Humans have been making music for tens of thousands of years, maybe more. We have extent records of music going back around 3500 years. Every human culture and society makes music. Even in Anglophonic culture, there are still folk songs in circulation that go back to the 1200. This 15 year period in the late 20th century wasn't really a big bang for anything any more than say the 1720s were. It's a very small frame idea of "music" that could leave one to elevate those particular 20th century years above all others in human history, past or future.
I guess my point isn’t as obvious as I thought. Yes. I know it is an industry standard. But the standard is not helpful in supporting a proposition that new music is declining in popularity.
Humans had been walking for tens of thousands of years prior to the 60's and 70's. But not on the moon. Subtle difference, but there ya go.
It’s a relatively small difference; one that could be attributable to the lack of superstar product. There have been efforts to avoid Q1 2022 because of fear that Adele would dominate charts. Adele then underperformed.
Well, it's all about the defined terms -- what's defined as "new" mostly -- and about the screens being used for comparison to define increase or decline. The stats that exist from the industry have to do with the old 18-month/back catalog distinction. Those stats show that in the first half of 2022 (I think these stats are US only, but I don't remember, this Luminate thing came out so long ago and I haven't looked back), listeners on the platforms tracked by the study and music purchasers listened to and purchased music 18 months old or more recent less than they did in the first half of 2021, and less than they did to music older than 18 months. And that this was the first time in the history of these statistics than this had been observed Personally, I wouldn't try to draw any kind of broad conclusion from that -- the data doesn't support any kind of broad sweeping conclusion. First, it's only one period -- first six months of 2021 vs first six months of 2022. We don't know if it's a trend, or a moment. Second, the data is a mix of purchasing data and self selected listening data -- it's kind of dirty data. We also don't know anything about what that "new" or "older music was, "Dance Monkey" and "Blinding Lights" or Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations. Or who they listeners and buyers were. Also it's really hard to compare this data with data from the past because before streaming we weren't tracking self selected music listening at home. We had no idea if a person who bought an album when home and listened to it at all, or was still listening to it 18 or 24 months later or not. The data is just an industry sales and user statistics relevant to its business and marketing planning, and yes, based probably on a distinction left over from the era of physical media sold through retail locations that isn't very useful anymore. All the people drawing conclusions from this that young people don't care about music, that pop music from '60 years ago was better than pop music today, that people are turning away from Bad Bunny and rushing to listen to the Beatles or something -- are just talking out of their asses, saying what they always say and repeating their own personal beliefs. None of that has anything to do with what's in the data.
And because a couple of people walked on the moon in the 1960s is was the greatest era for walking in human history? The quality of walking has been in decline ever since? And is walking like making art? I don't understand the analogy you're reaching for.
Well, you have to read between the lines. Obviously I'm talking about advancements in technologies that made what was once one thing into something quite different. i.e. electric guitars and electric keyboards, amplifiers, effects, recording equipment changed the way music is made. I'm not saying that advancements in musical instrumentation never happened before, but the 60's and 70's did have somewhat of a quickening effect.
Plenty of good new music that I follow all the time if your taste goes beyond Dadrock. I find interesting stuff and buy it on Bandcamp all the time.
The interesting thing is that young people do listen to bands like The Beatles, whereas my generation wouldn't have been caught dead listening to music from our parent's youth.
The technology was always changing -- you went from stone age flutes to bronze age flutes, things like pipe organs came along, someone strung up a harpischord, then a pianoforte, and the art responded to the tech (and vice versa) in a constant dialogue, stretch tuning and the even tempered scale allows stringed instrument and pianos to work a certain kind of why which led composers to write certain kinds of harmonies. It's always been thus. There was nothing special about the 1960s and 1970s in that regard (fwiw, electric guitars and electric keyboards were technology innovations of the 1930s). Styles change and technology changes. Digital tech came along after that and could be said to have quickened the pace of change again. But in fact I think technological and social change, and creative response to those changes, is pretty much just constant.
Like I said, I'm aware of the history of music and it's instrumentation. 1930's? There's a big difference between amplifying an acoustic guitar with a pickup through a 5W amp and putting an electric guitar through a fuzz box, echo, phaser and 100W Marshall stack, then multilayering it on a multitrack tape recorder using varispeed and flanging. I agree that the 60's and 70's aren't fundamentally different from any other era, except that my ears hear radical changes happening in pop music on the records of that period. I don't have records from prior to the 1920's. In general, the pop and jazz from the 20's to the 50's has a certain flavour to it. From the 60's onward it changes. That's what my ears tell me. Yours may tell you otherwise.
i guess it really depends on what you consider "new". new, as in new artists, young people who have not been around. or new songs by older, established artists, that have been around for years and years.
I try to like current music, and I often find stuff to check out, but mostly it's not my bag. I refer to my sons and the younger people I work with to help make sense of it all. Yesterday at work, I saw a young guy wearing a Dark Side of the Moon t-shirt. My youngest (who's 30!) is currently into Jim Croce and Otis Redding, and he's got very current tastes. (He's way into a band called Future Islands.) He once said that older music "is just better." That's enough for me.
There's some truth to that, though when I was a kid, and I'm 58, I listened to my dad's Sinatra records and my wife, who is older than I am, listened to her dad's Benny Goodman records and there was no shame in it. There's certainly been a cultural change in the US from the '60s to now in terms of the "generation gap" and how pop culture, including music, was/is used as a kind of tribal identity marker. And in the internet era there's been a profound change in the media environment in terms of pop culture of the past being all just part of the cultural present (though in truth, as a kid, I grew up watching the Little Rascals and The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy and Looney Tunes and they were as much part of my media present then as anything else). But why do we take the mid 20th century as the baseline for comparing today's music engagement? As people of a certain age, that may be our personal baseline and the context that shape our assumptions. But how music was in the 1960s and 1970s in the US wasn't how music always was before or how it was always going to be after. There's really no historical reason necessarily to start with that as the baseline norm.
Yes - all this, plus, what do we know about changes in the audience for this music? It's possible that more older people are finally making the switch to streaming, something the young did a decade ago, which would mean "their" music would grow in popularity. There are so many variables and such a short period of time being studied it's impossible to draw any broad conclusions. Never mind comparing this era to 1985, when we had basically zero information about consumption of new vs. old music. And you always have to remember that up until the past 15 years or so, huge amounts of old music fell out of print and was difficult to find for the average person. Pet Sounds was out of print in the U.S. through most of the 1980s. Also, in terms of listening to our parents' music, I grew up in the 80s, and the music from my parents' generation—the 1960s—was quite prominent throughout the entire decade. Quite a few 1960s cover songs went to No. 1, artists like Roy Orbison and Steve Winwood were logging hits. Going back earlier, Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" hit No. 3 on the Hot 100 in 1974.
It's when a lot of our music genre families were born: Rock (as opposed to rock'n'roll), Metal, Hard Rock, Prog, Punk, New Wave, Ska & Reggae, Soul, Funk, Disco, Electro Pop, Hip Hop. Most newer stuff falls into one or other of those parent genres. Of course there's older genres too, obviously Classical, Jazz, Blues & Country, but not so many that still dominate the pop scene. Not many Western Swing bands around these days.
Music styles come and go, music technology comes and goes. Music style differ from era to era and culture to culture But our interaction with music as humans in society remains remarkably similar -- we use it for mood, for worship, for dancing and partying, for sentimental emotional attachment and memory. Sometimes big changes come along in our engagement with music -- broadcast and then recording was a big one, before that all music was ephemeral and you had to be in the presence of the performers (or perform it yourself) in real time in order to experience music. Globalization too -- in terms of telecom, travel, economics -- has led to much more blending of cultural influence than was true for most of human history (though it's amazing, when you go back into the ancient world, how much culture passed along over time from region to region and even continent to continent). But the kinds of things that were popular music in preindustrial folk times -- vernacular dance music, novelty songs and storytelling songs, sentimental ballads of romance -- were popular in industrial times as one economic system for production and consumption replaced another. Genres are a blip. Look even at that list you made above --- metal, rock, hard rock, prog, punk vs. "classical" Classical has way more sub genres but that those subgenres of rock you outline, but they're all subsumed in time and history in to one chunk. All this hair splitting parsing of these substyles of our time will completely disappear to anyone but historians in the near future. If Monteverdi, Mozart, Schoenberg and Steve Reich are all "classical" then surely Elvis, Yes and the Sex Pistols aren't all example of people working in wholly separate genres These aren't major different kinds of music. They're one kind. But with our cultural and time bias we exaggerate the importance of these distinctions in our time, and under appreciate the distinction that in the past people treated the same way you're treating these distinctions. And they're all anglophonic. I mean, what about the music of the Indian subcontinent, Asia, Africa, you know, where most of the people on earth are? Again, we've made the rock era the norm for historical perspective, but it's not really (and even in the rock era it was only a portion of the popular music of the day).
I'm talking about today, not a hundred years from today. I'm talking about western pop musics as per the thread. I can't really argue with your post as it's beyond the confines of the argument. Yes, in the past there was music and in the future there will be music.
Apples and oranges. In 1965 or 1975 the listener wasn't able to choose what they heard on the radio. Downloading and streaming puts the individual in control of the playlist. On the radio, sometimes you had to put up with stuff you didn't like. That isn't the case anymore. And yes, most younger folks today stream music instead of filesharing because it's easier but the two are pretty similar in terms of how much money the actual artists make (filesharing = nothing; streaming = pennies). My point was that the article was making a sweeping generalization about people's music tastes based on sales when there is really no way of gauging how much music is consumed through free downloading.
Here's another example of very poor gatekeeping - if I want to own a copy of Jessica Pratt's second album on vinyl, I have to pay over $100 for it. Furthermore, I only knew it existed because I very randomly heard Moon Dude in a bar a few weeks ago, and it came out 7 years ago.
