Im 17, and personally, I dont understand today's pop music, there is no movement, boring choruses and the idea of bridges or instrumental solos is practically extinct. Personally i love those older rock bands that really wanted to say something through more than lyrics.
Lucky for both of you there is decades of older music for you to appreciate and enjoy. And if you can steer clear of peer pressure, you can enjoy whatever period or genre of music makes you truly happy
I’m a little bit older but when I was at school I was the only person into alternative music (extreme forms of metal mostly), and had to put up with all sorts of comments from people who were into general mainstream music or things like rap or grime (which I actually didn’t mind listening to). Anyway, like the previous poster put, if you can ignore the peer pressure and all that crap you’ll discover some great music and you’ll eventually be able to appreciate music from whatever genre. Keep listening to whatever you’re into my friend 👍
they are not really extinct they went to "bass drops" phase but it's sorta passing anyway to bridges with vocal vocalize parts or chops so technicaly they are still there. (if the track is longer than 2min that is). but i get your point you want that guitar solo after 2nd chorus and a 2nd solo in the final chorus with backing vocals going nuts all the way to the end. in this case you have to have more bars in the track. producers seem to shorten their tracks becuase most listeners have small attention span and less time to listen to songs because of heavy browising activities. mind you most people up untill the 2010's didn't have access to all forms of media on one device. nowadays music have to compete with videos and gaming & written text within one playback device.
I remember when Filthy Frank fucking demolished people like you. Please, tell me again how you bands like pink floyd and the beatles and how no one listens to "good music" anymore. Go touch grass and stop being such an ass. NOBODY CARES
Music has become more of a background thing than the centerpiece for many folks. Though people stream music, songs are shorter as are attention spans. Culturally, music is all around us and even more available than ever but does not have the same significance to many folks.
Songs are actually longer now, depending on when you compare to. If you compare to anything before recorded music, music now is quite short. However, if you compare to the 50s and 60s pop, songs are longer. This is due to the length limitations on vinyl when they first caught on. Radio edits were 3 mins as an industry standard.
@@thepoofster2251 They are able to be longer due to less limitations but songs are still getting shorter overall. Sure, there is the occassional longer one but that is not the norm. Song length hit its peak in the 90's/early 2000's before a decline. They were shorter in previous time periods so perhaps it a cycle but with diminishing attention spans, I wouldn't count on it.
@@petealba707 I disagree heavily. Music was longest in the era before recorded music. everything from 1400s to the late 1800s ish. A singular opus or movement can easily be a half hour long. So if we arbitrarily start measuring at the 60s, then yes. But when compared to the VAST majority of written music, all music written post 20s is super short
@@thepoofster2251 For sure, I agree with that. The title of the video is "Why is MODERN music so bad?" I'm only referring to the recorded era. Raga music in India can last for days in traditional ceremonies but I'm talking popular music.
I actually think we're in a musical renaissance, despite what's "popular" now. Today you can find a ton of new music from artists that cover any genre you like, on a wide variety of platforms. It's just unfortunate that most the popular music today comes from artists content on selling their soul to the music industry in exchange for endless promotion of their homogeneous trash songs.
In the 1980s to mid-1990s I had to travel the length and breadth of the country, to find those illusive gems made by true artists that lived and died for the sincerity of their music, rather than chase the shekels of the industry. The internet has made this much easier, but its still fairly random trying to locate the gems.
I wish it were so- But the truth is there’s just not enough money in music making to support a rigorous curriculum of practice and playing out. In 1975 a jazz gig would pay $75. In 2023 a jazz gig pays $75.
I am glad that's still the case. It always has been. In every genre you can find amazing work, even if you personally dislike that genre for the most part. But you have to really look for it. You won't find anything decent if you only listen to what is put on a plate for you.
I think that's the difference. It's not modern music that's bad, it's modern hits. Nowadays it's much more of an effort to find the good stuff, you have to actually look for it or get a fortunate recommendation from a friend or an algorithm. In the old days, much of the good stuff was in the charts (along with plenty of dross, sure) and that at the least let you discover the good bands. I see the difference when I look at what my nephews and nieces (Gen Z and late Millennial) listen to: plenty of hits from the 70s, 80s and 90s, as well as modern hits and more obscure modern music. But it's the older music and the modern gems they discovered themselves that stay on their playlists, not the modern hits. Not a one.
I am 22, and I find that most of modern, trendy music lacks substance. In the past, creating music required dedication. One needed to learn to play an instrument and master it before even attempting to produce a musical piece. This rigorous process ensured that only the most committed individuals would endure the extensive learning required. Consequently, people created music from the heart. Today, however, music production seems driven by the pursuit of clicks, profit, and ego gratification, facilitated by the ease of creating music with modern technology. With the barrier to entry so low, a vast quantity of subpar music is inevitably produced by those who may have a casual interest in 'music' but do not invest their heart and soul into the craft.
it's so saturated and boring. and yes, others can say the same thing about the past but at least it was done with real instruments, lack of autotune, and something to say. nowadays its crass and about profit; plus dare I say most "artists" these days lack any actual talent, only care about the image they put out. no one appreciates art anymore, I miss the old days and I am 23 years old (cries)
Nailed it! Born in the 60s, rocked the 70s & 80s, even the 90s werent to bad. 2000 onward has been crap. Zero talent compared to the earlier generations
I'm more than double your age and I completely agree with this. While there are plenty of decent song writers out there, the dedication to mastering and manipulating their instrument is severely lacking. I'm watching and listen to many bass guitar based YT channels, and they never talk about modern songs. It's always 90's and earlier music where they point out intricate and innovative bass lines that established the soul and groove of the song. Today, bass has been relegated to synthesized pounding or worse, the bassists play only 2 of the 4 strings for the entire song (and you almost never see a 5 or 6 string bass anymore). I'm finding more true bassists playing out of Asia/Japan these days than anything in the West.
As a Mixing and Mastering Engineer, I try not to think of music in terms of "hot garbo noise" or not, instead I try to find the objective beauty in the sonic qualities of the music and instrumentation itself in each piece. I haven't reached the "New is Noise" phase, and I'm 42, but I sense it coming. The music coming out today, the loudness, the sheer sausage waveforms coming out, it's just shocking. There isn't anything to enjoy or pick out sometimes, it's all too damn loud, it all competes, it all clips, it all distorts, so then I'm faced with .... What's to like? So that's why I don't mix/master that way. Even -14 is too loud sometimes. Yet, I'm told in my educational institution to try to push -9 dB LUFS-I, which to me just seems insane. Although, in practice, if you achieve balance in the mix and in the arrangement, and manage the space well, -9 can sound larger than life in a wonderful way. And sadly, if you don't try to go past -14 towards -10 or further, then you will just sound too quiet compared to the next song in the playlist, and that's the fear, and that's why everyone wants to be the loudest. Bottom line opinion: I think it's all just getting too loud with no justification to be that loud other than a "Mine is bigger than yours" contest. It's hard to hear the nuance and beauty when my ears are bleeding from the piercing distortion and clipping.
I'd be curious to know what % of people turn loudness normalisation off in their streaming service. My bet is that the loudness war is kinda pointless now. However I don't really hear distortion (on a fairly compressed track) if I master it to around -11 or -10 LUFS. But I guess it's more audible in certain genres.
Agree. I actually LIKE todays pop-music and grew up listening to black-metal. I can until today stand and love music that is that is 80% distortion and has no dynamics. But I do not get why you would want your melodic pop-arrangements to be that obnoxious. Another input: if you listen to j-pop-productions, they found a good way to manage that level of sum-compression: Compress the whole instrumental track as much as you like, but the vocal is completely over everything. This way you can at least follow something. The examples here are so horrible because everything is equally loud, subconciously disorienting. The vocals are too tucked in. There is no foreground.
I find your words to be interesting from a production point of view, but has no content in terms of musical structure. You don't talk about melody (or the lack thereof.) You don't talk about key changes. You don't talk about harmonic content. You don't talk about chord progressions. All of these things is what music, itself is made of. Recording is an entirely separate subject. Production is an entirely separate subject. What you refer to is the electronic processing. I appreciate that, myself because, as a songwriter/performer/musician/singer I have to be involved with this stuff, if I want to have recordings of my work. However, you actually, inadvertently, de facto, point to an interesting problem: People doing production that are not musicians. I don't know for sure that you are not a musician (chances are that you at least do some elementary playing.) In the old days, people that produced music, were commonly musicians. They understood, at least to some degree, musical structure. Look at Herb Alpert, George Martin, Phil Spector,, etc. They're musicians. They understand music. When the era of the star producer arrived, people recording music, and making decisions about music, in larger numbers, knew little about what was being presented, musically. They went on feel. They didn't go on musicality. That created a problem, in some cases, because recording technique (and engineering tricks) became more important than the actual content of the music. Combine this with record company execs who, themselves, knew little about the stucture of music, and you have a recipe for a noise fest on records, rather than music actually being presented. Non musicians can recognize tempo, speed (how many speedy notes are in a solo), mood, and style of music. This doesn't include musical structure (music theory.) So what you end up with is a group of non musician business people, and non musician producers and engineers, catering to these limited thing about music that I just presented. These non musician are selling the lowest common denominator to the public. It works, because the public, generally, who doesn't understand music, will go for a strong beat, a style, and a mood, and repetition. This is the lowest understanding of music. When musicians were in charge of production and selling music, the public was educated about music. This is different than having the lowest common denominatior in music being catered to the public. If youi want better music, get the non musicians out of the studio, and out of the ranks of the music biz executives. Music was best when musicians were running it. It has gone down hill, when non musicians began to occupy the ranks of the music exectives, and control of studios.
@@KenTeel In the "old days" you needed a technical degree to be allowed to record music. I would claim that today, it`s the other way round. Most mix-engineers and producers were musicians once. Also: Since most "mainstream"-productions are electronic, there is no difference between production and mix anymore really. I shared your opinion when I was younger, but now I think that it is pretty arrogant to think that there is "low" and "high" music, and people who hold the true understanding of what "good music" is. Music theory is also more than harmony and counterpoint. Rhythm and sound are way more important even in contemporary classical music than they used to be 200 years ago. The only thing I really agree with is that the guys who think that louder is always better do not belong in any decisive position. Louder is sometimes better, sometimes not. It all depends on the song and the message behind the music.
I grew up in the 80's loving 60's rock and 80's pop. I was a teenager in the 80's who couldn't get enough of The Beatles and the Beach Boys.. Good music is good music.
Its not new vs old, its popular-above-else vs music the artists makes for its own sake. Also, its not just the listeners age, its about how open minded and exploratory is in one’s listening habits.
From the point of view of a 72yo fart who’s been an avid music listener and purchaser for over 60 years, I’d hafta agree that thanks to the internet, there’s greater accessibility to a wider range of music - both old and new - than ever before. It’d be nice if the artists could be as well remunerated for their work as they may have been in the early years of my listening career - but that’s an entirely different discussion. I also happen to be a “recovering audiophile”, and while many of the hair shirt absolutists of that cohort love to excoriate YT for its sound quality, I must say that some of my most enjoyable new finds are from amateur street musicians/looping buskers, performing everything from deconstructions of old chestnuts to original jams. Not always “audiophile quality” in terms of sample rate, dynamic range, noise floor - pick your favourite technical spec, but seldom the noisy mess that passes for much of current “pop”. Listening to such free content on my Sennheiser headphones or my main HT rig can be as emotionally satisfying as “high SQ” streaming on Spotify.
@@Squidward_Tikiland ...and today we have 'insert your favourite band of the moment' - there is some stellar music being released all the time! Music is subjective - for example - I have every Toto album released (apart from 'best ofs' or live albums) - BUT - Whitney - I wouldn't give her the time of day - that doesnt mean her music is awful - it's just I - personally - cannot stand it - music is art - and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I’m in my 50s and probably about 70% of my Spotify playlist is music made by newer bands in the last 10 years. I don’t know if the music I listen to is “popular” but there is still great music being made.
Absolutely agree. The digital age is a curse and a bliss: I would assume that the financial investment required to record something with acceptable quality has come down a lot (think of Billie Eilish for example), and it generates opportunities for more musicians to get something out there. On the flip side, it seems that artists are promoted as products, not musicians. And you still need proper expertise for mastering (again: Billie Eilish as an example), although that still comes with -9 or so as the targeted average loudness level.
I would say, the new 'pop' music is garbage, but like you, I listen to old and new music. I'm in my late 40s and love metalcore, and there are plenty of (in my opinion) great bands in that genre.
Wet Leg, Caroline Polachek, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Dirty Projectors… I’m in my 50s and there’s an abundance of fantastic music out there. Now, I cut my teeth on early Peter Gabriel, who incorporated a lot of dissonance and noise into his music, and I think Radiohead has nearly perfected the art of layering soundscapes of distortion into melodic pieces, so I’ve always had a preference for novel approaches to music. It’s not better… just what I prefer.
@dantelikesrock ones like Kingdom of Giants, Crown the Empire, If I Were You, Enox, Savage Hands, Advents, Never Back Down, Saint Asonia, Lost in sight, Revaira, Avalanche Effect, Pridelands, The End At The Beginning, The Word Alive, SETYØURSAILS, ASHEN, Darkmatter, Frontières, As Within So Without, Nothing More. Now, some of these bands are Metalcore. Some people might say some of them are other genres of metal, but I like them, and to me, the lines are a little blurry. IMHO. Try at your own risk, lol. And There are many more I didn't list, otherwise I'd be typing all day lol
I'm a bit older born '73 so 80's was my highlight for music. Today I'm into "classical" but hear a lot of kids I work with playing dubstep... which I actually enjoy to a point, but it's more or less "literally" just noise... or at least re-arranged noise. Interesting, sort of takes my 80's synth age to a whole new level 40 years later. Not really my thing but in my opinion it's one of the better and most innovated genres to surface. That being said, I still want my MTV.
I was born in 68, and used to make a lot of dance records in the 90s, then moved onto mixing films and so on. Dubstep sort of amazes me, the weaponization and extreme organization of noise. I'm glad I don't have to program it though. I have mastered it though and got great results, the frequencies being quite satisfying and so rich.
@badnick6659 I just listened to a few tracks. To me, they seem to be the equivalent of so-called "Break Beats" in Hip-Hop. Break Beats are NOT meant to serve as complete songs. Hip-Hop started with the concept : "Turntables Are Musical Instruments". Basically, a DJ would get two copies of a record pick one short part of a song (usually a drumroll) and keep switching back and forth between the turntables. By varying tempo, shortening or lengthening of the selected part of the original song , the DJ was creating "new" dance music. Again : DANCE music. Now, from what I understand, most audiophiles don't dance. Also, when the first Hip-Hop DJ's started doing this , the audiences would initially stop dancing (lol) in 🫨amazement🫨 until they realized that the drumbeat was what they should/could dance to. So again a dubstep "song" is only a part of a DANCE music performance. Hence the name dubSTEP. To get the full experience, one has to visit a party/concert where SKILLED DJ's will mix the tracks and create a dance-music performance. Unfortunately I haven't visited any concerts yet with skilled DJ's that use dubstep for mixing. Therefore I don't know for sure if I will enjoy a concert. Let me emphasize: the DJ who MIXES the tracks is the artist. If (s)he merely plays dubstep tracks in sequence, then the dance music performance is INCOMPLETE.
@@Buddahabrot been in the music biz since the late 80s, thanks for your history of modern music lecture, but I was there at the cutting edge, literally. All the best.
@badnick6659 Would you be so kind as to name a few artists that you consider "cutting-edge"? As you may hve noticed, I'm always trying to broaden my knowledge in (dance)music. One last remark. "I AM A DANCER"
It sucks the most when a genuinely good music get destroyed for being competitive in the loudness war! It does hurt the song and ears. Also I realised tracks with dynamic range have much longer lifespan compared to crunched ones! Great take as always.
music is compressed the way that it is because of the fact that most people listen to music on subpar sound systems and in less than ideal situations, from what i understand. no point in having a high dynamic range when listening on headphones on a loud bus on the way home from school. or in your noisy car with poor sound isolation. i mean at the end of the day, all of the parts are still present in the song. it doesnt make it any less of a song
@@noodletribunal9793 yeah, but they still sound horrible and not long lasting! that's why I enjoy 70s and 80s mixes the more time passes. dynamic range of course! if I want to make it lounder I have a volume knob for that! remember volume is another expressive dimension at an artist's disposal, when we remove this utility we simply flatten the musical experience and that's the price with pay for loudness, not a good trade imo!
@@Ramt33n ehh, i dont agree, but to each their own! the music i like consists of pretty heavily distorted/overdriven guitars to begin with, so it kinda lends itself to the world of compression. umm yea, idk. it sounds good to me ( ´∀｀)
Yes, compression does work well with certain types of music. But the excessive levels of limiting, compression, and EQ frequently used reduce dynamic range to a point where the music becomes unlistenable after a while. It's sort of like having a conversation in which everyone is yelling every word. That gets tiring to listen to, and pretty soon someone is going to exit.
The sophistication of lyrics, chord progressions, timing, melody, harmony, song structure and the topics being expressed have overall become elementary compared to the twentieth century. That’s not to say that something simple can’t be brilliant, but it has to have something that makes it brilliant. Can’t say I hear that a lot today.
The reason why you aren't hearing it is largely because you have to hunt to find it. There's a lot of new great stuff. And there are some DJs that push the good stuff, but so much of it you'll have to hunt for yourself.
@@nrXic I agree here. I've listened to a lot of music from rhythm games, radio, SoundCloud, etc. and only a few usually stick for a moment, but the most memorable sounds will eventually come back into mind.
a-- not even close to the truth b-- i suspect that you have not listened to any older music c-there was no auto tune or pitch correct until 1997 that was the year the music died
Oh really ? Have u ever listened to Kraft ? Niels Gade ? Nietzsche (yes he did compose some music) ? Romberg ? The list goes on and on and on. Trust me there are many works of music that have been forgotten for the best
I think this is a cop out. We're all here because we're searching for great new music and aren't finding it. It's out of my own frustration of years of searching that I found this video.
I grew up on Nirvana and Metallica as a kid, then Dream Theater, Queen, Tool, John Mayer, Muse, Genesis and others in my 20s, as well as a bunch of jazz and classical. Now I’m 41, and lately I’ve discovered that the British progressive tradition really is what interests me most. I discovered Porcupine Tree on Spotify a few years back, rolled into Steven Wilson’s solo work from there, and that brought me back to Genesis and King Crimson (among others), and also to The Pineapple Thief. I feel like I’ve discovered this treasure and I’m unpacking it bit by bit. The common denominator among most artists mentioned above is how beautifully and dynamic their albums have been recorded. SW, in particular, is a true modern gem in this regard. “The Raven That Refused To Sing” is incredibly well produced. My all-time favorite band Dream Theater is a joke in comparison, I’m sorry to say. I think I can objectively say that most modern pop music is poor in terms of arrangements, creativity and originality, and it sounds crappy to boot thanks to brick wall limiting. All imagination and wonder has been replaced by the smarts of marketeers attempting to appeal to our young’s basest impulses. “It's only meant to repress and neutralize your brain.” Wilson had it exactly right. I really don’t think it’s “a matter of taste” any longer at this point.
It's a darn shame that prog/prog metal band names are... a little bit out there. 😉It took me forever to give Porcupine Tree a chance, but the "sister act" (Opeth, where Wilson has been a long standing influence) didn't trigger any aversion in me. Similarly Caligula's Horse... I mean... come on! 😄 But yeah, it seems like you and I have been on a similar journey. Not quite the same start, nor current position... but parallel paths at the very least!
..just wait until you find Gentle Giant! I generally recommend starting with The Power And The Glory, however, given your apparent taste, you may find the first two albums (Gentle Giant and Acquiring The Taste) the better way in.. :-)
I feel sad for the poor ears of the fans of this sound/music. One of the things we love about live performance is, dynamic range! It excites people. Why do people want to destroy their music by more or less eliminating dynamic range from their recordings??? Don’t get, never will. AND, we now have so much available range... it’s jaw dropping really. Go figure.
Music is the best it's ever been. Because Babymetal :) ua-cam.com/video/WIKqgE4BwAY/v-deo.html They are my girls. Any who say otherwise get struck down with vengeance and furious anger.
They crank it at concerts too with digital brickwall limiters. The vast majority of concerts, that are charging $100+ per ticket, are using a digital console. Which I feel is a big mistake. Concerts should be as analog/straight line as possible. Digital console = analog to digital converters are employed. The days of FOH mix engineers having racks full of all analog gear are sadly, over.
@@maidenthe80sla I agree. I have found some very creative music around the world. The US music is dead. Mostly Japan. Babymetal is my favorite they invented their own genre. Nobody ever did what they do. But tons more. Yoasobi is Jpop based on Vocaloid. Atarashii Gakko is super unique I can't even describe them. Waggaki Band is a full rock band mixed with traditional Japanese music. Hanabie is an all girl Metalcore band that is now mixing in electronic music and becoming super unique.
Well you definitely won't with that attitude! A little food for thought however: Maybe different people enjoy different aspects of music. If you want to dance, a limiter and some side chain compression goes a long way. The "pump" you get from that type of processing just does something to your body that other music can't. I didn't understand it until I learned to dance. Different strokes for different folks I guess
Todays music lacks melody. What made Ah Ha's Take On Me so great was that it has a Melody Hook in the intro. Human League Don’t you want Me had a baseline Hook. Melodies lend to harmonics and that's what gives you goosebumps.
yep and you can blame hip hop for that. There is no melody in vocals in rap. Rapper get big for no being good but the fact they are good at getting followers on social media.
@@spark300c you are right but rappers can be good in a way. but it's not music in a common sense you could say. rapping is closer to poetics than music and the background "music" is often essentialy just a glorified metronome. Of course, some rappers can and do sing as well, blending those types of speech together but that's a rare thing in my opinion 😁 This is comming from someone who isn't a big rap fan, but I get why people might like it and don't necessarily see them as unskilled. (I can't rap 😆)
For the old set, those born around 1950, the sound was representative of the times. Not to ignore the sound quality of music as it blasted through the airwaves, we got music from a different type of band, not like the Benny Goodman stuff, but San Francico and New York rock. The sheer variety of bands is what made that period so great. That is what is missing today. Imagine the year 1967, the year I graduated from High School. It was The Doors, The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Procol Harum, Janic Joplin with Big Brother and Jefferson Airplane. It's easy to see that not all of great music was super processed, it was, to put it simply, different and beautiful. Who can't say the Moody Blues weren't great integrating orchestral music in their albums. Oh, and let's not forget when the Beatles arrived in the US, it was an event. All the girls were screaming and wetting their panties. Today is boring in comparison. As I tell people who are too young, you had to be there during that time period to take it all in. For those who were fortunate to live on the east coast, Woodstock was a experience no one who attended will forget.
Boomer here. I followed popular music through the sixties and seventies, but moved out of England during the eighties so I lost track of the new music. Now I couldn't tell you who or what is in the charts, but I rediscovered Klaus Schultz of Tangerine Dream, and listen to a lot of electronica and ambient. Also plenty of Bach, Vivaldi, the Minimalists. The hi-fi is never off in my house!
In the US we used to have music programs in public schools. It was hip to have private music lessons. Between 1967 and 1975 we had so much amassing new music every week. Yes. We have some great artists, today. But not in abundance. Adele and Billie Eilish are phenomenal but, have you seen the Grammys in the last ten years.
The older I get, the more I like „old music“. I‘m currently listening to McCartneys solo work after the Beatles and love it. However, modern music can be absolutely mindblowing, if you look in the right places. Wet Leg blew my mind, now does Sir Chloe. Whitey is also a great underrated rock musician. Ex:Re - Too Sad is a modern song, that even brought me to tears. The guys from Radiohead are also getting better and better. Great times, if you ignore the charts.
I am 58 and love all kinds of music, even today's music. I love; Wet Leg, The Strokes, The Beatles, Bruno Mars, MCR, Led Zep, Elvis, Disco, The Ramones and on and on and on. A great song is a great song, no mater what era.
I'm so glad I have never been an 'average' music listener. As a 5/6/7 year old, I listened to a radio under my duvet, tuning it in to strange foreign stations on LW. I have never liked listening to the music that was 'forced' on to me by commercial radio, television, etc, and always tried to seek out strange, different, and interesting music from anywhere in the world. I discovered that music made in none western 'studio's' did not have the same production techniques (like the over use of compression), and thus had a much greater dynamic range, and was much more expressive. Wet leg are utter shyte. I saw them live on Jules Hootananny and they were pretty useless live, and even live I could tell they were using and needed auto tune. Modern music is made to a formula to sell as much of it as possible to consumers, most of whom do not know the first thing about music. Just the same as McDonalds sell massive amounts of crap food to plebs who know nothing about cooking.
That's like the dumbest thing ever said. It is quite so that plebs like you @DjNikGnashers think they are special. You are not. You just learned to find your niches but expext anyone else to like the same niches you do. Too bad when this takes away some of your friends when they don't follow you into every dark and damp alley you deem worthy. And I also think you are sour because you got tricked by McDonald's when your friends knew how to cook and eat healthier.
Perhaps 20 years ago, or so (I’m 43 now) I was so disgusted with what was considered popular, that I forced myself to listen to the radio for a few hours, and find at least one aspect of each song that I truly liked. It could be an intro, a hook, a vocal harmony, some sonic characteristic, or even just a delay throw. I actually found it quite easy. Will I may have heard 10 songs in a row that I would never want subject myself to hear again, I also really enjoyed the journey of discovering the subtleties that formed the “ah ha!” moments that hit me with each new song. That forced exercise quite literally changed my life. If I could find the “hidden” joys in veritable sonic garbage such as those songs (term used loosely), what other wonders have I been missing out on? How else could I experience, or more importantly, help others experience joy, in seemingly hidden ways? Music, even when it is noise, is a gift of grace to be cherished until we breathe our last…
Mcpribs, your words are ponder worthy. Your willingness to have a foray into music that you found distastefull, initially, is a statement on your curiosity and your intelligence. It's also a statement on your emotional control. Well done. You went on a search for "diamonds in a dirt pile." That is more than most of us are willing (and quite possible able to, from an emotional point of view) to do.
@@KenTeel Thank you for your kind words! I was reflecting on that time, and remembered thinking at the time that not everyone would like music I made that o considered great. The least (well, second least, to be fair) I could do was give their creativity a fair shake.
What you did was similiar to what students of musical instruments have to do while practicing pieces they do not like (or even hate). Or at least I tried to do that with what I got in my piano lessons, and some of my colleagues tried that, too, just to endure the unendurable ;-)
@@pontram Been there…clarinet. Haha! Also, bass in a 70’s and 80’s cover band. And…playing contemporary worship at church. Every time I hear one of those songs for the first time, I get angry. “How can it be this bad?!” Haha
This is on a BBC page: (about forcing Noriega from an embassy ) "The US army decided to use psychological warfare - by blasting a wall of sound non-stop outside. A fleet of Humvees mounted with loudspeakers rolled in, and rock music rolled out. The troops' playlist came care of the Southern Command Network, the US military radio in central America. It featured hits picked for their irony value, including I Fought The Law by The Clash, Panama by the stadium rock band Van Halen, U2's All I Want Is You, and Bruce Cockburn's If I Had A Rocket Launcher."
I think you have it summed up correctly. It's not the music I dislike, it's the way it sounds on a HiFi system. But! probably 95% of people don't listen to music on such a system or even own one. If most music comes out of a telephone, being distorted does not hurt the ears quite as much because so much bandwidth and detail is lost anyway. If you started your musical life with a telephone, then that is the new normal. I remember as a kid my exposure to music was from radio Luxemburg and Caroline. AM radio, lots of fading, distortion, and nothing above 6K on a good day. When I built my first HiFi the music was almost unrecognizable. I now could hear, dynamic range and lots of detail and HF completly missing in the past. Now things have gone full circle, no dynamic range, we do have the HF it's just badly clipped and distorted and makes my ears bleed and does NOT sound better on a HiFi system.
I'd have to agree. What's the point of buying a recording if it sounds less bad through a cheap Amazon Echo than it does through your multi-thousand-dollar hi-fi system? I don't know why artists don't produce two versions of their songs; one mastered properly, and one with the compressor turned up to 11.
@@nomis4913 "Hit single edits were often the least dynamic tracks on an artists album. As you indicate squeezed to maximise impact on non hi Fi listening devices. Now it seems many very commercial albums are mastered to sound " like that "call the way through 🙄
I'm 63, happily listening to today's alt-rock where melody and chord progression still thrive. I have enjoyed most popular, some disco, rock, grunge, and alt-rock music until recently when popular music became not musical. Every Abba song has a tune, not so much with today's hits.
I'm still waiting for this mysterious age at which I stop finding new kinds of music compelling. I don't listen to much pop though. But I'm constantly gaining appreciation (and yes, loving) new kinds of music. I'm well into my 20s, but maybe when I'm 30 I'll start being one of those people. new genres I've loved after I turned 20: hyperpop, (not pop)country, bossa nova, drift phonk, and indie folk.. that I can think of. This discussion is always annoying to me because people always say "you just like what you were exposed to when you were younger" and.. I listened to mainly EDM when I was young, and I don't anymore really. I don't count hyperpop, you might count drift phonk, but that makes up only a small bit of what I listen to, and I barely ever listen to the genres I liked back then. I don't hate the music I listened to in my teens, I go back to it sometimes, but I've found thing I enjoy even more.
something I have in common with my niece Rhian, of wetleg. we both got btec national diplomas in music technology! its quite possible this being the first work ahead of producing the album she did not have a lot of input into the production of the song, the studio probably used their junior engineers, even in post production, I am overjoyed she became a success on the strength of this tune. having listened to the album only on small speakers it is difficult to discern, but it sounds "live" like a live cut demo, not a meticulously and possibly over produced studio master, which knowing the energy the band has, is probably what they were hoping to achieve.
Overall the video makes some very good points. But Wet Leg is a poor example. The song sounds fine...headphones and speakers. It gets a little over-excited at the end which I'm sure was the intention. There's nothing new about overdriven guitars.
@@franksherman1774 Let’s be fair: these days you’re lucky to get a guitar, that’s why most pop music sounds so bad. It’s mainly computer-generated loops and sounds and autotuned vocals. Remember when you didn’t need a computer to make music? That’s when you had some.
any mainstream music is generally bad, not only modern. Mainstream music of the 60's was utter crap. So was mainstream music of the 70's, this utter disco crap. Same counts for the 80s, 90s, etc. Music in that is no different than other "art" forms. The bulk of books being read is also utter crap, with castle novels as most read genre.
@@celestine5340 Honestly, I tend to listen to less mainstream music but you cannot generalize even on mainstream music. The relation between pop and underground music is complex, some pop music is very innovative, some artists that are not on radio contribute to radio music by producing or writing lyrics. And at the end if the music is appreciated it is good music. Period. The fact that there is music better appreciated by people used to listen to a lot of music doesn't change that.
Thanks for this comment!!! Because everything is about marketing these days, only top budget songs hit the charts overal, rest of the 100.000 new songs per day (!) get burried. You can still score with good, original music, its just very hard to get heard since you need to be a social media expert besides very good writer and producer, and graphics and video edittor etc etc
I’m 57 and I’m discovering new music almost everyday. I can’t imagine being stuck in the music of my teens. Wet Leg who are among one of the many new bands I like.
yo i really appreciate you, because so many people just write it off as bad. if you like rap music i highly recommend you check out a few songs that i consider masterpieces, devil in a new dress, sing about me im dying of thirst, prom/king, and 90210 are all worth listening to
Same here. I laughed when he first said "Wet Leg". Their whole first album is musically inventive and fun. And I'm 62! Also, the distortion argument neglects to mention that almost every musician after the 1950s uses it like salt on fries.
Great and informative video. I think one key factor is that there isn’t the money to be made in the record industry today because of streaming services. On one hand it allows for a greater number of artists to democratically have an opportunity to bubble to the surface, on the other hand I think it has lead to a diminishment in quality. I may also argue that the old formula of forming a band and honing ones sound through live gigging before going into the studio has largely been replaced by hobbyists in their bedrooms many of who have never performed live ( not to say that this can’t be immensely great) . Also the culture of the audience in their relationship to live music has largely changed and consequently so has the music suffered.
I see the same phenomenon in indie videogames. More people can now make games, but there seems to be more and more hobbyist entering the field and making really mediocre games. I see with both music and games these hobbyists will just use already made assets/sounds to create their projects. I've even heard some hobbyist developers saying the art doesn't matter. It seems like mostly all the new artists are more into the production aspect and that can only take you so far.
Modern music has always been bad, even back in the 60s. The reason it seems old music was better is the “sieve of time”. If you went back to any time in the past, the majority of what you hear would not be very good. Thinking back, you just remember the songs good enough to be remembered and passed on for decades. 30 years from now, people will be talking about how much better music was in the 2020s, having forgotten about the 90% that’s bad, just like in any other decade.
I’m certainly coming late to this conversation but after viewing your excellent video and reading many of the responses regarding “new” music or music outside the usual comfort zone, I’ll share how I adapt to such experiences: I imagine the environment where that music is probably being played. You see, music is more than sound, it’s a rhythmic, moving force. I often see dancers or a dancer, in a club setting or gathering of people moving to the music. What I’m suggesting is that in order to fully appreciate the music it helps to envision the activity that it goes best with. Youth does not stand or sit still, their active, with a beat, a reythim that mirrors their lives. I stopped expecting to appreciate music in a static mode. It really helps me to set the scene and groove with whatever environment the music places me.
I guess it depends on the person. Trap beats do not make me want to move at all. In fact, they are like anti-movement and almost paralyze me. Now, more Jazz and funk sounds do move me a lot and I love that. I also love drum and bass and some rock/alt music that moves me. Most of the music I listen to is rhythmic, but I feel like producers think every song has to be trap to be rhythmic or danceable.
I think we are on the other side of the loudness war now. To my ears, masters are less wild than they were 5-10 years ago. The lufs limit on streaming platforms has really taken the pressure off. People are understanding that if you want to make your song knock, you need a bit of dynamic range to let the beat jump out.
I am still blown away by new music and I am 56 years old; however, it is never new music found in the top 40, but rather among jazz hybrid stuff and stuff involving folk music forms from around the world as they meet other traditions or ways of arranging. This is because I value surprise within melodies and harmony, as well as lyrics that go beyond greed culture and variations on consumerist nihilism.
The first music I fell in love with was probably what you didn't like at the time - Gary Numan! Loads of 80s music then filled my collection, but mixed in with back catalogue stuff from the 60s and 70s. Things got boring for the most part during the 90s and 2000s, but there were always things around that I really enjoyed, although it tended to be non-mainstream stuff. I still find some new music that I really love to this day, but the "popular" stuff I can't bear listening to!
I am loving Japanese metal. Japanese music in general is getting really good. Since 2010. Their music industry was not destroyed by downloading. I love the all girl Japanese metal bands like Nemophila, Band-Maid and Hanabie. I like women. I like rock. But my favorite is Babymetal. They make all the metal neckbeards angry. They are cute and they dance. That is not allowed in metal. They sing happy songs and smile. It's pretty hilarious. They invented their own genre of music. Cute metal.
I had an older brother who got stuck on 50-60's music. I have a younger brother who stopped at The Beatles. I think any style of music you have to teach your brain to like, sometimes through enforced repetition. I did this on purpose with The Chemical Brothers "Not Another Drug Store", which went from "Why would anyone listen to this?" to a masterpiece of alliteration, syncopation, tempo and contrast. Now one of my favorites. The appeal of music is repetition broken by surprise change, so something that has to be learned so you have a notion of hte basic patterns, which are then broken. I think there is natural tie in with human speech, especially female vs. male vs. children and emotion. There is also a natural tendency to understand the patterns of the natural world for obvious evolution reasons. Our brains are more interested in the changes of tone and tempo so we can understand both male and female speech as well as emotional intonation based on pitch, minor keys and breaks in tempo. We look for hesitation and intonation to detect emotion, lies, enthusiasm, gender. Music mimics and stimulates much of this. Some people learn music in their youth and then no longer wish to learn any more. I don't mean this as an insult, it is just the way their brain is wired. Their temperament is to use their brain and learning for other things, such as (actual) language. My temperament is a love of patterns (high on the Asperger's scale) so not only do I enjoy music, I tend to search out a new "fix" when my music doesn't have the same stimulation and novelty. In fact, I tend to listen to my old favorite music less because I can "play it" already in my head and I only need a reminder to get the emotional response I am looking for. I feel blessed because I like so much variety of music. I haven't caught up to the 2020's, as I'm still working my way through the 2000's and 2010's. I don't like all of it, but I can always find something that catches my fancy. My current ear worms are from Shpongle, before that The Chrystal Method. I am 65. From classical to hip-hop, grunge, techno, there is good stuff and not so good stuff. I have a great deal of respect for Hip-Hop because it put rhythm, words and (sometimes clever) rhyming poetry back into popular music. I like it all, except Country and Western. OK, one or two and who doesn't think "Johnny Cash at Fulsome Prison" isn't one of the greatest albums of all time.
Due to the smaller dynamic range, a loud master appears louder despite being penalized. To combat the loudness war, streaming services would have to introduce a non-linear penalty system. At -10 LUFS 5 db quieter, at -5 LUFS 12 db quieter. For example.
I really like your videos. Thanks for making them. I agree with you that most people tend to "look in the rear view mirror" when it comes to the music that they like. I use the term "most", because not all people are like that, just majority of them. Looking back, in regard to music, is a form of nostalgia. How old do you have to be to develop nostalgia? Well I'd suspect that nostalgia starts to kick in , somewhere around the mid twenties, for most people. Interestingly, this is when a lot of people kind of "lock the doors" to new music. When nostalgia kicks in, openness to new sounds diminishes, for a lot of people. Of course this can happen in the late twenties, early thirties, or late thirties. But, it does seem to happen for most people. It is interesting that this parallels the reproductive years, for people. The human brain isn't fully developed until the early twenties, yet people's reproductive systems have been "activated" for a few years, by the time the brain fully develops (Its is as if nature knows that if people's brains are fully developed, they might know what they are getting into, and realize the full responsiblity, and not want to reproduce, if the brain was fully developed earlier.) So, people are operating in a more emotionally charged way, before the brain is fully developed. We see this with impetuous behaviors with lots of people in their late teens. Music business people have figured out that people are the most "vulnerable" to musical sound tracks, when they are at an age where their brains are not fully developed, and when reproductive urges are very strong. These business people know that providing a sound track to all of this emotional behavior, especially formulated for the theme of love, is highly affective with young people (especially young women.) They know that young people haven't assumed full adult reponsiblities yet (mortgage payments, child care payments, etc.) and that they'll have the combination of a vulnerable emotional state (including an emotional vulnerability to dramatic videos with music) and discretionary income, which provides the fuel for music sales. After people, generally assume adult responsiblities, they are too distracted with those responsiblities, to focus on music, or soundtracks for their emotions. They are too busy working, paying bills, changing diapers, etc., to focus on music. Additionally, they are old enough to have nostalgia kick in. So, there you have the formula for most people, and why the music of their youth's is so powerful to them. Of course there are exceptions. Also, we musicians, oftentimes are on a journey to discover. This is not always the case (witness the number of cover bands playing classic rock, in your local area), but is significant enough to make note of it. It is interesting how the music biz has figured out when that vulnerablity for a soundtrack, for people is, and how they keep "servicing" that characteristic, with the same old sh*t listened to in their youths, by people (generally.) I find that if one wished to be creative in writing music for people who are over 25 or 30, writing something in a familiar style at least gives the music half a chance of being listened to. Afterall, it's the same old glove, just refashioned in a different color. Thanks for the video. I really like your intelligence, experience, and sense of dry humor.
I think this is a good take. Especially the bit at the end: "if one wished to be creative in writing music for people who are over 25 or 30, writing something in a familiar style at least gives the music half a chance of being listened to." I recently became a big fan of the retro synthwave and vaporwave genres. These genres are specifically designed to evoke feelings of nostalgia in people my age (30s) and they are incredibly successful at doing so. If you're in your mid-30's give retro synthwave a try!
I agree with most of what you say, but when in my thirties I enjoyed 80's music including synthesisers. In my forties I enjoyed 90's music. For me, things went downhill in 2007. I was brought up listening to Dean Martin and Perry Como (mum was Italian) and I liked it. In my teens I liked both pop music and classical. Artists that tailor their output to please fans are, in Oscar Wilde's opinion, mere tradesmen. Pioneers in any art form do what their instinct dictates and not what the industry expects. Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, Tangerine Dream, to name just four, furrowed their own path.
@@thomasalexand I don't know about including Pink Floyd, and The Beatles in the category of furrowing their own path. Pink Floyd guys were putting their finger in the "commercial winds" and figuring out that album rock was the de jour cool stuff, so they did that. The Beatles recycled Chuck Berry-EverylyBrothers-Buddy Holly, and tweeked it just enough to look different. I think that they were also keenly interested making a recipe that would sell. The Velvet Underground, well Lou Reed was second only to Yoko Ono in lack of musical talent. His presentations were along that line, too. He was another guy who was posing as avante guarde, but really just a hack. The guy who really did what you describe in furrowing his own path, was Frank Zappa. He wanted success, but he wanted it on his terms. I think that it's very rare to find people making art, who truly go their own way.
@KenTeel Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sergeant Pepper. Chuck Berry, and if he were alive, Buddy Holly, were both obviously heading in that direction. No, they weren't. Lou Reed was but one member of The Velvet Underground. Dark Side of the Moon was unique. Floyd wasn't mimicking anyone else.
I am 71y from Germany and disagree. I daily discover good new music, but it’s hard to find it. I agree if you speak of mainstream music. The music of the 60‘s and 70’s revolutionized my life and a lot of it is still great and will last for generations.
I was there in the 1960s too, but I must say, I never heard anyone say that the music was "just noise". Never. The idea that the older generation disliked that era of music is just false. It's not an age thing. Music today is objectively less diverse, less innovative, less interesting, and less musical than at any time since the invention of recorded music. To assign it all to ageism is ignorant nonsense.
I grew up in the 70s and remember my parents moaning about the state of modern music then. There is plenty of evidence of people condemning sixties music and before that fifties music. I was even reading earlier an article about someone moaning about new music in the 1920s
0:18 When was it first commented that 'modern' music was noise? It was Tumac-ar-Fado of Sumer commenting on the recent fad of reeded flutes layered over percussive sticks. "Pure rubbish," he pronounced, 5488 BCE.
There's very little to "understand" about today's music. But please take note of how much sampling from "older gnerations" music is used in today's music. Not only do they have to appropriate past music (because it's good), but they then butcher it by turning it into a 2-3 second loop that becomes the basis for the trash they layer on top of it.
Going back nearly a decade to my mid teenage years I found an old early 1990s Technics portable CD player that used to belong to my dad, and noticed when listening to CDs on it that ones mastered prior to the early-mid 1990s (during the first decade or so of the format existing) almost all sounded better than newer ones despite being quieter. I had been aware for a while before that that older CDs (in their original non-remastered form) were quieter than newer ones but had only listened to them on mainly poor quality gear. Technics were a pretty good brand and I could hear a lot of distortion on these newer CDs that wasn't present on early ones, and it turned out that the Loudness War was the cause. I suspect that the majority of people think that CDs have become louder due to "improvements" in technology. In reality all that making them louder has done has been a reduction in fidelity, to the point that I find the vast majority of releases from the past 15 years with rare exceptions to be almost completely unlistenable since training myself on what music should sound like unless there is an alternative Atmos mix available. Those old, "quieter" CDs retain the full dynamics that give the recordings their distinctive character which is sadly lacking on nearly every modern release, probably without the majority of people realising. I would argue that "quieter" CDs are louder because they have louder peaks if listened to at the same volume to a compressed CD, meaning a sharper, punchier sound, particularly on the drums. A lot of remasters sound worse than old CDs from the 1980s and as a result I seek out secondhand original CD copies from of a lot of pre mid 1990s music that wasn't originally brickwalled compressed because the original CDs nearly always sound better in my experience than their modern CD or streaming counterparts. It makes me question why the labels have been ruining their back catalogues since the mid 1990s with remasters that sounded better previously to anyone who knew how to turn their volume up. I feel that for the most part, good music recordings (at least in digital form) of non-classical or jazz music pretty much died about 30 years ago due to brickwalling becoming an almost universal practice in the industry, on the basis that it would make recordings seem louder to the average consumer. CDs from the 1980s seem to generally sound as good as they could possibly make them sound at the time, and many still sound fantastic up to 40 years later. We've seen a lot of advancements in digital technology since then, and yet most of today's releases sound poor compared with releases from then. I don't think vinyl sounds any better than CD as a medium, but it seems to nowadays get a lot better treated when it comes to mixing and mastering. I believe that back in the 1980s most audiophiles found CDs to generally sound better than vinyl, and at that point both tended to get an equal amount of care when it came to mastering.
I don't think 16 bit 44.1kHz vs 24 bit 192kHz sound much different in practice. What definitely does make a difference in sound would be dynamics, which newer recordings are usually lacking in.
great comment, I agree with every single point. Ironically as you said, old masters are in fact louder relatively speaking since they have more transients and energy; they are farter from the 0 dbfs ceiling, yes, but that is very simply resolved by turning up the f***g volume knob.
Completely agree with this. A well-mastered CD from the late 80s sounds better than a brick-walled anything produced after the mid-90s. It’s the recording and mastering which is the determining factor much more than the medium. And I say that as somebody who has used it all, up to 24/192…
One article that I've read about the "worst sounding CDs" seems to mention at least one of the original c.late 1980s CDs of Neil Young's 1970s albums. I have a few of them, and they all sound great to me. They sound like raw master tape transfers without any noise reduction or brickwalling.
Digital clipping is not like a 'bad mix', which is subjective. It's an objective deliberate abuse of the recording process intended to produce a non-musical effect (i.e. increased loudness). Therefore it is quite valid to say that it is ruining the music. That's before we even get to auto-tune.
I am so glad that there's other people besides myself that sees most modern music not only lacks talent, skills, and creativity. But it is also too loud for no reason at all which makes most music coming out now even more unbearable to listen to. To me, it feels that the loudness wars either is still alive or morphed into something else. Many people both realize but don't realize that no matter even if a song has a lot of good melodies, amazing harmony, creativity galore and great use of overall instrumentation. If the audio is clipping, then all of that gets thrown out the window. I am not the best audio engineer and I feel my musical skills is far superior than my sound editing skills and knowledge, but I can tell by even looking at an audio file in a DAW or video editing software that a song is way too loud. Some may say; "just turn down the volume". That won't work because the audio is already ruined when the mix got bounced in whatever sound format it came it. So just turning it down won't solve anything other than not losing your hearing. The song will still be a distorted mess of sounds where you simply can't enjoy the song even if it was good, and that is a huge problem in modern music.
When you say "limiting dynamic range," I'm guessing that's similar to using a compressor on an instrument, right? One thing that I notice about modern music that gets popular is the short musical phrasing and lyrics that are highly repetitive. But now that you mention the "compression" of all the recorded sounds, I'm noticing that in your examples. It just sounds like distortion and thudding beat. It gives a "claustrophobic" feel. Maybe it's supposed to sound like a packed club environment, which some people consider fun.
My own mother detested our music in the 70's, she called Freebird noise! Freebird, can you imagine? Obviously, my Mom was wrong. But really the stuff we hear in today's top songs on Spotify or whatever seem super simplistic even though the vocal performances can be quite good. I just don't hear much if any sophistication in the arrangements of the backing instruments. It makes the newer stuff sound incomplete, or if I may - lacking.
There was a story I read about a rest home that hired an Elvis impersonator to entertain the people. However they were fans of Frank Sinatra and thought Elvis was our version of Justin Beiber.
It's not just the music, but current mastering tends. I am a Jean-Michel Jarre music fan (yes, I heard it first sometime in my 20'ies). I bought a "50 years of music" compilation of his tracks, made in 2018, and... I couldn't listen to it. At first I thought that my speakers were damaged and were producing those "farting" noises (pardon my french). But no, the speakers were fine. Everything got clear when I decided to compare that track to the same track from his original album from 1982. The new master almost didn't have any dynamics! No sharp "needles" - just a line at a top/bottom of a graph. It was the first CD that I really wanted to refund - so bad it sounded! I kept it, at the end, because I collect his work. But I never listened to that CD again. These were the same tracks as back from 1980'ies. But modern "mastering". I put "mastering" in "", because it's rather destroying the music, not mastering it.
Many of these "Remastered" tracks are a disappointment to me, as well. But what absolutely annoys me is the addition of reverb and other spatial effects that actually introduce phasing issues. Loss of dynamic range is annoying, but the injudicious addition of effects after the original mastering seems wrong. Morally wrong.
I have a very early CD of Jean Michel Jarre's best known songs up to that point. It looks to be an original 1983/84 West German Polygram pressing, and sounds very good. Recordings from 40 years ago still sound very good for the most part, and early CDs were also generally well mastered, so with some exceptions there's generally no real need to remaster old recordings, at least not in the brickwalled form that most seem to get remastered to. As someone who is aware of what has happened to mastering techniques over the past 30 years, seeing "digitally remastered" on an old release is always a let down and in such cases I'll avoid buying the product and instead look around a little longer until I come across the older version that usually sounds superior. For some reason a lot of modern vinyl doesn't seem to get the brickwall treatment that nearly all new digital releases now get, which makes me wonder why the labels continue to think that it is needed for every new CD and streaming release. Digital remasters of old films typically have a significantly improved picture compared with the originals since colour reproduction technology has improved a lot since the 1980s, but I feel that remastered music, at least since the 1990s when the trend of brickwalling began, is a major marketing con. People see the word and think they are getting something superior, when in most cases the remastered versions are actually inferior aside from often containing additional content lacking on the original. Sometimes they'll contain less tape hiss than the originals, but they are also typically less dynamic. Some people have said that the loudness war was at its worst during the early 2000s but in my experience many of today's releases are even more distorted than releases from then. Most of today's pop and rock CD/streaming releases have dynamic range scores of just 4-6, and the highest I've encountered on any new major label release from the past 15 years is 10, whereas in the 1980s almost all had a score of at least 11-12, and it wasn't at all uncommon to find releases with scores of 14 or 15. Due to the number of remastered old releases, often the only way to hear a digital version of a lot of old music in its original dynamic form is to look around for secondhand CDs. Vinyl records from the 1980s tend to have similar dynamics to what CDs at the time had.
The problem is that people tends to listen to music on little shitty BT-speakers and not equipment that has speakers that can handle proper bass frequencies. You can’t reproduce bass on tiny speakers.
@@robertkiss7003 I was listening it on my Pure Acoustics home theater system. Its subwoofer is good enough to reproduce lows, rated at 35-150 Hz, 175W (RMS watts, not fake). The new master is full of distortion. The same track of the original old album master sounds just fine on the same system. The playback system is not the problem. The problem is that the original track was mastered at -15.1 LUFS (integrated), while the 2018 version is at... you wouldn't believe it: -6.5 LUFS (i)!
Great example track with Wet Leg. I have actually been listening to this track over the last 6 months or so. I am in my 50's and I sort of liked the track at the beginning. Simple beat and I thought the initial verses sounded pretty good. Both music and recording. Then, it builds energy to a point that seemed the engineer went on a bathroom break. Total distortion and clipping. Your video helped explain that they simply wanted it to sound "loud" to their listeners.
People who think for themselves and who take the time to craft their ideas are creators. Those are the people who breach into new sonic or esthetic landscapes and bring the listeners on for the ride. It's sometimes risky but at least it leaves room for innovation and discovery. You can find jewels in any genres, even jazz. Mainstream industry ( music or movies ) are mainly interested in producing winning formulas, because they only care about money, not art. Real music lovers never listen to commercial radio. They know it relies on sponsoring, and that it's not culturally motivated. Good music leaves permanent marks, trends don't.
It's not just the mastering house... Sounds are loaded with compression and saturation on track level during the recording. Even acoustic instruments are compressed to oblivion.
This topic might be worth a video. Compression is used during recording to make things sound good. Compression during mixing is used to hide poor mixing. Compression in mastering is used to make everything louder and worse. IMHO of course.
@@AudioMasterclass You are right. Worth a video for sure... I am speaking from an expirience working as a mastering engineer. It's a former career, but the knowlage and experience remains... Things just come in "too hot", and while trying to help the client, provided they even want to listen to you, one comes to find compressors in every stage of the recording process. The waveforms you showed in the video are 90% of what comes in. The reason sometimes is that multiple recording and mixing engineers are working on a single song, etc, etc...
Plenty of stuff that doesn't chart is great, usually the stuff that charts is throw away music that'll get tired after a day or two. So much music coming out is fantastic and we've never had so much choice in what to listen to and so many artists that are evolving genres. NF for example just released a new album.
I used to think like the headline. What I realized is that there is always someone, somewhere making the kind of music you like. Don't like distortion? Don't listen to Wet Leg. Don't like it loud? Turn it down. As for the rest of us, we can happily listen to our loud, distorted, clippy music on our record players and eight tracks and folks like you can waste your breath telling us we're wrong. Good luck with that
I’m 61 years old and for me Band-Maid is one of the greatest rock acts of all time-five Japanese women, none past their early 30s. There is an amazing number of brilliant rock bands coming out of Japan these days. Nothing wrong with music today; you just have to know where to look for it.
Agreed. I'm a Band-Maid fan in my 20s who used to live in Japan. Their music industry is thriving. The CEO of Fender himself said that the Asia-Pacific market is the fastest-growing market for music.
Most of the music I listen to come from Japan. There is still a lot of musical diversity over there and it isn't uncommon to find a lot of artists play instruments and mix multiple genres together and make it work. I really love the Jazz fusion genre over there. I also listen to some Korean music and some other music from the other countries. I grew up with Japanese video game music haha.
Yes every generation prefers the music it grows up with. But I don't think that's the whole story. There's no doubt in my mind that the quality of music has gone down in absolute terms over the decades - with many exceptions - because of the way the music corporations have homogeonised manufactured pop music into a loud, bland, wall of noise in which no talent is needed, because it's all made in the computer. Young people have been brainwashed to accept this tripe and the next step will be to do away with artists entirely and have AI produce their mush. More profits for the corporations and I'm sure the young will lap it up eagerly. But we _want_ new music. Our brains always want something new and we will listen to new stuff - if it's good.
Im an "edm" producer and from my prespective distortion in general is used as a tool to get your sound to be loud on any system, especially your phone speakers. Now as a consequence of that pursuit most sounds you hear nowadays are grossly loud and sometimes obnoxious, although sometimes will produce plesant artifacts into your song such as sounding uniform through bass distortion. Another thing is that dynamic range (in my opinion) has kind of changed in definition with all the new techniques avaliable. In my own pursuit, ive produced songs that look very brick-ish due to me boosting volumes through distortion on spacial/immersive elements and i imagine many producers do the same. There is much more to discuss about this topic i just dont wanna type it all out, hit me up if youd like to discuss more
One reason why "old" music sounds good is because only the good "old" music is still popular. If you went back to the 60s and listened to ALL of the music of that time, I'm sure you will find plenty of trash.
@@themelancholyofgay3543 how will it ever be popular if people dont know where to look?? or maybee you lying that its any good to make us think u have good taste...
There's a lot of really good modern music. Some made by popular artists even, Kendrick Lamar has made a lot of the better music in recent years and that's mostly because it's about things he cares about and real issues. Especially when compared to the recent output of another great rapper, Kanye, who kinda seems to have resorted to focusing more on decent sound with strange lines that almost always relate to sex than experimentation and his personal life (at least what I got from his newest album).
I am 19, and have not been able to enjoy modern pop since I was about 10. I was brought up on older music but regularly complained about it being "too old." But then I listened properly to older music. And music went from being something with a singer and a little bit of assistance from computers to seemingly nothing but computers. Every song on the radio today has such little development, and almost no humanity to them. All vocalists sound almost the same because of the techniques they use. I might say that today, I have the music tastes of someone born in the fifties or sixties. I will listen to anything from the 1700s to about 2009 without much complaint. After that, no thanks...
There are some songs from the 70's and 80's that do sound aged, but they tend to be songs with daft sounding synth sounds. There are plenty of songs from those same era's which have synth sounds that still sound great and pretty fresh today. I was born in the late 70's and grew up through the 80's. Some of that 80's music sounds great today but some of it sounds a bit stupid because of the choice of synth sounds.
There is still music being made that is very similar to that of the 60s, it just doesn't chart. Take the first two Tame Impala albums for example (Innerspeaker and Lonersim), those are quintessential psychedelic rock that could've been made in the 60s. That is the great thing about todays technology, no one forces you to listen to what plays on the radio or in the charts. By looking into playlists from genres that you are interested in (e.g. indie rock), you can find many amazing artists from the 2010s and 2020s.
Thank you so much for telling me about those albums, I will certainly look them up. I am certain that there is great music today, but as you say, you don't see it on the radio or in the charts. I will definitely have a look at some modern rock artists, for example.
For what it’s worth, I love the sound of mixes that are clipping and sound like its trying to burst out of the speakers. You Lose by Magdalena Bay is an example that comes to mind. I’m 25
Mainstream music from 1969, when I was five: I Heard It Through the Grapevine. Marvin Gaye Everyday People. Sly and the Family Stone Get Back. The Beatles Honky Tonk Women. The Rolling Stones I Can't Get Next to You. The Temptations Suspicious Minds. Elvis Presley Come Together. The Beatles Something. The Beatles Someday We'll Be Together. Diana Ross and the Supremes Bad Moon Rising. Creedence Clearwater Revival Something in the Air. Thunderclap Newman The Ballad of John and Yoko. The Beatles The Israelites. Desmond Dekker Blackberry Way. The Move Albatross. Fleetwood Mac All of the above made No.1 in the UK or the US.
I'm 50 and love heaps of current music Wet Leg included! There's so much out there that is so easy to find that I could not have dreamed of doing when I was young. Problem is people equate the loudness of these songs to them being rubbish.
This is not the entire story. It's not just generational. I grew up with my father playing records, tapes, Mtv and the rest. The styles were so diverse, I have a feeling I wasn't left locked in a period with my musical taste. For short it was Eddy Grant-Mozart-Emerson, Lake & Palmer-Louise Armstrong-Mike Oldfield-Kid Creole and the Coconuts-Kraftwerk, it was simply everything available. So now, even in my old days, I can enjoy Weeknd and could enjoy Eilish if only she was at all good. Modern music doesn't immediately sound like all noise. Quite to the contrary, Taylor Swift and Adele, who, admittedly, sound much closer to older styles music, I literally can't stand hearing. So, obviously it's not old vs. new. I think ZZ Top is the most boring band of all time matched only by Joe Cocker and even coming close to how boring Taylor Swift is. The generational thing is much older that the sixties. History books teach us that opera was just cheap kitsch, entertainment for the masses and not refined. These days, you'd be considered to have a very high taste if your choice is opera. Still, the moment a certain distortion is not a limiting factor dictated by the stage of the technological development, it becomes a stylistic figure. Black and White photo or movies, sound distortion, pops and crackle of records or clipping. Eilish has a song where bass clips very heavily and it was deliberately left in. As early as 90' artists started artificially mimicking the pops and crackle of records and recording those onto a CD. (But the biggest "connoisseurs" could, of course, tell them apart from the real stuff immediately.) People are too quick to judge flatten dynamic range. But just as all those other distortions, I see them bad only when out of place. I think these dynamic range puritans are precisely the likes of people who'd say that Hendrix's guitar sounds wrong. Just like a musical academy (a Conservatory if you will), would never garner admittance to Tom Waits. A lot of pop music is loud and flat and doesn't really need huge dynamic range. It's only when you flatten music that is supposed to have dynamic range is when I see it as wrong.
I think it's all where you look for music. I think if you look to what's popular on the charts, you will find music that takes little talent to produce but there are probably millions of songs recorded each year that are uploaded to various platforms and I think that there has to be good music in there. I think we just have to maybe look a bit harder and keep our ears open for it. I think that we should look deeper than the surface. Great video by the way 👏👍.
check out Convexity, they make jazzy Colourbass, quintessential zoomer music but Very interesting in terms of music theory and timbre. It's a Subgenrw of dubstep that uses various sounddesign techniques to conjoin Heavie Fullspectrum Dubstep basses with more traditional harmony.
The problem is more deeper than what most people are overstating relating to mainstream vs less popular music or in comparison to independent music. What i noticed is that the better music may not necessarily be indie or "less popular", on very rare occasions ( 1 out of 10,000 songs maybe if looking rigorously through one website ), then it could be found in what appears to be "mainstream" routes or venues, the problem is, these specific songs i like are embedded in so much crap ( most of them being songs i already heard before anyways, so the actual new songs are close to none ), that finding them is even more difficult than finding good music in say a independent record label, so although the music may be less popular in itself, the place to which you find it may not be. For example, i may only like one song from an artist that is very popular, and the artist may have over 1000 songs. The key point being that this music ends up "niche" but not necessarily indie music. It's a nuanced topic that requires more naunced discussion.
Well, your argument seems to centre solely on the loudness thing. And tbh I really don't think that's a major factor in whether you like a band or a song. Plenty of sixties music was very distorted, and deliberately, too, or early seventies at least. All of these things are available to producers to use or abuse. It's just whether you like it. I'm 'only' 45 and I don't find a lot of new pop music very good, but then in the nineties, before I was twenty, I actually didn't find the majority of music good then either, I just selectively remember only the good stuff from then. In fact, I now have a radio show on Dandelion Radio, and it forces me to seek out new music that I like. It turns out there is tons. Some sounds old, some sounds new. I suspect that it's down to what sources you trust to curate your new music for you, and what preconceptions you take in with you, rather than what time period the music comes from or what the fashion is in producing it.
If you're interested, i mostly listen to J-pop. It's very different from western pop music and isn't mainstream like K-pop, so it isn't jusy soulless corporations trying to make the next hit. Try listening to "Overdose" by Natori, "Dramaturgy" by Eve or "Mixed Nuts" by Higedan
@@Bananabread810 dude so fucking true, im 23 myself so the good western pop was just my early childhood, jpop is quite appealing now since it doesnt seem corrupted by trends or other bullshit, it feels samey just like back then.
Where is it written that music must follow a specific formula to be good? It’s not, that’s the whole beauty of music. As with any art form, there are no rules or boundaries. What sounds bad to you, someone else might love.
@@brandonsheets1883 there is a rule about music that it needs to be artful, modern pop is none of that, you cant call a song about sex money and drugs art when it has no intention of respecting the medium.
@@brandonsheets1883 that’s the easy answer but we all know there’s good and bad music, it comes down to to melody, harmony, depth of lyrics, arrangement, mixing, recording, vocals, etc etc etc, you can certainly like trash nobody is complaining about that but just because music is art you don’t get to say all music is equal and you just like what you like, there is absolutely better music than others, and the things that are being done nowadays in its majority it’s pure garbage.
I’m 18 and I can’t understand modern music. Half the time it does not even sound like music, and the vocals don’t sound like singing. It’s like there talking with extra noise and sound.
To be fair it depends on what you listen to. Most of the bad music will probably forgotten too because it's soulless and devoid of care. Sometimes that kind of music makes it through the years, even sometimes being the most popular from an otherwise good artist (Cherry Pie by Warrant being the biggest example). But really I think most of the well remembered music will by people who care.
As a musician, I like a ton of variety. Everything from Big Band to Barry Manilow, from Rush to Rage Against the Machine. Much of today’s “music” is objectively simple and lifeless, computer generated instrumentation and computer controlled vocals. However, some people still play instruments and write good songs. It takes weeding through the trash to find a few bits of treasure. Band-Maid has been my most recent discovery. Real music from real musicians
Big Band to Barry Manilow, from Rush to Rage Against the Machine = cringe. Big sellers. Big posturing. Don't like bands because other people do. Find your own gems.
@@clvrswineI picked familiar names. If I had written “The Cold Stares to Maximum the Hormone to JJ Grey” nobody would’ve known what I was talking about 🤔 Or Band Maid, my current favorite
I feel lucky to have grown up with 90s pop music because as the time went by there have been fewer and fewer artists whose sound attracts my attention. I have always liked music so, I now revisit the songs I like and YT sometimes surprises me with good recommendations. I also go to concerts and festivals occasionally instead of just streaming music because nowadays that is the best way to support artists you like.
i'm born in 87, teenage of early 2000', i still hate 2004 song and above. Why is it happen? i find the 'old' song especially 70-90' no matter how dense the syntesized thing they put, they have a nice quality instrumental play... each music instrument is harmony and blend with each other... even if the same band reproduce the same song with improvised mellody it will never replicate the original version. that is a mystery😅
Today's singers compete to have an unusual way of singing, so it often goes to the extreme and sounds like a sick person. Of course no one will listen to the song a second time because it's tiring. You always prefer to return to healthy and normal vocals from the 70s/80s/90s
Ironic you say that since EVERY single song is adopting this subgenre formula. Mainstream to indie, to international have all started to adopt this kind of sound more and more. Even artists I enjoyed have started incorporating more and more of this sound making everyone sound the same.@@curlyhairboiakabaddude8922
I’m 40, I’ve loaded some songs into audacity and you can clearly see the loudness war at play in newer songs. There’s no dynamic left and it’s sad, I also believe that that’s where listening fatigue may come from.
I'm 70, and love modern music! It's nothing to do with age. Way back in the 60s there was plenty of crap going around that even we young'uns hated! If today's older generation just give it a chance I'm sure they'll get to love it........ Well, some of it!
This. Most of what ppl talking about "good old days" is that they remember the good ones and not the bad. I hear a lot of people saying that the first half of 90' was marvelous time for music - I grew up in '90 and I remember a lot of trash. For each Nirvana there was thousands of Lou Begas or Vengaboys (and Nirvana wasn't that popular really).
There are two rules when it comes to music: 1- It peaked when you were 25. It doesn't matter when you were born, you were 25 when it peaked. 2- Yours is the first generation to truly appreciate Joy Division.
Music peaked for me whilst I was too young to appreciate it (late 60's / early 70's). By the time I was in high school, KISS RULED!!!!!! RULED I SAID!!!!!! Then there was Foghat, Thin Lizzy, Bachman Turner Overdrive. The late 70's Begat Boston, Foreigner, Cheap Trick, Van Halen. Oh yeah, there was Disco. And Punk. And 50's Nostalgia. I HATED all of it. ALL OF IT!!!!!! Sure, by college, I started Appreciating Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, The Clash, Patty Smith, etc. Of course, then, it took a few years of HATING on MTV before I started appreciating bands like INXS, The Eurythmics, Men At Work, Love & Rockets. Then there was the 90's, & again, took awhile to appreciate Morphine, Soul Coughing, Cake, Incubus, Blind Melon . . .
Music used to be an artform with an intrinsic value. Today's music often has a tendency to be merely the means to an end. Allow me to quote Finn Mckenty, who has analyzed this phenomenon very well: "Music is no more a primary activity. [...] For the most part, music has become the background to some other activity that has a heavy visual component." He also gives the following examples: videogames, studying and TikTok. By the way: We still have good artists today. No doubt about that. But IMHO there has never been a time where you had to tolerate so much meaningless shit as today.
I borned in 1994 but my favorite bands are wasp, metallica, led zeppelin, scorpions, guns, skidrow, and much more from 60s 70s 80s I think it's about how you're listen! If you don't know what is live music with instruments, you will listen to the synth and and electronic musics Instruments are totally different
There's so much incredible music being made today that's its literally overwhelming.... and you'll hear almost none of it on radio, TV, or mainstream sources.
I think that the general lack of tallent in modern music is a different problem from the way it is mastered, although they usually go together. And, my taste in music hasn't stopped developing. I'm 46 now and I keep discovering genres or historical styles of music that I have never been exposed to in my "formative" years. There is even some music that I couldn't stand back then and I enjoy now. For me the biggest problem is lack of reproduction quality. PA systems, mono boom boxes or heaven forbid small bluetooth "speakers" squeeze the melody out of every music and serve you only fermented dregs. It's a pity that there are generations which haven't heard properly reproduced music.
I started discovering music in my late teens, that was the late 80’s. There has always been awful music through every decade, I don’t think music now is better or worse than any other decade.
I’m 30, and I’m starting to think music kind of peaked 7-8 years ago, cannot see people making albums better overall than they did in 2013-2015. Really hope my mind changes in this, but general creativity and album flow across the board has been in a downward swing for years, I kept telling everyone music was so good they just didn’t know for the last 13 years but that feeling is gone as of the last few, artists like Charli XcX, Beyoncé, and weirdly Enough Ariana Grande give me hope for popular music to grow and be better than the modern classics, but for now I either need to do some deeper investigation or the stagnation of modern sounds has actually been achieved. I don’t know if this is too much to read or not, but I had to stop myself from going fully into all of the major modern genres because I definitely don’t mean to only focus on pop, my favorite genres personally are death metal, post-hardcore, progressive rock, hardcore punk, and golden era boom bap hip-hop, but I am very familiar for modern rap (drake, Kanye, Travis etc), while modern rock is an enigma, people think Imagine dragons makes rock music, and the ones crying about the state of modern rock don’t like the actual artists like Every Time I Die or Coheed and Cambria because they’re too heavy or eccentric and deep into niches.
23yo here. I actually never liked music directed to my age group (2010s/2020s). To me, it all sounds industrialized and emptied of genuine creativity and passion. It just sounds like its made to be forced into every radio station and streaming service for the purpose of profit, and listened to just because it has a "good beat". I dont really listen to anything newer than the 90s.
I still listen to great music, discover new song regularly that are brilliant and sound good to my older ears. They aren’t what the music industry is trying to shove in my ears though. I believe we can all objectively state that the majority of the top 10 songs are quite bad. The lyrics like any form of composition, poetry or soul. The music writing lacks innovation, creativeness and boldness. And pretty faces are preferred to beautiful voices. There is still great music been made and I would compare this to « cuisine ». Most modern music is like fast food junk. There were never that much gourmet restaurant, but there used to be really decent restaurants that would still buy their meat from the butcher’s. Now, just like restaurants, even those posing as « decent » and not fast food, don’t go to the butcher’s for their meat, they prefer to serve cheap disgusting meat, and they have a take out service so that your food isn’t even fresh when you eat it. Most people can’t regularly afford a real gourmet restaurant, so at best they go to the « decent » restaurants, if not the fast food. With music it’s the same thing more or less. Either they will listen to what is being pushed on them, or they will go the easy route listening to verified and good oldies, not taking the time to try and discover new music. So you are left with a few gourmet albums, a ton of junk food, and some « decent » albums. And this is a trend with all art : music, cuisine, painting, cinema, literature. These industries would rather have a low risk cheap product to make and sell with a good return on investment, rather than craft something unique and lasting. Ask yourself, when was the last time you went to a tailor and at the very least got a suit or dress adjusted to you personally? When was the last time you bought a clothing from fast fashion? Do you go to Ikea for furniture, or have it handcrafted?
If anyone can tell me why any modern pop artist and their music is as good as the Beatles, David Bowie, Elton John, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, The BeeGees, The Who, Pink Floyd, Queen, Abba (and so many more myself and fellow oldies could mention) then I'd be very interested. There are a few notable singers recently though, like Adele but they are not going to be remembered as great writers like the above. There was crap too in the old days but there was also much more variety of style in pop music and maybe it's become too homogenized for its own good or there isn't the talent to lick any of the boots of the above now. Some will claim it's there but has been driven underground by the fashion in music and by the way the pop industry works now. My belief though is that it simply isn't there now in anything like that previous quality.
I think one can say objectively that most modern music is, in fact rubbish. Gone are the days of songs that actually went somewhere, elicited emotions and had any degree of complexity. There has been a steady decrease in the complexity of music which has kept pace with the dumbing down of society in general. Or maybe I'm just getting old.
There are still new gems around, but as always it takes some active effort to discover it. But I hear you; society is simultaneously dumbing down as well as getting more complex in all the wrong ways. It is not your age, it is your experience.
The complexity and shape of most chart pop has generally dumbed down a lot. Listening as I did as a kid tracks would have an introduction price, not just the groove from the main track. There would be a chorus or even pre-chorus and bridge. Even better they might have an interesting transpose in it. Perhaps this is the age where that sort of thing doesn't matter but I prefer it. The issue of subjective level and decrease in dynamic range is I think clearer to identify. When you put that together with FM radio broadcast processing I find it unlistenable anyway. I think perhaps the rot may have started earlier than some imagine, maybe started in the late eighties and early 90s in the UK when dance records from club acts started filling the airwaves as record companies cashed in to the new thing. Cheap to make they might be a bangers on a 3k sound system at you local nunnery of noise but just don't sound that good on typical radio. I have nothing against the genre myself, it's just not very radio friendly. 90s Rock is fairly infamous in the loudness mix wars so it came at us both ways regardless of genre. As pop music industry's money slowly disappears so does the quality perhaps but also the loudness pushed to the max is rather like the print media (at least in UK) dumbing down to get every last customer. Ironic that in our post medium era we gave potentially the greatest dynamic range yet waste mist of it jacking the volume, then again mist listening takes place acoustically hostile environments or shitty earbuds etc. Hi-Fi is increasingly aged affair also too.
I’m 54 and my favourite bands are bands I’ve discovered later in life (Coheed and Cambria, IDKHOW but they found me, MCR (got into that very late), polyphia… the list goes on. And yes, I love this music with a passion. Commercial music has never sounded so bad, but the music you hunt out for yourself has never been so good, and the musicianship of even the youngest bands is off the chart.
Thank you for explaining lufs. I wondered why my Amazon music service sounded so average with their ultra hd. files but when I listen on J Rivers the same files sounded much better. I went to settings and turned off volume normalization in Amazon and the ultra hd files sound much better.
I'm 31 so according to you I already reached the end of falling in love with new styles 11y ago. I can't quite confirm that. I was extremely hyped about future bass and stuff. Only when I hit the actual number '30' I was like 'eeh'. Color bass was the latest genre and I really enjoyed it but couldn't fall in love due to the vibe not really fitting my life anymore. but at least I understood the music. I'm much more of a hater when it comes to pop music, especially formulaic trap. it's always the exact same drum kit, chords, overall sound and style. and it makes total sense with all these sample packs and type beats out there that music gets homogenized like that. I think that sucks. It's not that these trap pop beats aren't fire or a banger or whatever. But they are all so same-y. Makes me wonder why people still make music at all when the whole goal of music production isn't even to create something new anymore. just listen to music instead then xD anyway, to your statements about distortion: I don't have a problem with that. If a song asks for -5db lufs, then it shouldn't be Spotify who decides what the dynamic range should be, but the music itself. And a dense mix just has this flavour that makes you feel like you can put it into your pocket, similiar to how black holes eat whole galaxies despite being small in size, and i think that's cool
Im 17, and personally, I dont understand today's pop music, there is no movement, boring choruses and the idea of bridges or instrumental solos is practically extinct. Personally i love those older rock bands that really wanted to say something through more than lyrics.
" i am 14 and was born in the wrong generation🤓🤪" ...
Lucky for both of you there is decades of older music for you to appreciate and enjoy. And if you can steer clear of peer pressure, you can enjoy whatever period or genre of music makes you truly happy
I’m a little bit older but when I was at school I was the only person into alternative music (extreme forms of metal mostly), and had to put up with all sorts of comments from people who were into general mainstream music or things like rap or grime (which I actually didn’t mind listening to). Anyway, like the previous poster put, if you can ignore the peer pressure and all that crap you’ll discover some great music and you’ll eventually be able to appreciate music from whatever genre. Keep listening to whatever you’re into my friend 👍
they are not really extinct they went to "bass drops" phase but it's sorta passing anyway to bridges with vocal vocalize parts or chops so technicaly they are still there. (if the track is longer than 2min that is). but i get your point you want that guitar solo after 2nd chorus and a 2nd solo in the final chorus with backing vocals going nuts all the way to the end. in this case you have to have more bars in the track. producers seem to shorten their tracks becuase most listeners have small attention span and less time to listen to songs because of heavy browising activities. mind you most people up untill the 2010's didn't have access to all forms of media on one device. nowadays music have to compete with videos and gaming & written text within one playback device.
I remember when Filthy Frank fucking demolished people like you. Please, tell me again how you bands like pink floyd and the beatles and how no one listens to "good music" anymore. Go touch grass and stop being such an ass. NOBODY CARES
Music has become more of a background thing than the centerpiece for many folks. Though people stream music, songs are shorter as are attention spans. Culturally, music is all around us and even more available than ever but does not have the same significance to many folks.
Wow I didn't know how to put that in words. It's definitely background noise nowadays!
Songs are actually longer now, depending on when you compare to. If you compare to anything before recorded music, music now is quite short. However, if you compare to the 50s and 60s pop, songs are longer.
This is due to the length limitations on vinyl when they first caught on. Radio edits were 3 mins as an industry standard.
@@thepoofster2251 They are able to be longer due to less limitations but songs are still getting shorter overall. Sure, there is the occassional longer one but that is not the norm. Song length hit its peak in the 90's/early 2000's before a decline. They were shorter in previous time periods so perhaps it a cycle but with diminishing attention spans, I wouldn't count on it.
@@petealba707 I disagree heavily. Music was longest in the era before recorded music. everything from 1400s to the late 1800s ish. A singular opus or movement can easily be a half hour long. So if we arbitrarily start measuring at the 60s, then yes. But when compared to the VAST majority of written music, all music written post 20s is super short
@@thepoofster2251 For sure, I agree with that. The title of the video is "Why is MODERN music so bad?" I'm only referring to the recorded era. Raga music in India can last for days in traditional ceremonies but I'm talking popular music.
I actually think we're in a musical renaissance, despite what's "popular" now. Today you can find a ton of new music from artists that cover any genre you like, on a wide variety of platforms. It's just unfortunate that most the popular music today comes from artists content on selling their soul to the music industry in exchange for endless promotion of their homogeneous trash songs.
In the 1980s to mid-1990s I had to travel the length and breadth of the country, to find those illusive gems made by true artists that lived and died for the sincerity of their music, rather than chase the shekels of the industry. The internet has made this much easier, but its still fairly random trying to locate the gems.
I always want lil Nas x to see my 5 year old innocently singing his deep lyrics!
I wish it were so-
But the truth is there’s just not enough money in music making to support a rigorous curriculum of practice and playing out. In 1975 a jazz gig would pay $75. In 2023 a jazz gig pays $75.
I am glad that's still the case. It always has been. In every genre you can find amazing work, even if you personally dislike that genre for the most part. But you have to really look for it. You won't find anything decent if you only listen to what is put on a plate for you.
I think that's the difference. It's not modern music that's bad, it's modern hits. Nowadays it's much more of an effort to find the good stuff, you have to actually look for it or get a fortunate recommendation from a friend or an algorithm. In the old days, much of the good stuff was in the charts (along with plenty of dross, sure) and that at the least let you discover the good bands.
I see the difference when I look at what my nephews and nieces (Gen Z and late Millennial) listen to: plenty of hits from the 70s, 80s and 90s, as well as modern hits and more obscure modern music. But it's the older music and the modern gems they discovered themselves that stay on their playlists, not the modern hits. Not a one.
I am 22, and I find that most of modern, trendy music lacks substance.
In the past, creating music required dedication. One needed to learn to play an instrument and master it before even attempting to produce a musical piece. This rigorous process ensured that only the most committed individuals would endure the extensive learning required.
Consequently, people created music from the heart. Today, however, music production seems driven by the pursuit of clicks, profit, and ego gratification, facilitated by the ease of creating music with modern technology. With the barrier to entry so low, a vast quantity of subpar music is inevitably produced by those who may have a casual interest in 'music' but do not invest their heart and soul into the craft.
it's so saturated and boring. and yes, others can say the same thing about the past but at least it was done with real instruments, lack of autotune, and something to say. nowadays its crass and about profit; plus dare I say most "artists" these days lack any actual talent, only care about the image they put out. no one appreciates art anymore, I miss the old days and I am 23 years old (cries)
= 'democracy'
Nailed it! Born in the 60s, rocked the 70s & 80s, even the 90s werent to bad. 2000 onward has been crap. Zero talent compared to the earlier generations
I'm more than double your age and I completely agree with this. While there are plenty of decent song writers out there, the dedication to mastering and manipulating their instrument is severely lacking. I'm watching and listen to many bass guitar based YT channels, and they never talk about modern songs. It's always 90's and earlier music where they point out intricate and innovative bass lines that established the soul and groove of the song. Today, bass has been relegated to synthesized pounding or worse, the bassists play only 2 of the 4 strings for the entire song (and you almost never see a 5 or 6 string bass anymore). I'm finding more true bassists playing out of Asia/Japan these days than anything in the West.
Zero LUFS is not the maximum. I've released a track at +2.3 LUFS integrated. A square wave at 3k would read even higher, due to frequency weighting.
As a Mixing and Mastering Engineer, I try not to think of music in terms of "hot garbo noise" or not, instead I try to find the objective beauty in the sonic qualities of the music and instrumentation itself in each piece. I haven't reached the "New is Noise" phase, and I'm 42, but I sense it coming. The music coming out today, the loudness, the sheer sausage waveforms coming out, it's just shocking. There isn't anything to enjoy or pick out sometimes, it's all too damn loud, it all competes, it all clips, it all distorts, so then I'm faced with .... What's to like? So that's why I don't mix/master that way. Even -14 is too loud sometimes. Yet, I'm told in my educational institution to try to push -9 dB LUFS-I, which to me just seems insane. Although, in practice, if you achieve balance in the mix and in the arrangement, and manage the space well, -9 can sound larger than life in a wonderful way. And sadly, if you don't try to go past -14 towards -10 or further, then you will just sound too quiet compared to the next song in the playlist, and that's the fear, and that's why everyone wants to be the loudest.
Bottom line opinion: I think it's all just getting too loud with no justification to be that loud other than a "Mine is bigger than yours" contest. It's hard to hear the nuance and beauty when my ears are bleeding from the piercing distortion and clipping.
I'd be curious to know what % of people turn loudness normalisation off in their streaming service. My bet is that the loudness war is kinda pointless now.
However I don't really hear distortion (on a fairly compressed track) if I master it to around -11 or -10 LUFS. But I guess it's more audible in certain genres.
Agree. I actually LIKE todays pop-music and grew up listening to black-metal. I can until today stand and love music that is that is 80% distortion and has no dynamics. But I do not get why you would want your melodic pop-arrangements to be that obnoxious. Another input: if you listen to j-pop-productions, they found a good way to manage that level of sum-compression: Compress the whole instrumental track as much as you like, but the vocal is completely over everything. This way you can at least follow something. The examples here are so horrible because everything is equally loud, subconciously disorienting. The vocals are too tucked in. There is no foreground.
I find your words to be interesting from a production point of view, but has no content in terms of musical structure. You don't talk about melody (or the lack thereof.) You don't talk about key changes. You don't talk about harmonic content. You don't talk about chord progressions. All of these things is what music, itself is made of. Recording is an entirely separate subject. Production is an entirely separate subject. What you refer to is the electronic processing. I appreciate that, myself because, as a songwriter/performer/musician/singer I have to be involved with this stuff, if I want to have recordings of my work. However, you actually, inadvertently, de facto, point to an interesting problem: People doing production that are not musicians. I don't know for sure that you are not a musician (chances are that you at least do some elementary playing.) In the old days, people that produced music, were commonly musicians. They understood, at least to some degree, musical structure. Look at Herb Alpert, George Martin, Phil Spector,, etc. They're musicians. They understand music. When the era of the star producer arrived, people recording music, and making decisions about music, in larger numbers, knew little about what was being presented, musically. They went on feel. They didn't go on musicality. That created a problem, in some cases, because recording technique (and engineering tricks) became more important than the actual content of the music. Combine this with record company execs who, themselves, knew little about the stucture of music, and you have a recipe for a noise fest on records, rather than music actually being presented. Non musicians can recognize tempo, speed (how many speedy notes are in a solo), mood, and style of music. This doesn't include musical structure (music theory.) So what you end up with is a group of non musician business people, and non musician producers and engineers, catering to these limited thing about music that I just presented. These non musician are selling the lowest common denominator to the public. It works, because the public, generally, who doesn't understand music, will go for a strong beat, a style, and a mood, and repetition. This is the lowest understanding of music. When musicians were in charge of production and selling music, the public was educated about music. This is different than having the lowest common denominatior in music being catered to the public. If youi want better music, get the non musicians out of the studio, and out of the ranks of the music biz executives. Music was best when musicians were running it. It has gone down hill, when non musicians began to occupy the ranks of the music exectives, and control of studios.
I am sensitive to distortion and for me its really a terrible idea to even ad distortion to any piece of music.
@@KenTeel In the "old days" you needed a technical degree to be allowed to record music. I would claim that today, it`s the other way round. Most mix-engineers and producers were musicians once. Also:
Since most "mainstream"-productions are electronic, there is no difference between production and mix anymore really. I shared your opinion when I was younger, but now I think that it is pretty arrogant to think that there is "low" and "high" music, and people who hold the true understanding of what "good music" is. Music theory is also more than harmony and counterpoint. Rhythm and sound are way more important even in contemporary classical music than they used to be 200 years ago.
The only thing I really agree with is that the guys who think that louder is always better do not belong in any decisive position. Louder is sometimes better, sometimes not. It all depends on the song and the message behind the music.
I grew up in the 80's loving 60's rock and 80's pop. I was a teenager in the 80's who couldn't get enough of The Beatles and the Beach Boys.. Good music is good music.
Heck thomas the tank engine from 1984 to 1997 (seasons 1 to 5) had better songs, soundtrack, themes then taylor swift
And in season 1 to 2 in the uk of thomas
Ringo starr was the narrator of the show
Its not new vs old, its popular-above-else vs music the artists makes for its own sake. Also, its not just the listeners age, its about how open minded and exploratory is in one’s listening habits.
But it is interesting when "popular-above-else vs music the artists makes for its own sake" coincides. And it seems it is rarer now
Well said - put the effort in and one will find fantastic music being released to this very day (thank you Steven Wilson....)
From the point of view of a 72yo fart who’s been an avid music listener and purchaser for over 60 years, I’d hafta agree that thanks to the internet, there’s greater accessibility to a wider range of music - both old and new - than ever before. It’d be nice if the artists could be as well remunerated for their work as they may have been in the early years of my listening career - but that’s an entirely different discussion.
I also happen to be a “recovering audiophile”, and while many of the hair shirt absolutists of that cohort love to excoriate YT for its sound quality, I must say that some of my most enjoyable new finds are from amateur street musicians/looping buskers, performing everything from deconstructions of old chestnuts to original jams. Not always “audiophile quality” in terms of sample rate, dynamic range, noise floor - pick your favourite technical spec, but seldom the noisy mess that passes for much of current “pop”. Listening to such free content on my Sennheiser headphones or my main HT rig can be as emotionally satisfying as “high SQ” streaming on Spotify.
We used to have genius popular music. We had toto and Genesis and Phil collins. We had Whitney. That shit was CLASSICAL in magnitude
@@Squidward_Tikiland ...and today we have 'insert your favourite band of the moment' - there is some stellar music being released all the time! Music is subjective - for example - I have every Toto album released (apart from 'best ofs' or live albums) - BUT - Whitney - I wouldn't give her the time of day - that doesnt mean her music is awful - it's just I - personally - cannot stand it - music is art - and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I’m in my 50s and probably about 70% of my Spotify playlist is music made by newer bands in the last 10 years. I don’t know if the music I listen to is “popular” but there is still great music being made.
Absolutely agree. The digital age is a curse and a bliss: I would assume that the financial investment required to record something with acceptable quality has come down a lot (think of Billie Eilish for example), and it generates opportunities for more musicians to get something out there. On the flip side, it seems that artists are promoted as products, not musicians. And you still need proper expertise for mastering (again: Billie Eilish as an example), although that still comes with -9 or so as the targeted average loudness level.
I would say, the new 'pop' music is garbage, but like you, I listen to old and new music. I'm in my late 40s and love metalcore, and there are plenty of (in my opinion) great bands in that genre.
@@nate_d376 what "great" metalcore bands do you listen to?
Wet Leg, Caroline Polachek, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Dirty Projectors… I’m in my 50s and there’s an abundance of fantastic music out there. Now, I cut my teeth on early Peter Gabriel, who incorporated a lot of dissonance and noise into his music, and I think Radiohead has nearly perfected the art of layering soundscapes of distortion into melodic pieces, so I’ve always had a preference for novel approaches to music. It’s not better… just what I prefer.
@dantelikesrock ones like Kingdom of Giants, Crown the Empire, If I Were You, Enox, Savage Hands, Advents, Never Back Down, Saint Asonia, Lost in sight, Revaira, Avalanche Effect, Pridelands, The End At The Beginning, The Word Alive, SETYØURSAILS, ASHEN, Darkmatter, Frontières, As Within So Without, Nothing More.
Now, some of these bands are Metalcore. Some people might say some of them are other genres of metal, but I like them, and to me, the lines are a little blurry. IMHO.
Try at your own risk, lol. And There are many more I didn't list, otherwise I'd be typing all day lol
I'm a bit older born '73 so 80's was my highlight for music. Today I'm into "classical" but hear a lot of kids I work with playing dubstep... which I actually enjoy to a point, but it's more or less "literally" just noise... or at least re-arranged noise. Interesting, sort of takes my 80's synth age to a whole new level 40 years later. Not really my thing but in my opinion it's one of the better and most innovated genres to surface. That being said, I still want my MTV.
I was born in 68, and used to make a lot of dance records in the 90s, then moved onto mixing films and so on. Dubstep sort of amazes me, the weaponization and extreme organization of noise. I'm glad I don't have to program it though. I have mastered it though and got great results, the frequencies being quite satisfying and so rich.
Which kids are listening to dubstep today?
@badnick6659 I just listened to a few tracks. To me, they seem to be the equivalent of so-called "Break Beats" in Hip-Hop. Break Beats are NOT meant to serve as complete songs. Hip-Hop started with the concept : "Turntables Are Musical Instruments". Basically, a DJ would get two copies of a record pick one short part of a song (usually a drumroll) and keep switching back and forth between the turntables. By varying tempo, shortening or lengthening of the selected part of the original song , the DJ was creating "new" dance music. Again : DANCE music.
Now, from what I understand, most audiophiles don't dance. Also, when the first Hip-Hop DJ's started doing this , the audiences would initially stop dancing (lol) in 🫨amazement🫨 until they realized that the drumbeat was what they should/could dance to.
So again a dubstep "song" is only a part of a DANCE music performance. Hence the name dubSTEP. To get the full experience, one has to visit a party/concert where SKILLED DJ's will mix the tracks and create a dance-music performance.
Unfortunately I haven't visited any concerts yet with skilled DJ's that use dubstep for mixing. Therefore I don't know for sure if I will enjoy a concert. Let me emphasize: the DJ who MIXES the tracks is the artist. If (s)he merely plays dubstep tracks in sequence, then the dance music performance is INCOMPLETE.
@@Buddahabrot been in the music biz since the late 80s, thanks for your history of modern music lecture, but I was there at the cutting edge, literally. All the best.
@badnick6659 Would you be so kind as to name a few artists that you consider "cutting-edge"? As you may hve noticed, I'm always trying to broaden my knowledge in (dance)music.
One last remark.
"I AM A DANCER"
It sucks the most when a genuinely good music get destroyed for being competitive in the loudness war! It does hurt the song and ears. Also I realised tracks with dynamic range have much longer lifespan compared to crunched ones! Great take as always.
music is compressed the way that it is because of the fact that most people listen to music on subpar sound systems and in less than ideal situations, from what i understand. no point in having a high dynamic range when listening on headphones on a loud bus on the way home from school. or in your noisy car with poor sound isolation. i mean at the end of the day, all of the parts are still present in the song. it doesnt make it any less of a song
@@noodletribunal9793 yeah, but they still sound horrible and not long lasting! that's why I enjoy 70s and 80s mixes the more time passes. dynamic range of course! if I want to make it lounder I have a volume knob for that!
remember volume is another expressive dimension at an artist's disposal, when we remove this utility we simply flatten the musical experience and that's the price with pay for loudness, not a good trade imo!
@@Ramt33n ehh, i dont agree, but to each their own! the music i like consists of pretty heavily distorted/overdriven guitars to begin with, so it kinda lends itself to the world of compression. umm yea, idk. it sounds good to me ( ´∀｀)
Even the most beautiful music in the world suffers from this problem.
ua-cam.com/video/yRS1c3TDtO0/v-deo.html
Yes, compression does work well with certain types of music. But the excessive levels of limiting, compression, and EQ frequently used reduce dynamic range to a point where the music becomes unlistenable after a while. It's sort of like having a conversation in which everyone is yelling every word. That gets tiring to listen to, and pretty soon someone is going to exit.
The sophistication of lyrics, chord progressions, timing, melody, harmony, song structure and the topics being expressed have overall become elementary compared to the twentieth century. That’s not to say that something simple can’t be brilliant, but it has to have something that makes it brilliant. Can’t say I hear that a lot today.
The reason why you aren't hearing it is largely because you have to hunt to find it.
There's a lot of new great stuff. And there are some DJs that push the good stuff, but so much of it you'll have to hunt for yourself.
@@nrXic I agree here. I've listened to a lot of music from rhythm games, radio, SoundCloud, etc. and only a few usually stick for a moment, but the most memorable sounds will eventually come back into mind.
This ☝️
Computer analysis has shown music complexity has been decreasing since the 50s
@@damianketcham I believe it and it is sort of funny that most genre today have their roots in Blues and Jazz but are just dumbed down versions of it.
This guy looks like McCartney
Younger brod of Macca
Omg I thought that. Lol
I thought so too,reason I clicked
The real one or the other one?
I had search if he was -- confusing.
It's not noise; it's mostly just boring, derivative and chronically over-produced.
a. Survivorship bias... bad music from the past has just been forgotten
b. Emotional relationship to the music
Short and spot on.
thats just a lie, the top songs of each year are proggresively just worse
a-- not even close to the truth
b-- i suspect that you have not listened to any older music
c-there was no auto tune or pitch correct until 1997
that was the year the music died
Oh really ? Have u ever listened to Kraft ? Niels Gade ? Nietzsche (yes he did compose some music) ? Romberg ? The list goes on and on and on. Trust me there are many works of music that have been forgotten for the best
I think this is a cop out. We're all here because we're searching for great new music and aren't finding it. It's out of my own frustration of years of searching that I found this video.
I grew up on Nirvana and Metallica as a kid, then Dream Theater, Queen, Tool, John Mayer, Muse, Genesis and others in my 20s, as well as a bunch of jazz and classical. Now I’m 41, and lately I’ve discovered that the British progressive tradition really is what interests me most. I discovered Porcupine Tree on Spotify a few years back, rolled into Steven Wilson’s solo work from there, and that brought me back to Genesis and King Crimson (among others), and also to The Pineapple Thief. I feel like I’ve discovered this treasure and I’m unpacking it bit by bit.
The common denominator among most artists mentioned above is how beautifully and dynamic their albums have been recorded. SW, in particular, is a true modern gem in this regard. “The Raven That Refused To Sing” is incredibly well produced. My all-time favorite band Dream Theater is a joke in comparison, I’m sorry to say.
I think I can objectively say that most modern pop music is poor in terms of arrangements, creativity and originality, and it sounds crappy to boot thanks to brick wall limiting. All imagination and wonder has been replaced by the smarts of marketeers attempting to appeal to our young’s basest impulses. “It's only meant to repress and neutralize your brain.” Wilson had it exactly right. I really don’t think it’s “a matter of taste” any longer at this point.
It's a darn shame that prog/prog metal band names are... a little bit out there. 😉It took me forever to give Porcupine Tree a chance, but the "sister act" (Opeth, where Wilson has been a long standing influence) didn't trigger any aversion in me.
Similarly Caligula's Horse... I mean... come on! 😄 But yeah, it seems like you and I have been on a similar journey. Not quite the same start, nor current position... but parallel paths at the very least!
@@herrpez Haha, I wish you all the best!
..just wait until you find Gentle Giant! I generally recommend starting with The Power And The Glory, however, given your apparent taste, you may find the first two albums (Gentle Giant and Acquiring The Taste) the better way in.. :-)
@@duncanparsons Thank you for the tip! I will definitely check that out.
The Warning. You want to hear The Warning!
I feel sad for the poor ears of the fans of this sound/music. One of the things we love about live performance is, dynamic range! It excites people. Why do people want to destroy their music by more or less eliminating dynamic range from their recordings??? Don’t get, never will. AND, we now have so much available range... it’s jaw dropping really. Go figure.
Music is the best it's ever been. Because Babymetal :) ua-cam.com/video/WIKqgE4BwAY/v-deo.html They are my girls. Any who say otherwise get struck down with vengeance and furious anger.
They crank it at concerts too with digital brickwall limiters. The vast majority of concerts, that are charging $100+ per ticket, are using a digital console. Which I feel is a big mistake. Concerts should be as analog/straight line as possible. Digital console = analog to digital converters are employed.
The days of FOH mix engineers having racks full of all analog gear are sadly, over.
@@truesoundchris oh get over yourself
@@maidenthe80sla I agree. I have found some very creative music around the world. The US music is dead.
Mostly Japan. Babymetal is my favorite they invented their own genre. Nobody ever did what they do. But tons more. Yoasobi is Jpop based on Vocaloid. Atarashii Gakko is super unique I can't even describe them. Waggaki Band is a full rock band mixed with traditional Japanese music. Hanabie is an all girl Metalcore band that is now mixing in electronic music and becoming super unique.
Well you definitely won't with that attitude! A little food for thought however:
Maybe different people enjoy different aspects of music. If you want to dance, a limiter and some side chain compression goes a long way. The "pump" you get from that type of processing just does something to your body that other music can't. I didn't understand it until I learned to dance. Different strokes for different folks I guess
Todays music lacks melody. What made Ah Ha's Take On Me so great was that it has a Melody Hook in the intro. Human League Don’t you want Me had a baseline Hook. Melodies lend to harmonics and that's what gives you goosebumps.
You are correct. Todays "artists" are not songwriters and prob neither musicians either.
yep and you can blame hip hop for that. There is no melody in vocals in rap. Rapper get big for no being good but the fact they are good at getting followers on social media.
@@spark300c you are right but rappers can be good in a way. but it's not music in a common sense you could say.
rapping is closer to poetics than music and the background "music" is often essentialy just a glorified metronome.
Of course, some rappers can and do sing as well, blending those types of speech together but that's a rare thing in my opinion 😁
This is comming from someone who isn't a big rap fan, but I get why people might like it and don't necessarily see them as unskilled. (I can't rap 😆)
You are thinking of pop music. This is non pop modern music with melody:
ua-cam.com/video/Go9EguPvtSg/v-deo.html
@@thetubedude2011 There is at least one great modern song writer:
ua-cam.com/video/yHch2KDaHjE/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/HkFY4lqKI5g/v-deo.html
I've noticed for a while that modern music either has nonsensical lyrics, is some dance styled genre, has auto tune, or all the above.
Today's nonsense lyrics are terrible. Give me I am the Walrus and Life on Mars any day.
“How? Because I was there, in the 1960’s, playing bass in The Beatles after Paul died “
Paul didn’t die, he’s in Pepperland.
For the old set, those born around 1950, the sound was representative of the times. Not to ignore the sound quality of music as it blasted through the airwaves, we got music from a different type of band, not like the Benny Goodman stuff, but San Francico and New York rock. The sheer variety of bands is what made that period so great. That is what is missing today. Imagine the year 1967, the year I graduated from High School. It was The Doors, The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Procol Harum, Janic Joplin with Big Brother and Jefferson Airplane. It's easy to see that not all of great music was super processed, it was, to put it simply, different and beautiful. Who can't say the Moody Blues weren't great integrating orchestral music in their albums. Oh, and let's not forget when the Beatles arrived in the US, it was an event. All the girls were screaming and wetting their panties. Today is boring in comparison. As I tell people who are too young, you had to be there during that time period to take it all in. For those who were fortunate to live on the east coast, Woodstock was a experience no one who attended will forget.
Boomer here. I followed popular music through the sixties and seventies, but moved out of England during the eighties so I lost track of the new music. Now I couldn't tell you who or what is in the charts, but I rediscovered Klaus Schultz of Tangerine Dream, and listen to a lot of electronica and ambient. Also plenty of Bach, Vivaldi, the Minimalists. The hi-fi is never off in my house!
In the US we used to have music programs in public schools. It was hip to have private music lessons. Between 1967 and 1975 we had so much amassing new music every week. Yes. We have some great artists, today. But not in abundance. Adele and Billie Eilish are phenomenal but, have you seen the Grammys in the last ten years.
The older I get, the more I like „old music“. I‘m currently listening to McCartneys solo work after the Beatles and love it. However, modern music can be absolutely mindblowing, if you look in the right places. Wet Leg blew my mind, now does Sir Chloe. Whitey is also a great underrated rock musician. Ex:Re - Too Sad is a modern song, that even brought me to tears. The guys from Radiohead are also getting better and better. Great times, if you ignore the charts.
I appreciate these kinds of videos so much. Thank you for taking the time to share them with us!
I am 58 and love all kinds of music, even today's music. I love; Wet Leg, The Strokes, The Beatles, Bruno Mars, MCR, Led Zep, Elvis, Disco, The Ramones and on and on and on. A great song is a great song, no mater what era.
I'm so glad I have never been an 'average' music listener.
As a 5/6/7 year old, I listened to a radio under my duvet, tuning it in to strange foreign stations on LW.
I have never liked listening to the music that was 'forced' on to me by commercial radio, television, etc, and always tried to seek out strange, different, and interesting music from anywhere in the world.
I discovered that music made in none western 'studio's' did not have the same production techniques (like the over use of compression), and thus had a much greater dynamic range, and was much more expressive.
Wet leg are utter shyte. I saw them live on Jules Hootananny and they were pretty useless live, and even live I could tell they were using and needed auto tune.
Modern music is made to a formula to sell as much of it as possible to consumers, most of whom do not know the first thing about music. Just the same as McDonalds sell massive amounts of crap food to plebs who know nothing about cooking.
You are really on the right track. Very good characterization of your experience of today's popular music.
I don't think Wet Leg uses auto-tune. The lead singer is trained in opera.
100x this. 👆
@@erestube Which makes the sort of stuff they churn-out even more unforgivable.
That's like the dumbest thing ever said. It is quite so that plebs like you @DjNikGnashers think they are special. You are not. You just learned to find your niches but expext anyone else to like the same niches you do. Too bad when this takes away some of your friends when they don't follow you into every dark and damp alley you deem worthy. And I also think you are sour because you got tricked by McDonald's when your friends knew how to cook and eat healthier.
Perhaps 20 years ago, or so (I’m 43 now) I was so disgusted with what was considered popular, that I forced myself to listen to the radio for a few hours, and find at least one aspect of each song that I truly liked. It could be an intro, a hook, a vocal harmony, some sonic characteristic, or even just a delay throw. I actually found it quite easy. Will I may have heard 10 songs in a row that I would never want subject myself to hear again, I also really enjoyed the journey of discovering the subtleties that formed the “ah ha!” moments that hit me with each new song.
That forced exercise quite literally changed my life. If I could find the “hidden” joys in veritable sonic garbage such as those songs (term used loosely), what other wonders have I been missing out on? How else could I experience, or more importantly, help others experience joy, in seemingly hidden ways? Music, even when it is noise, is a gift of grace to be cherished until we breathe our last…
Mcpribs, your words are ponder worthy. Your willingness to have a foray into music that you found distastefull, initially, is a statement on your curiosity and your intelligence. It's also a statement on your emotional control. Well done. You went on a search for "diamonds in a dirt pile." That is more than most of us are willing (and quite possible able to, from an emotional point of view) to do.
@@KenTeel Thank you for your kind words! I was reflecting on that time, and remembered thinking at the time that not everyone would like music I made that o considered great. The least (well, second least, to be fair) I could do was give their creativity a fair shake.
What you did was similiar to what students of musical instruments have to do while practicing pieces they do not like (or even hate). Or at least I tried to do that with what I got in my piano lessons, and some of my colleagues tried that, too, just to endure the unendurable ;-)
@@pontram Been there…clarinet. Haha! Also, bass in a 70’s and 80’s cover band. And…playing contemporary worship at church. Every time I hear one of those songs for the first time, I get angry. “How can it be this bad?!” Haha
This is on a BBC page: (about forcing Noriega from an embassy ) "The US army decided to use psychological warfare - by blasting a wall of sound non-stop outside. A fleet of Humvees mounted with loudspeakers rolled in, and rock music rolled out.
The troops' playlist came care of the Southern Command Network, the US military radio in central America. It featured hits picked for their irony value, including I Fought The Law by The Clash, Panama by the stadium rock band Van Halen, U2's All I Want Is You, and Bruce Cockburn's If I Had A Rocket Launcher."
I think you have it summed up correctly. It's not the music I dislike, it's the way it sounds on a HiFi system. But! probably 95% of people don't listen to music on such a system or even own one. If most music comes out of a telephone, being distorted does not hurt the ears quite as much because so much bandwidth and detail is lost anyway. If you started your musical life with a telephone, then that is the new normal. I remember as a kid my exposure to music was from radio Luxemburg and Caroline. AM radio, lots of fading, distortion, and nothing above 6K on a good day. When I built my first HiFi the music was almost unrecognizable. I now could hear, dynamic range and lots of detail and HF completly missing in the past. Now things have gone full circle, no dynamic range, we do have the HF it's just badly clipped and distorted and makes my ears bleed and does NOT sound better on a HiFi system.
I'd have to agree. What's the point of buying a recording if it sounds less bad through a cheap Amazon Echo than it does through your multi-thousand-dollar hi-fi system? I don't know why artists don't produce two versions of their songs; one mastered properly, and one with the compressor turned up to 11.
@@nomis4913 "Hit single edits were often the least dynamic tracks on an artists album. As you indicate squeezed to maximise impact on non hi Fi listening devices.
Now it seems many very commercial albums are mastered to sound " like that "call the way through 🙄
I'm 63, happily listening to today's alt-rock where melody and chord progression still thrive. I have enjoyed most popular, some disco, rock, grunge, and alt-rock music until recently when popular music became not musical. Every Abba song has a tune, not so much with today's hits.
I'm still waiting for this mysterious age at which I stop finding new kinds of music compelling. I don't listen to much pop though. But I'm constantly gaining appreciation (and yes, loving) new kinds of music. I'm well into my 20s, but maybe when I'm 30 I'll start being one of those people.
new genres I've loved after I turned 20: hyperpop, (not pop)country, bossa nova, drift phonk, and indie folk.. that I can think of.
This discussion is always annoying to me because people always say "you just like what you were exposed to when you were younger" and.. I listened to mainly EDM when I was young, and I don't anymore really. I don't count hyperpop, you might count drift phonk, but that makes up only a small bit of what I listen to, and I barely ever listen to the genres I liked back then. I don't hate the music I listened to in my teens, I go back to it sometimes, but I've found thing I enjoy even more.
something I have in common with my niece Rhian, of wetleg. we both got btec national diplomas in music technology! its quite possible this being the first work ahead of producing the album she did not have a lot of input into the production of the song, the studio probably used their junior engineers, even in post production, I am overjoyed she became a success on the strength of this tune. having listened to the album only on small speakers it is difficult to discern, but it sounds "live" like a live cut demo, not a meticulously and possibly over produced studio master, which knowing the energy the band has, is probably what they were hoping to achieve.
They seem pretty good, but the production and sound seems total shit! Sorry to the producer...
Overall the video makes some very good points. But Wet Leg is a poor example. The song sounds fine...headphones and speakers. It gets a little over-excited at the end which I'm sure was the intention. There's nothing new about overdriven guitars.
@@franksherman1774 Let’s be fair: these days you’re lucky to get a guitar, that’s why most pop music sounds so bad. It’s mainly computer-generated loops and sounds and autotuned vocals. Remember when you didn’t need a computer to make music? That’s when you had some.
@@gliddofglood who me?
You're right of course. Perhaps Wet Leg uses this technology as well, but I do hear guitars. Kind of retro, in a good way.
Listening to their album right now and I have to say I enjoy it :)
That Wet Leg record is a hoot. So much fun and my vinyl copy actually sounds great.
I haven't heard the vinyl but it is possible that the mastering is different, perhaps with less added distortion. DM
Mine too...amazing band!...❤
Yeah, they are really quite darn good.
Yep. Brilliant track!
Modern Music isn’t bad, modern MAINSTREAM music is.
It is clearly not.
any mainstream music is generally bad, not only modern. Mainstream music of the 60's was utter crap. So was mainstream music of the 70's, this utter disco crap. Same counts for the 80s, 90s, etc.
Music in that is no different than other "art" forms. The bulk of books being read is also utter crap, with castle novels as most read genre.
@@celestine5340 Honestly, I tend to listen to less mainstream music but you cannot generalize even on mainstream music. The relation between pop and underground music is complex, some pop music is very innovative, some artists that are not on radio contribute to radio music by producing or writing lyrics. And at the end if the music is appreciated it is good music. Period. The fact that there is music better appreciated by people used to listen to a lot of music doesn't change that.
@@celestine5340 That's not true. The Beatles were as mainstream as you can get. Are you really gonna say that their music is utter crap?
Thanks for this comment!!! Because everything is about marketing these days, only top budget songs hit the charts overal, rest of the 100.000 new songs per day (!) get burried. You can still score with good, original music, its just very hard to get heard since you need to be a social media expert besides very good writer and producer, and graphics and video edittor etc etc
I’m 57 and I’m discovering new music almost everyday. I can’t imagine being stuck in the music of my teens. Wet Leg who are among one of the many new bands I like.
yeah the argument is dumb
Checked Wet leg out and Im guessing you are joking right?
yo i really appreciate you, because so many people just write it off as bad. if you like rap music i highly recommend you check out a few songs that i consider masterpieces, devil in a new dress, sing about me im dying of thirst, prom/king, and 90210 are all worth listening to
Same here. I laughed when he first said "Wet Leg". Their whole first album is musically inventive and fun. And I'm 62!
Also, the distortion argument neglects to mention that almost every musician after the 1950s uses it like salt on fries.
Have you heard every music made in your youth?
There is no hope in 2020s. The lyrics are depressing and hateful.
Great and informative video. I think one key factor is that there isn’t the money to be made in the record industry today because of streaming services. On one hand it allows for a greater number of artists to democratically have an opportunity to bubble to the surface, on the other hand I think it has lead to a diminishment in quality. I may also argue that the old formula of forming a band and honing ones sound through live gigging before going into the studio has largely been replaced by hobbyists in their bedrooms many of who have never performed live ( not to say that this can’t be immensely great) . Also the culture of the audience in their relationship to live music has largely changed and consequently so has the music suffered.
I see the same phenomenon in indie videogames. More people can now make games, but there seems to be more and more hobbyist entering the field and making really mediocre games. I see with both music and games these hobbyists will just use already made assets/sounds to create their projects. I've even heard some hobbyist developers saying the art doesn't matter. It seems like mostly all the new artists are more into the production aspect and that can only take you so far.
Nowadays main stream music is purely about a crap fashion & narcissistic ego.
Modern music has always been bad, even back in the 60s. The reason it seems old music was better is the “sieve of time”. If you went back to any time in the past, the majority of what you hear would not be very good.
Thinking back, you just remember the songs good enough to be remembered and passed on for decades. 30 years from now, people will be talking about how much better music was in the 2020s, having forgotten about the 90% that’s bad, just like in any other decade.
The question is why? Why do they distort the sound so much in modern music????
I’m certainly coming late to this conversation but after viewing your excellent video and reading many of the responses regarding “new” music or music outside the usual comfort zone, I’ll share how I adapt to such experiences: I imagine the environment where that music is probably being played. You see, music is more than sound, it’s a rhythmic, moving force. I often see dancers or a dancer, in a club setting or gathering of people moving to the music. What I’m suggesting is that in order to fully appreciate the music it helps to envision the activity that it goes best with. Youth does not stand or sit still, their active, with a beat, a reythim that mirrors their lives. I stopped expecting to appreciate music in a static mode. It really helps me to set the scene and groove with whatever environment the music places me.
I guess it depends on the person. Trap beats do not make me want to move at all. In fact, they are like anti-movement and almost paralyze me. Now, more Jazz and funk sounds do move me a lot and I love that. I also love drum and bass and some rock/alt music that moves me. Most of the music I listen to is rhythmic, but I feel like producers think every song has to be trap to be rhythmic or danceable.
I think we are on the other side of the loudness war now.
To my ears, masters are less wild than they were 5-10 years ago.
The lufs limit on streaming platforms has really taken the pressure off.
People are understanding that if you want to make your song knock, you need a bit of dynamic range to let the beat jump out.
I am still blown away by new music and I am 56 years old; however, it is never new music found in the top 40, but rather among jazz hybrid stuff and stuff involving folk music forms from around the world as they meet other traditions or ways of arranging. This is because I value surprise within melodies and harmony, as well as lyrics that go beyond greed culture and variations on consumerist nihilism.
The first music I fell in love with was probably what you didn't like at the time - Gary Numan! Loads of 80s music then filled my collection, but mixed in with back catalogue stuff from the 60s and 70s.
Things got boring for the most part during the 90s and 2000s, but there were always things around that I really enjoyed, although it tended to be non-mainstream stuff. I still find some new music that I really love to this day, but the "popular" stuff I can't bear listening to!
I am loving Japanese metal. Japanese music in general is getting really good. Since 2010. Their music industry was not destroyed by downloading. I love the all girl Japanese metal bands like Nemophila, Band-Maid and Hanabie. I like women. I like rock.
But my favorite is Babymetal. They make all the metal neckbeards angry. They are cute and they dance. That is not allowed in metal. They sing happy songs and smile. It's pretty hilarious. They invented their own genre of music. Cute metal.
I had an older brother who got stuck on 50-60's music. I have a younger brother who stopped at The Beatles.
I think any style of music you have to teach your brain to like, sometimes through enforced repetition. I did this on purpose with The Chemical Brothers "Not Another Drug Store", which went from "Why would anyone listen to this?" to a masterpiece of alliteration, syncopation, tempo and contrast. Now one of my favorites.
The appeal of music is repetition broken by surprise change, so something that has to be learned so you have a notion of hte basic patterns, which are then broken. I think there is natural tie in with human speech, especially female vs. male vs. children and emotion. There is also a natural tendency to understand the patterns of the natural world for obvious evolution reasons.
Our brains are more interested in the changes of tone and tempo so we can understand both male and female speech as well as emotional intonation based on pitch, minor keys and breaks in tempo. We look for hesitation and intonation to detect emotion, lies, enthusiasm, gender. Music mimics and stimulates much of this.
Some people learn music in their youth and then no longer wish to learn any more. I don't mean this as an insult, it is just the way their brain is wired. Their temperament is to use their brain and learning for other things, such as (actual) language. My temperament is a love of patterns (high on the Asperger's scale) so not only do I enjoy music, I tend to search out a new "fix" when my music doesn't have the same stimulation and novelty. In fact, I tend to listen to my old favorite music less because I can "play it" already in my head and I only need a reminder to get the emotional response I am looking for.
I feel blessed because I like so much variety of music. I haven't caught up to the 2020's, as I'm still working my way through the 2000's and 2010's. I don't like all of it, but I can always find something that catches my fancy. My current ear worms are from Shpongle, before that The Chrystal Method. I am 65. From classical to hip-hop, grunge, techno, there is good stuff and not so good stuff. I have a great deal of respect for Hip-Hop because it put rhythm, words and (sometimes clever) rhyming poetry back into popular music.
I like it all, except Country and Western. OK, one or two and who doesn't think "Johnny Cash at Fulsome Prison" isn't one of the greatest albums of all time.
Due to the smaller dynamic range, a loud master appears louder despite being penalized. To combat the loudness war, streaming services would have to introduce a non-linear penalty system. At -10 LUFS 5 db quieter, at -5 LUFS 12 db quieter. For example.
I really like your videos. Thanks for making them. I agree with you that most people tend to "look in the rear view mirror" when it comes to the music that they like. I use the term "most", because not all people are like that, just majority of them. Looking back, in regard to music, is a form of nostalgia. How old do you have to be to develop nostalgia? Well I'd suspect that nostalgia starts to kick in , somewhere around the mid twenties, for most people. Interestingly, this is when a lot of people kind of "lock the doors" to new music. When nostalgia kicks in, openness to new sounds diminishes, for a lot of people. Of course this can happen in the late twenties, early thirties, or late thirties. But, it does seem to happen for most people. It is interesting that this parallels the reproductive years, for people. The human brain isn't fully developed until the early twenties, yet people's reproductive systems have been "activated" for a few years, by the time the brain fully develops (Its is as if nature knows that if people's brains are fully developed, they might know what they are getting into, and realize the full responsiblity, and not want to reproduce, if the brain was fully developed earlier.) So, people are operating in a more emotionally charged way, before the brain is fully developed. We see this with impetuous behaviors with lots of people in their late teens. Music business people have figured out that people are the most "vulnerable" to musical sound tracks, when they are at an age where their brains are not fully developed, and when reproductive urges are very strong. These business people know that providing a sound track to all of this emotional behavior, especially formulated for the theme of love, is highly affective with young people (especially young women.) They know that young people haven't assumed full adult reponsiblities yet (mortgage payments, child care payments, etc.) and that they'll have the combination of a vulnerable emotional state (including an emotional vulnerability to dramatic videos with music) and discretionary income, which provides the fuel for music sales. After people, generally assume adult responsiblities, they are too distracted with those responsiblities, to focus on music, or soundtracks for their emotions. They are too busy working, paying bills, changing diapers, etc., to focus on music. Additionally, they are old enough to have nostalgia kick in. So, there you have the formula for most people, and why the music of their youth's is so powerful to them. Of course there are exceptions. Also, we musicians, oftentimes are on a journey to discover. This is not always the case (witness the number of cover bands playing classic rock, in your local area), but is significant enough to make note of it. It is interesting how the music biz has figured out when that vulnerablity for a soundtrack, for people is, and how they keep "servicing" that characteristic, with the same old sh*t listened to in their youths, by people (generally.) I find that if one wished to be creative in writing music for people who are over 25 or 30, writing something in a familiar style at least gives the music half a chance of being listened to. Afterall, it's the same old glove, just refashioned in a different color. Thanks for the video. I really like your intelligence, experience, and sense of dry humor.
I think this is a good take. Especially the bit at the end: "if one wished to be creative in writing music for people who are over 25 or 30, writing something in a familiar style at least gives the music half a chance of being listened to." I recently became a big fan of the retro synthwave and vaporwave genres. These genres are specifically designed to evoke feelings of nostalgia in people my age (30s) and they are incredibly successful at doing so. If you're in your mid-30's give retro synthwave a try!
I agree with most of what you say, but when in my thirties I enjoyed 80's music including synthesisers. In my forties I enjoyed 90's music. For me, things went downhill in 2007. I was brought up listening to Dean Martin and Perry Como (mum was Italian) and I liked it. In my teens I liked both pop music and classical. Artists that tailor their output to please fans are, in Oscar Wilde's opinion, mere tradesmen. Pioneers in any art form do what their instinct dictates and not what the industry expects. Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, Tangerine Dream, to name just four, furrowed their own path.
@@thomasalexand I don't know about including Pink Floyd, and The Beatles in the category of furrowing their own path. Pink Floyd guys were putting their finger in the "commercial winds" and figuring out that album rock was the de jour cool stuff, so they did that. The Beatles recycled Chuck Berry-EverylyBrothers-Buddy Holly, and tweeked it just enough to look different. I think that they were also keenly interested making a recipe that would sell. The Velvet Underground, well Lou Reed was second only to Yoko Ono in lack of musical talent. His presentations were along that line, too. He was another guy who was posing as avante guarde, but really just a hack. The guy who really did what you describe in furrowing his own path, was Frank Zappa. He wanted success, but he wanted it on his terms. I think that it's very rare to find people making art, who truly go their own way.
@KenTeel Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sergeant Pepper. Chuck Berry, and if he were alive, Buddy Holly, were both obviously heading in that direction. No, they weren't. Lou Reed was but one member of The Velvet Underground. Dark Side of the Moon was unique. Floyd wasn't mimicking anyone else.
I am 71y from Germany and disagree. I daily discover good new music, but it’s hard to find it. I agree if you speak of mainstream music.
The music of the 60‘s and 70’s revolutionized my life and a lot of it is still great and will last for generations.
I should clarify that I wasn't complaining about the music, I was complaining about modern mastering practices.
Kraftwerk
I think its the sound, because old music can also sound terrible when its remastered too loud.
I was there in the 1960s too, but I must say, I never heard anyone say that the music was "just noise". Never. The idea that the older generation disliked that era of music is just false.
It's not an age thing. Music today is objectively less diverse, less innovative, less interesting, and less musical than at any time since the invention of recorded music.
To assign it all to ageism is ignorant nonsense.
I grew up in the 70s and remember my parents moaning about the state of modern music then. There is plenty of evidence of people condemning sixties music and before that fifties music. I was even reading earlier an article about someone moaning about new music in the 1920s
0:18 When was it first commented that 'modern' music was noise? It was Tumac-ar-Fado of Sumer commenting on the recent fad of reeded flutes layered over percussive sticks. "Pure rubbish," he pronounced, 5488 BCE.
Older generations never understand young people's music. But then music (sound) is just noise anyway.
The music of the younger gen z generation is simple trash, regardless from what generation you are from.
There's very little to "understand" about today's music. But please take note of how much sampling from "older gnerations" music is used in today's music. Not only do they have to appropriate past music (because it's good), but they then butcher it by turning it into a 2-3 second loop that becomes the basis for the trash they layer on top of it.
@@MikeSchmidt969 Your music knowledge is clearly limited.
Going back nearly a decade to my mid teenage years I found an old early 1990s Technics portable CD player that used to belong to my dad, and noticed when listening to CDs on it that ones mastered prior to the early-mid 1990s (during the first decade or so of the format existing) almost all sounded better than newer ones despite being quieter. I had been aware for a while before that that older CDs (in their original non-remastered form) were quieter than newer ones but had only listened to them on mainly poor quality gear. Technics were a pretty good brand and I could hear a lot of distortion on these newer CDs that wasn't present on early ones, and it turned out that the Loudness War was the cause. I suspect that the majority of people think that CDs have become louder due to "improvements" in technology. In reality all that making them louder has done has been a reduction in fidelity, to the point that I find the vast majority of releases from the past 15 years with rare exceptions to be almost completely unlistenable since training myself on what music should sound like unless there is an alternative Atmos mix available. Those old, "quieter" CDs retain the full dynamics that give the recordings their distinctive character which is sadly lacking on nearly every modern release, probably without the majority of people realising. I would argue that "quieter" CDs are louder because they have louder peaks if listened to at the same volume to a compressed CD, meaning a sharper, punchier sound, particularly on the drums.
A lot of remasters sound worse than old CDs from the 1980s and as a result I seek out secondhand original CD copies from of a lot of pre mid 1990s music that wasn't originally brickwalled compressed because the original CDs nearly always sound better in my experience than their modern CD or streaming counterparts. It makes me question why the labels have been ruining their back catalogues since the mid 1990s with remasters that sounded better previously to anyone who knew how to turn their volume up. I feel that for the most part, good music recordings (at least in digital form) of non-classical or jazz music pretty much died about 30 years ago due to brickwalling becoming an almost universal practice in the industry, on the basis that it would make recordings seem louder to the average consumer.
CDs from the 1980s seem to generally sound as good as they could possibly make them sound at the time, and many still sound fantastic up to 40 years later. We've seen a lot of advancements in digital technology since then, and yet most of today's releases sound poor compared with releases from then. I don't think vinyl sounds any better than CD as a medium, but it seems to nowadays get a lot better treated when it comes to mixing and mastering. I believe that back in the 1980s most audiophiles found CDs to generally sound better than vinyl, and at that point both tended to get an equal amount of care when it came to mastering.
Those "quieter" 80s cds will amaze most diehard audiphiles raised on 24bit 192khz.
I don't think 16 bit 44.1kHz vs 24 bit 192kHz sound much different in practice. What definitely does make a difference in sound would be dynamics, which newer recordings are usually lacking in.
great comment, I agree with every single point. Ironically as you said, old masters are in fact louder relatively speaking since they have more transients and energy; they are farter from the 0 dbfs ceiling, yes, but that is very simply resolved by turning up the f***g volume knob.
Completely agree with this. A well-mastered CD from the late 80s sounds better than a brick-walled anything produced after the mid-90s. It’s the recording and mastering which is the determining factor much more than the medium. And I say that as somebody who has used it all, up to 24/192…
One article that I've read about the "worst sounding CDs" seems to mention at least one of the original c.late 1980s CDs of Neil Young's 1970s albums. I have a few of them, and they all sound great to me. They sound like raw master tape transfers without any noise reduction or brickwalling.
Digital clipping is not like a 'bad mix', which is subjective. It's an objective deliberate abuse of the recording process intended to produce a non-musical effect (i.e. increased loudness). Therefore it is quite valid to say that it is ruining the music. That's before we even get to auto-tune.
I am so glad that there's other people besides myself that sees most modern music not only lacks talent, skills, and creativity. But it is also too loud for no reason at all which makes most music coming out now even more unbearable to listen to. To me, it feels that the loudness wars either is still alive or morphed into something else. Many people both realize but don't realize that no matter even if a song has a lot of good melodies, amazing harmony, creativity galore and great use of overall instrumentation. If the audio is clipping, then all of that gets thrown out the window. I am not the best audio engineer and I feel my musical skills is far superior than my sound editing skills and knowledge, but I can tell by even looking at an audio file in a DAW or video editing software that a song is way too loud. Some may say; "just turn down the volume". That won't work because the audio is already ruined when the mix got bounced in whatever sound format it came it. So just turning it down won't solve anything other than not losing your hearing. The song will still be a distorted mess of sounds where you simply can't enjoy the song even if it was good, and that is a huge problem in modern music.
When you say "limiting dynamic range," I'm guessing that's similar to using a compressor on an instrument, right?
One thing that I notice about modern music that gets popular is the short musical phrasing and lyrics that are highly repetitive. But now that you mention the "compression" of all the recorded sounds, I'm noticing that in your examples. It just sounds like distortion and thudding beat. It gives a "claustrophobic" feel. Maybe it's supposed to sound like a packed club environment, which some people consider fun.
My own mother detested our music in the 70's, she called Freebird noise! Freebird, can you imagine?
Obviously, my Mom was wrong. But really the stuff we hear in today's top songs on Spotify or whatever seem super simplistic even though the vocal performances can be quite good. I just don't hear much if any sophistication in the arrangements of the backing instruments. It makes the newer stuff sound incomplete, or if I may - lacking.
There was a story I read about a rest home that hired an Elvis impersonator to entertain the people. However they were fans of Frank Sinatra and thought Elvis was our version of Justin Beiber.
It's not just the music, but current mastering tends. I am a Jean-Michel Jarre music fan (yes, I heard it first sometime in my 20'ies). I bought a "50 years of music" compilation of his tracks, made in 2018, and... I couldn't listen to it. At first I thought that my speakers were damaged and were producing those "farting" noises (pardon my french). But no, the speakers were fine.
Everything got clear when I decided to compare that track to the same track from his original album from 1982. The new master almost didn't have any dynamics! No sharp "needles" - just a line at a top/bottom of a graph.
It was the first CD that I really wanted to refund - so bad it sounded! I kept it, at the end, because I collect his work. But I never listened to that CD again.
These were the same tracks as back from 1980'ies. But modern "mastering". I put "mastering" in "", because it's rather destroying the music, not mastering it.
Many of these "Remastered" tracks are a disappointment to me, as well. But what absolutely annoys me is the addition of reverb and other spatial effects that actually introduce phasing issues. Loss of dynamic range is annoying, but the injudicious addition of effects after the original mastering seems wrong. Morally wrong.
I have a very early CD of Jean Michel Jarre's best known songs up to that point. It looks to be an original 1983/84 West German Polygram pressing, and sounds very good.
Recordings from 40 years ago still sound very good for the most part, and early CDs were also generally well mastered, so with some exceptions there's generally no real need to remaster old recordings, at least not in the brickwalled form that most seem to get remastered to. As someone who is aware of what has happened to mastering techniques over the past 30 years, seeing "digitally remastered" on an old release is always a let down and in such cases I'll avoid buying the product and instead look around a little longer until I come across the older version that usually sounds superior. For some reason a lot of modern vinyl doesn't seem to get the brickwall treatment that nearly all new digital releases now get, which makes me wonder why the labels continue to think that it is needed for every new CD and streaming release. Digital remasters of old films typically have a significantly improved picture compared with the originals since colour reproduction technology has improved a lot since the 1980s, but I feel that remastered music, at least since the 1990s when the trend of brickwalling began, is a major marketing con. People see the word and think they are getting something superior, when in most cases the remastered versions are actually inferior aside from often containing additional content lacking on the original. Sometimes they'll contain less tape hiss than the originals, but they are also typically less dynamic.
Some people have said that the loudness war was at its worst during the early 2000s but in my experience many of today's releases are even more distorted than releases from then. Most of today's pop and rock CD/streaming releases have dynamic range scores of just 4-6, and the highest I've encountered on any new major label release from the past 15 years is 10, whereas in the 1980s almost all had a score of at least 11-12, and it wasn't at all uncommon to find releases with scores of 14 or 15. Due to the number of remastered old releases, often the only way to hear a digital version of a lot of old music in its original dynamic form is to look around for secondhand CDs. Vinyl records from the 1980s tend to have similar dynamics to what CDs at the time had.
The problem is that people tends to listen to music on little shitty BT-speakers and not equipment that has speakers that can handle proper bass frequencies. You can’t reproduce bass on tiny speakers.
@@robertkiss7003 I was listening it on my Pure Acoustics home theater system. Its subwoofer is good enough to reproduce lows, rated at 35-150 Hz, 175W (RMS watts, not fake).
The new master is full of distortion. The same track of the original old album master sounds just fine on the same system. The playback system is not the problem. The problem is that the original track was mastered at -15.1 LUFS (integrated), while the 2018 version is at... you wouldn't believe it: -6.5 LUFS (i)!
You‘re right, and that‘s sad. The art of Re-Mastering to destruction.
Great example track with Wet Leg. I have actually been listening to this track over the last 6 months or so. I am in my 50's and I sort of liked the track at the beginning. Simple beat and I thought the initial verses sounded pretty good. Both music and recording. Then, it builds energy to a point that seemed the engineer went on a bathroom break. Total distortion and clipping. Your video helped explain that they simply wanted it to sound "loud" to their listeners.
People who think for themselves and who take the time to craft their ideas are creators. Those are the people who breach into new sonic or esthetic landscapes and bring the listeners on for the ride. It's sometimes risky but at least it leaves room for innovation and discovery. You can find jewels in any genres, even jazz. Mainstream industry ( music or movies ) are mainly interested in producing winning formulas, because they only care about money, not art. Real music lovers never listen to commercial radio. They know it relies on sponsoring, and that it's not culturally motivated. Good music leaves permanent marks, trends don't.
It's not just the mastering house... Sounds are loaded with compression and saturation on track level during the recording. Even acoustic instruments are compressed to oblivion.
This topic might be worth a video. Compression is used during recording to make things sound good. Compression during mixing is used to hide poor mixing. Compression in mastering is used to make everything louder and worse. IMHO of course.
@@AudioMasterclass You are right. Worth a video for sure... I am speaking from an expirience working as a mastering engineer. It's a former career, but the knowlage and experience remains... Things just come in "too hot", and while trying to help the client, provided they even want to listen to you, one comes to find compressors in every stage of the recording process. The waveforms you showed in the video are 90% of what comes in. The reason sometimes is that multiple recording and mixing engineers are working on a single song, etc, etc...
Plenty of stuff that doesn't chart is great, usually the stuff that charts is throw away music that'll get tired after a day or two. So much music coming out is fantastic and we've never had so much choice in what to listen to and so many artists that are evolving genres. NF for example just released a new album.
i am subscribed to the Stoned Meadow Of Doom
I used to think like the headline. What I realized is that there is always someone, somewhere making the kind of music you like. Don't like distortion? Don't listen to Wet Leg.
Don't like it loud? Turn it down.
As for the rest of us, we can happily listen to our loud, distorted, clippy music on our record players and eight tracks and folks like you can waste your breath telling us we're wrong. Good luck with that
I’m 61 years old and for me Band-Maid is one of the greatest rock acts of all time-five Japanese women, none past their early 30s. There is an amazing number of brilliant rock bands coming out of Japan these days. Nothing wrong with music today; you just have to know where to look for it.
Agreed. I'm a Band-Maid fan in my 20s who used to live in Japan. Their music industry is thriving. The CEO of Fender himself said that the Asia-Pacific market is the fastest-growing market for music.
Most of the music I listen to come from Japan. There is still a lot of musical diversity over there and it isn't uncommon to find a lot of artists play instruments and mix multiple genres together and make it work. I really love the Jazz fusion genre over there. I also listen to some Korean music and some other music from the other countries. I grew up with Japanese video game music haha.
Funny you should say that. My current new-found favourite genre is from Japan too, but it was all recorded in the 1970s.
Yes every generation prefers the music it grows up with. But I don't think that's the whole story. There's no doubt in my mind that the quality of music has gone down in absolute terms over the decades - with many exceptions - because of the way the music corporations have homogeonised manufactured pop music into a loud, bland, wall of noise in which no talent is needed, because it's all made in the computer. Young people have been brainwashed to accept this tripe and the next step will be to do away with artists entirely and have AI produce their mush. More profits for the corporations and I'm sure the young will lap it up eagerly. But we _want_ new music. Our brains always want something new and we will listen to new stuff - if it's good.
Im an "edm" producer and from my prespective distortion in general is used as a tool to get your sound to be loud on any system, especially your phone speakers. Now as a consequence of that pursuit most sounds you hear nowadays are grossly loud and sometimes obnoxious, although sometimes will produce plesant artifacts into your song such as sounding uniform through bass distortion. Another thing is that dynamic range (in my opinion) has kind of changed in definition with all the new techniques avaliable. In my own pursuit, ive produced songs that look very brick-ish due to me boosting volumes through distortion on spacial/immersive elements and i imagine many producers do the same. There is much more to discuss about this topic i just dont wanna type it all out, hit me up if youd like to discuss more
One reason why "old" music sounds good is because only the good "old" music is still popular. If you went back to the 60s and listened to ALL of the music of that time, I'm sure you will find plenty of trash.
modern music is immensely better if people knows where to look
Correct
@@themelancholyofgay3543 how will it ever be popular if people dont know where to look?? or maybee you lying that its any good to make us think u have good taste...
@@themelancholyofgay3543 What's a good modern song in your opinion for example?
There's a lot of really good modern music. Some made by popular artists even, Kendrick Lamar has made a lot of the better music in recent years and that's mostly because it's about things he cares about and real issues. Especially when compared to the recent output of another great rapper, Kanye, who kinda seems to have resorted to focusing more on decent sound with strange lines that almost always relate to sex than experimentation and his personal life (at least what I got from his newest album).
Corporate music sucks. There is plenty of great stuff if you want to dig a little.
I am 19, and have not been able to enjoy modern pop since I was about 10. I was brought up on older music but regularly complained about it being "too old." But then I listened properly to older music. And music went from being something with a singer and a little bit of assistance from computers to seemingly nothing but computers. Every song on the radio today has such little development, and almost no humanity to them. All vocalists sound almost the same because of the techniques they use. I might say that today, I have the music tastes of someone born in the fifties or sixties. I will listen to anything from the 1700s to about 2009 without much complaint. After that, no thanks...
There are some songs from the 70's and 80's that do sound aged, but they tend to be songs with daft sounding synth sounds. There are plenty of songs from those same era's which have synth sounds that still sound great and pretty fresh today.
I was born in the late 70's and grew up through the 80's. Some of that 80's music sounds great today but some of it sounds a bit stupid because of the choice of synth sounds.
There is still music being made that is very similar to that of the 60s, it just doesn't chart. Take the first two Tame Impala albums for example (Innerspeaker and Lonersim), those are quintessential psychedelic rock that could've been made in the 60s. That is the great thing about todays technology, no one forces you to listen to what plays on the radio or in the charts. By looking into playlists from genres that you are interested in (e.g. indie rock), you can find many amazing artists from the 2010s and 2020s.
Thank you so much for telling me about those albums, I will certainly look them up. I am certain that there is great music today, but as you say, you don't see it on the radio or in the charts. I will definitely have a look at some modern rock artists, for example.
For what it’s worth, I love the sound of mixes that are clipping and sound like its trying to burst out of the speakers. You Lose by Magdalena Bay is an example that comes to mind. I’m 25
Mainstream music from 1969, when I was five:
I Heard It Through the Grapevine. Marvin Gaye
Everyday People. Sly and the Family Stone
Get Back. The Beatles
Honky Tonk Women. The Rolling Stones
I Can't Get Next to You. The Temptations
Suspicious Minds. Elvis Presley
Come Together. The Beatles
Something. The Beatles
Someday We'll Be Together. Diana Ross and the Supremes
Bad Moon Rising. Creedence Clearwater Revival
Something in the Air. Thunderclap Newman
The Ballad of John and Yoko. The Beatles
The Israelites. Desmond Dekker
Blackberry Way. The Move
Albatross. Fleetwood Mac
All of the above made No.1 in the UK or the US.
I'm 50 and love heaps of current music Wet Leg included! There's so much out there that is so easy to find that I could not have dreamed of doing when I was young.
Problem is people equate the loudness of these songs to them being rubbish.
Couldn’t agree more. I’m also 50 and love music from every decade I’ve been alive and much further back as well. And Wet Leg is refreshingly awesome.
I'm 72 and Wet Leg bore me to tears, oh well. So, as you would probably advise I don't listen to them.
This is not the entire story. It's not just generational. I grew up with my father playing records, tapes, Mtv and the rest. The styles were so diverse, I have a feeling I wasn't left locked in a period with my musical taste. For short it was Eddy Grant-Mozart-Emerson, Lake & Palmer-Louise Armstrong-Mike Oldfield-Kid Creole and the Coconuts-Kraftwerk, it was simply everything available. So now, even in my old days, I can enjoy Weeknd and could enjoy Eilish if only she was at all good. Modern music doesn't immediately sound like all noise. Quite to the contrary, Taylor Swift and Adele, who, admittedly, sound much closer to older styles music, I literally can't stand hearing. So, obviously it's not old vs. new. I think ZZ Top is the most boring band of all time matched only by Joe Cocker and even coming close to how boring Taylor Swift is.
The generational thing is much older that the sixties. History books teach us that opera was just cheap kitsch, entertainment for the masses and not refined. These days, you'd be considered to have a very high taste if your choice is opera.
Still, the moment a certain distortion is not a limiting factor dictated by the stage of the technological development, it becomes a stylistic figure. Black and White photo or movies, sound distortion, pops and crackle of records or clipping. Eilish has a song where bass clips very heavily and it was deliberately left in. As early as 90' artists started artificially mimicking the pops and crackle of records and recording those onto a CD. (But the biggest "connoisseurs" could, of course, tell them apart from the real stuff immediately.)
People are too quick to judge flatten dynamic range. But just as all those other distortions, I see them bad only when out of place. I think these dynamic range puritans are precisely the likes of people who'd say that Hendrix's guitar sounds wrong. Just like a musical academy (a Conservatory if you will), would never garner admittance to Tom Waits.
A lot of pop music is loud and flat and doesn't really need huge dynamic range. It's only when you flatten music that is supposed to have dynamic range is when I see it as wrong.
Accurate.
I think it's all where you look for music. I think if you look to what's popular on the charts, you will find music that takes little talent to produce but there are probably millions of songs recorded each year that are uploaded to various platforms and I think that there has to be good music in there. I think we just have to maybe look a bit harder and keep our ears open for it. I think that we should look deeper than the surface. Great video by the way 👏👍.
If you find any, please report back.
It used to be called crate-digging. It became just that now, literally and figuratively (on streaming services).
check out Convexity, they make jazzy Colourbass, quintessential zoomer music but Very interesting in terms of music theory and timbre. It's a Subgenrw of dubstep that uses various sounddesign techniques to conjoin Heavie Fullspectrum Dubstep basses with more traditional harmony.
But what is interesting, is what kind of music becomes/being made popular, now versus 'old times'
The problem is more deeper than what most people are overstating relating to mainstream vs less popular music or in comparison to independent music. What i noticed is that the better music may not necessarily be indie or "less popular", on very rare occasions ( 1 out of 10,000 songs maybe if looking rigorously through one website ), then it could be found in what appears to be "mainstream" routes or venues, the problem is, these specific songs i like are embedded in so much crap ( most of them being songs i already heard before anyways, so the actual new songs are close to none ), that finding them is even more difficult than finding good music in say a independent record label, so although the music may be less popular in itself, the place to which you find it may not be. For example, i may only like one song from an artist that is very popular, and the artist may have over 1000 songs. The key point being that this music ends up "niche" but not necessarily indie music. It's a nuanced topic that requires more naunced discussion.
Well, your argument seems to centre solely on the loudness thing. And tbh I really don't think that's a major factor in whether you like a band or a song.
Plenty of sixties music was very distorted, and deliberately, too, or early seventies at least. All of these things are available to producers to use or abuse. It's just whether you like it.
I'm 'only' 45 and I don't find a lot of new pop music very good, but then in the nineties, before I was twenty, I actually didn't find the majority of music good then either, I just selectively remember only the good stuff from then. In fact, I now have a radio show on Dandelion Radio, and it forces me to seek out new music that I like. It turns out there is tons. Some sounds old, some sounds new.
I suspect that it's down to what sources you trust to curate your new music for you, and what preconceptions you take in with you, rather than what time period the music comes from or what the fashion is in producing it.
I’m 24, always have hated the direction modern music has taken, but there’s ups and downs and I’m hopping this trend will eventually end.
If you're interested, i mostly listen to J-pop. It's very different from western pop music and isn't mainstream like K-pop, so it isn't jusy soulless corporations trying to make the next hit. Try listening to "Overdose" by Natori, "Dramaturgy" by Eve or "Mixed Nuts" by Higedan
@@Bananabread810 dude so fucking true, im 23 myself so the good western pop was just my early childhood, jpop is quite appealing now since it doesnt seem corrupted by trends or other bullshit, it feels samey just like back then.
Where is it written that music must follow a specific formula to be good? It’s not, that’s the whole beauty of music. As with any art form, there are no rules or boundaries. What sounds bad to you, someone else might love.
@@brandonsheets1883 there is a rule about music that it needs to be artful, modern pop is none of that, you cant call a song about sex money and drugs art when it has no intention of respecting the medium.
@@brandonsheets1883 that’s the easy answer but we all know there’s good and bad music, it comes down to to melody, harmony, depth of lyrics, arrangement, mixing, recording, vocals, etc etc etc, you can certainly like trash nobody is complaining about that but just because music is art you don’t get to say all music is equal and you just like what you like, there is absolutely better music than others, and the things that are being done nowadays in its majority it’s pure garbage.
I’m 18 and I can’t understand modern music. Half the time it does not even sound like music, and the vocals don’t sound like singing. It’s like there talking with extra noise and sound.
Hii😊
Stop listening to MAINSTREAM music!!
@@PeteDunes omgg hii
To be fair it depends on what you listen to. Most of the bad music will probably forgotten too because it's soulless and devoid of care. Sometimes that kind of music makes it through the years, even sometimes being the most popular from an otherwise good artist (Cherry Pie by Warrant being the biggest example). But really I think most of the well remembered music will by people who care.
Because they're singing through a machine, or they are actually talking (rapping) It's disgusting.
As a musician, I like a ton of variety. Everything from Big Band to Barry Manilow, from Rush to Rage Against the Machine.
Much of today’s “music” is objectively simple and lifeless, computer generated instrumentation and computer controlled vocals.
However, some people still play instruments and write good songs. It takes weeding through the trash to find a few bits of treasure.
Band-Maid has been my most recent discovery. Real music from real musicians
All the great that being rock and metal was driven to the underground.
Big Band to Barry Manilow, from Rush to Rage Against the Machine = cringe. Big sellers. Big posturing. Don't like bands because other people do. Find your own gems.
@@clvrswineI picked familiar names. If I had written “The Cold Stares to Maximum the Hormone to JJ Grey” nobody would’ve known what I was talking about 🤔 Or Band Maid, my current favorite
I feel lucky to have grown up with 90s pop music because as the time went by there have been fewer and fewer artists whose sound attracts my attention. I have always liked music so, I now revisit the songs I like and YT sometimes surprises me with good recommendations. I also go to concerts and festivals occasionally instead of just streaming music because nowadays that is the best way to support artists you like.
90s pop music 🤣 you're definitely a spice girl fan
i'm born in 87, teenage of early 2000', i still hate 2004 song and above. Why is it happen? i find the 'old' song especially 70-90' no matter how dense the syntesized thing they put, they have a nice quality instrumental play... each music instrument is harmony and blend with each other... even if the same band reproduce the same song with improvised mellody it will never replicate the original version.
that is a mystery😅
Today's singers compete to have an unusual way of singing, so it often goes to the extreme and sounds like a sick person. Of course no one will listen to the song a second time because it's tiring. You always prefer to return to healthy and normal vocals from the 70s/80s/90s
Like before Autotune? That warbling distortion in so many songs could be considered distracting...
@@ShamrockParticle The production ate the song..
Yes I find the vocal takes very insincere and affected or full of acrobatics.
@@EgoShredder One can feel the insincerity in the songs. To make a good song, you also need to be a little hungry. :)
The loudness wars is the problem. And silence is a key element in music; without pauses there is no music.
Without pause is just simply noise
🤨
That mumble rap with the drum machine track with the clap 👏 is the stuff I can't stand. What is that?
“Anything that differentiates from east coast and west coast is mumble rap cause I don’t understand it”🤓
“I don’t understand that subgenres exist for a reason, and that not everything has to be the same”🤓
It is called Trap, I believe.
Ironic you say that since EVERY single song is adopting this subgenre formula. Mainstream to indie, to international have all started to adopt this kind of sound more and more. Even artists I enjoyed have started incorporating more and more of this sound making everyone sound the same.@@curlyhairboiakabaddude8922
It’s not just a generational thing. Art has ups and downs and what is popular now is shit .
I’m 40, I’ve loaded some songs into audacity and you can clearly see the loudness war at play in newer songs. There’s no dynamic left and it’s sad, I also believe that that’s where listening fatigue may come from.
I'm 70, and love modern music! It's nothing to do with age. Way back in the 60s there was plenty of crap going around that even we young'uns hated! If today's older generation just give it a chance I'm sure they'll get to love it........ Well, some of it!
This. Most of what ppl talking about "good old days" is that they remember the good ones and not the bad. I hear a lot of people saying that the first half of 90' was marvelous time for music - I grew up in '90 and I remember a lot of trash. For each Nirvana there was thousands of Lou Begas or Vengaboys (and Nirvana wasn't that popular really).
@@artephank So true. There was even music I literally hated when I was young, but love it now!
Today's cringe is tomorrow's nostalgia
There are two rules when it comes to music:
1- It peaked when you were 25. It doesn't matter when you were born, you were 25 when it peaked.
2- Yours is the first generation to truly appreciate Joy Division.
Those rules don't apply to all listeners.
I'd say it peaks when you are about 16
But everyone is different and generalizing is dumb
@@stuartstark I'm 41 and it has not peaked for me yet.
Music peaked for me whilst I was too young to appreciate it (late 60's / early 70's). By the time I was in high school, KISS RULED!!!!!! RULED I SAID!!!!!! Then there was Foghat, Thin Lizzy, Bachman Turner Overdrive. The late 70's Begat Boston, Foreigner, Cheap Trick, Van Halen. Oh yeah, there was Disco. And Punk. And 50's Nostalgia. I HATED all of it. ALL OF IT!!!!!! Sure, by college, I started Appreciating Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, The Clash, Patty Smith, etc. Of course, then, it took a few years of HATING on MTV before I started appreciating bands like INXS, The Eurythmics, Men At Work, Love & Rockets. Then there was the 90's, & again, took awhile to appreciate Morphine, Soul Coughing, Cake, Incubus, Blind Melon . . .
Music used to be an artform with an intrinsic value. Today's music often has a tendency to be merely the means to an end. Allow me to quote Finn Mckenty, who has analyzed this phenomenon very well: "Music is no more a primary activity. [...] For the most part, music has become the background to some other activity that has a heavy visual component." He also gives the following examples: videogames, studying and TikTok.
By the way: We still have good artists today. No doubt about that. But IMHO there has never been a time where you had to tolerate so much meaningless shit as today.
I borned in 1994 but my favorite bands are wasp, metallica, led zeppelin, scorpions, guns, skidrow, and much more from 60s 70s 80s
I think it's about how you're listen!
If you don't know what is live music with instruments, you will listen to the synth and and electronic musics
Instruments are totally different
There's so much incredible music being made today that's its literally overwhelming.... and you'll hear almost none of it on radio, TV, or mainstream sources.
The most incredible music nowadays is publiced by the non mainstream artists. The main stream artists make garbage.
There is a lot of good music coming out of Japan
I think that the general lack of tallent in modern music is a different problem from the way it is mastered, although they usually go together. And, my taste in music hasn't stopped developing. I'm 46 now and I keep discovering genres or historical styles of music that I have never been exposed to in my "formative" years. There is even some music that I couldn't stand back then and I enjoy now. For me the biggest problem is lack of reproduction quality. PA systems, mono boom boxes or heaven forbid small bluetooth "speakers" squeeze the melody out of every music and serve you only fermented dregs. It's a pity that there are generations which haven't heard properly reproduced music.
I started discovering music in my late teens, that was the late 80’s. There has always been awful music through every decade, I don’t think music now is better or worse than any other decade.
But is the collective Western psyche better or worse?
I’m 30, and I’m starting to think music kind of peaked 7-8 years ago, cannot see people making albums better overall than they did in 2013-2015. Really hope my mind changes in this, but general creativity and album flow across the board has been in a downward swing for years, I kept telling everyone music was so good they just didn’t know for the last 13 years but that feeling is gone as of the last few, artists like Charli XcX, Beyoncé, and weirdly Enough Ariana Grande give me hope for popular music to grow and be better than the modern classics, but for now I either need to do some deeper investigation or the stagnation of modern sounds has actually been achieved.
I don’t know if this is too much to read or not, but I had to stop myself from going fully into all of the major modern genres because I definitely don’t mean to only focus on pop, my favorite genres personally are death metal, post-hardcore, progressive rock, hardcore punk, and golden era boom bap hip-hop, but I am very familiar for modern rap (drake, Kanye, Travis etc), while modern rock is an enigma, people think Imagine dragons makes rock music, and the ones crying about the state of modern rock don’t like the actual artists like Every Time I Die or Coheed and Cambria because they’re too heavy or eccentric and deep into niches.
And you would be totally wrong about that.
23yo here. I actually never liked music directed to my age group (2010s/2020s). To me, it all sounds industrialized and emptied of genuine creativity and passion. It just sounds like its made to be forced into every radio station and streaming service for the purpose of profit, and listened to just because it has a "good beat". I dont really listen to anything newer than the 90s.
I still listen to great music, discover new song regularly that are brilliant and sound good to my older ears. They aren’t what the music industry is trying to shove in my ears though.
I believe we can all objectively state that the majority of the top 10 songs are quite bad. The lyrics like any form of composition, poetry or soul. The music writing lacks innovation, creativeness and boldness. And pretty faces are preferred to beautiful voices.
There is still great music been made and I would compare this to « cuisine ». Most modern music is like fast food junk. There were never that much gourmet restaurant, but there used to be really decent restaurants that would still buy their meat from the butcher’s. Now, just like restaurants, even those posing as « decent » and not fast food, don’t go to the butcher’s for their meat, they prefer to serve cheap disgusting meat, and they have a take out service so that your food isn’t even fresh when you eat it.
Most people can’t regularly afford a real gourmet restaurant, so at best they go to the « decent » restaurants, if not the fast food.
With music it’s the same thing more or less. Either they will listen to what is being pushed on them, or they will go the easy route listening to verified and good oldies, not taking the time to try and discover new music. So you are left with a few gourmet albums, a ton of junk food, and some « decent » albums.
And this is a trend with all art : music, cuisine, painting, cinema, literature.
These industries would rather have a low risk cheap product to make and sell with a good return on investment, rather than craft something unique and lasting.
Ask yourself, when was the last time you went to a tailor and at the very least got a suit or dress adjusted to you personally? When was the last time you bought a clothing from fast fashion? Do you go to Ikea for furniture, or have it handcrafted?
If anyone can tell me why any modern pop artist and their music is as good as the Beatles, David Bowie, Elton John, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, The BeeGees, The Who, Pink Floyd, Queen, Abba (and so many more myself and fellow oldies could mention) then I'd be very interested. There are a few notable singers recently though, like Adele but they are not going to be remembered as great writers like the above. There was crap too in the old days but there was also much more variety of style in pop music and maybe it's become too homogenized for its own good or there isn't the talent to lick any of the boots of the above now. Some will claim it's there but has been driven underground by the fashion in music and by the way the pop industry works now. My belief though is that it simply isn't there now in anything like that previous quality.
I think one can say objectively that most modern music is, in fact rubbish. Gone are the days of songs that actually went somewhere, elicited emotions and had any degree of complexity. There has been a steady decrease in the complexity of music which has kept pace with the dumbing down of society in general. Or maybe I'm just getting old.
Animals As Leaders and Polyphia. welcome to the rest of your life
Yup, there never been and will never be a time like the 90s.
There are still new gems around, but as always it takes some active effort to discover it. But I hear you; society is simultaneously dumbing down as well as getting more complex in all the wrong ways. It is not your age, it is your experience.
No real drums, no real music. No dynamics, no music. If these two issues were addressed, I would actually listen.
The complexity and shape of most chart pop has generally dumbed down a lot. Listening as I did as a kid tracks would have an introduction price, not just the groove from the main track. There would be a chorus or even pre-chorus and bridge. Even better they might have an interesting transpose in it. Perhaps this is the age where that sort of thing doesn't matter but I prefer it.
The issue of subjective level and decrease in dynamic range is I think clearer to identify. When you put that together with FM radio broadcast processing I find it unlistenable anyway. I think perhaps the rot may have started earlier than some imagine, maybe started in the late eighties and early 90s in the UK when dance records from club acts started filling the airwaves as record companies cashed in to the new thing. Cheap to make they might be a bangers on a 3k sound system at you local nunnery of noise but just don't sound that good on typical radio. I have nothing against the genre myself, it's just not very radio friendly. 90s Rock is fairly infamous in the loudness mix wars so it came at us both ways regardless of genre. As pop music industry's money slowly disappears so does the quality perhaps but also the loudness pushed to the max is rather like the print media (at least in UK) dumbing down to get every last customer. Ironic that in our post medium era we gave potentially the greatest dynamic range yet waste mist of it jacking the volume, then again mist listening takes place acoustically hostile environments or shitty earbuds etc. Hi-Fi is increasingly aged affair also too.
I’m 54 and my favourite bands are bands I’ve discovered later in life (Coheed and Cambria, IDKHOW but they found me, MCR (got into that very late), polyphia… the list goes on. And yes, I love this music with a passion. Commercial music has never sounded so bad, but the music you hunt out for yourself has never been so good, and the musicianship of even the youngest bands is off the chart.
Coheed and Cambria? Starbucks music. Yikes. Venture out.
Thank you for explaining lufs. I wondered why my Amazon music service sounded so average with their ultra hd. files but when I listen on J Rivers the same files sounded much better. I went to settings and turned off volume normalization in Amazon and the ultra hd files sound much better.
I'm 31 so according to you I already reached the end of falling in love with new styles 11y ago. I can't quite confirm that. I was extremely hyped about future bass and stuff. Only when I hit the actual number '30' I was like 'eeh'. Color bass was the latest genre and I really enjoyed it but couldn't fall in love due to the vibe not really fitting my life anymore. but at least I understood the music. I'm much more of a hater when it comes to pop music, especially formulaic trap. it's always the exact same drum kit, chords, overall sound and style. and it makes total sense with all these sample packs and type beats out there that music gets homogenized like that. I think that sucks. It's not that these trap pop beats aren't fire or a banger or whatever. But they are all so same-y. Makes me wonder why people still make music at all when the whole goal of music production isn't even to create something new anymore. just listen to music instead then xD anyway, to your statements about distortion: I don't have a problem with that. If a song asks for -5db lufs, then it shouldn't be Spotify who decides what the dynamic range should be, but the music itself. And a dense mix just has this flavour that makes you feel like you can put it into your pocket, similiar to how black holes eat whole galaxies despite being small in size, and i think that's cool