooked is the drop in quality.
Listening to a song recorded before quantizing and autotune on vinyl with a high-end custom audio setup is a whole other experience than listening with your phone’s Bluetooth ear buds.
A while back, a buddy of mine had the pleasure of experiencing a Jimi Hendrix record on a genuine audiophile’s 5-figure system. He’d listened to it countless times before on lesser equipment, but this time he made out all kinds of nuances that were hidden before.
He could even hear Jimi’s guitar pick scratching the strings.
Consider this: Just over a century ago, if you wanted to hear your favorite song, you had to find a way to hear it performed live. That made listening to music a premium experience.
Sure, you could hear a piano player in a tavern hammer out a folk tune. But enjoying classic works by top talent was an upper-class affair.
Then the phonograph brought music to the masses. But there were still technological and professional limitations.
The point is, scarcity is still a prime determining factor when it comes to value.
People tend not to esteem highly what they can get cheap.
Look at the prestigious Michelin restaurant guide. At first they gave it away, and people were using this august book to prop up table legs.
Then they started charging for it, and just like that, it became a coveted status symbol.
It’s likely that the sheer volume of music being pumped into the mainstream is degrading the popular music experience.
One thing’s for sure: There is no stopping the rock faucet.
But you can make a resolution to get your head above the water from time to time.
Try Rick’s advice: Carve out half an hour to sit down in front of a decent sound system, and really listen to some of your favorite music. No streaming, no distractions, just drink it in.
Not only will you have an enjoyable time, you just might gain a fresh perspective.
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After learning to play classical music on the piano, I noticed that dynamics disappeared from modern music. I concluded that this was necessary; nuanced, dynamic, orchestral-level ensembles fit communal concert halls, whereas tracks that featured static volumes and fewer voices fit individualized, mass-produced stereo systems.
To paraphrase, if game composers can make music sound good on 20th century console sound chips and CD-ROMs, then general musicians can do the same if they stop and think about how consumers will play their music (without participating in the streaming loudness wars).
Even more than that: try listening to classical music while in the car (even from a quantized, digitized, compressed stream like Amazon Music). The dynamic range makes parts inaudible over the road noise, and parts are uncomfortably loud. You’ll have the same problem with earbuds or any other listening experience that allows for distractions or multi-tasking.
So, yes, modern music is at an even volume so people can listen in the car or on the subway without being inconvenienced. It’s a commodity, not a luxury.
You can also pump out AI songs through things like Suno which ends up flushing out generic major label garbage when you could put their own tropes into your own custom tracks. I wrote about that a bit on Wasteland & Sky that this was inevitable because they’ve relied on crusty stale formulas that are old enough to vote and drink themselves to an early grave. And modern music listeners can’t tell them apart from modern music because it’s all the same. You can only tell the difference if you’re well versed in the history of popular music for the last half century.
And lets not pretend the majors aren’t using AI programs already. That these AI programs can effectively pump out comparable music to them isn’t because they’re stealing–it’s because their algorithms are very easy for a computer to mimic. It’s the same problem Hollywood is going to have in the near future. The only way to compete with the rise of AI is to not be generic and easily replicable. Stop valuing the cheap cost greed these industries have thrived on for so long and start demanding better. That’s the only way things improve.
So yes, I agree with Rick’s overall point. We need to bring back championing effort and ambition and reward it accordingly. Otherwise its all going to turn into grey corpo mush, and no one who matters really benefits from that.
“Which is why music is not as valued by young people. There is no sweat equity put into obtaining it, having it be part of your collection.”
Underrated aspect.
Being a post-Napster kid, I don’t have the perspective to judge on music, but it has totally been my experience with video games.
The games I got back when I got 2-3 games a year in the early to mid 2000s, I’ve always loved to bits, and played every single one of them until the credits.
Now that I have access to every single game from my friends’ childhood, I’ll play one of their absolute favorite games for an hour of two, say “it’s pretty good” and never touch them again. Ditto for them playing my favorites.
I really gained an appreciation for listening to an album in one sitting when I started going through cassette tapes again. Due to the format you don’t really have any option BUT to listen to the whole album in order. No options for shuffling, swapping tapes takes effort and you want to finish the whole thing so that you’re at the start of side A the next time you listen.
Now as for sound quality, obviously it’s worse on tape then on well preserved vinyl with a high quality system… but I guarantee you that as long as the tape doesn’t have obvious defects like being twisted or having a missing pressure pad that it will sound better than listening on a phone. It’s pretty affordable too; most places have thrift stores or used music shops that sell tapes for about $.25-$1.50 and you can usually pick up a good tape deck from a thrift store for $5-$20.
I lost my 2012 car in a crash and replaced it with a 2016 model. Very sad to no longer have a built-in CD player.
I know people won’t want to hear this but the democratization of anything leads to crap quality of that thing. The arts are no exception. Say what you will about the benefits of anyone having equal access to create and publish, but let’s remember that the gatekeeping institutions we hate now once had the job of filtering out the crap so it never went to market. Albeit imperfect at times, now the dam is broken and there’s no desire to fix it.
Amateurs flood the market next to solid stuff and it’s like trying to find a needle in the haystack for something good these days. It takes way too much effort to search for anything new and good. You have to spend so much effort to fight through all the noise to find something remotely entertaining.
People wanted democratized entertainment so now they get it, the little good and mostly bad and ugly. That same guy made a video about AI music a while back which is an interesting bit to listen to. It’s just a product of our times. No more, no less.
I agree, but I also note that most people can’t seem to tell the difference. Is it an inherent defect? A case of liking what you know? Poor education and lack of exposure to the good? Perhaps all of the above in various ratios.
Then again, you can also make money from people even if you suck at what you do as long as you reach enough people. I started getting lots of ads for Kindle books (I’m talking over a dozen per day) that were clearly written for KU even though you could obviously purchase the books outright as well. Most of these books started series that were at least 5, and up to 12 books long. I tried three of them. One ended up being genuinely good; the other two were a waste of a few dollars. But those authors still made a little money off me, even if I won’t buy their stuff again. Somehow, all of them have 4.8-star average reviews, though. Who knows? I don’t.
Rick Beato released a video yesterday as a follow up. A few points that he brought up:
-Interest in things like music generally and in specific genres as well as art has been in freefall since Google has been tracking search trends. (Though country music stabilized in 2011.) Video games have been in freefall since 2012 (just after Minecraft was released). Evidence for cultural ground zero/video game ground zero.
-Rick puts the blame on a decline in anything that requires effort. Music requires practice, but even classic video games require gitting gud.
-There’s an interesting comment on the video from a music teacher who notes that students never discuss music in depth. They might talk about artists they listen to, but never discuss WHY they are good or which artists are better than others. He notes that they do do these things when discussing sports teams, so it’s not like they just are adverse to making judgments.
I think Rick Beato is right in that ultimately the decline in music is due to a decline in effort, both in creation and appreciation. You can see it in other areas. For example, 20 somethings often get the majority of their food through door dash and complain about the effort required to even make something like scrambled eggs.
One bizarre trend I stumbled across recently is that of anime recap channels. These are channels where someone explains what happened in an anime. There is no analysis, it’s just a list of events that happened and the narrators are often bland if not computer generated. Yet the videos reliably get hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of views with plenty of comments, and many of the watchers are apparently consuming their anime this way. The only explanation I can find for this is that kids are too impatient to watch a 20 minute episode and so watch a 5 minute summary of that episode. The weird thing is that since they often do complete season recaps the video might still end up being over an hour meaning that it’s not just an attention span thing; my guess is that the issue is that when you watch a show for real you actually have to process what is happening in terms of both audio and visual elements but you can be completely passive if someone is just telling you about it.
I wonder how what Beato is discussing is reflected in other, less popular genres of music, such as bluegrass or Irish?