Rick Beato brings up an interesting point about musical eras....
 

And I think this point can be applied to a vast majority of the things that influence our lives. Politics, sports, fitness, food, trends of all kinds,...The days of the 'defining era' are behind us. Everything has multiple sub-genres that appeal to a select few, not the majority. I don't have a point or an opinion about this change, at least not one I can easily describe, but it feels like we've lost a lot. I'm just nostalgic I guess.

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There's a lot of truth to what he says.

Frankly, I think there is very little good music being made these days. Not much that will be remembered in 20 years. part of it is that the business model has changed. I don't think much of the talent level, now, either.

Movies? Largely the same. Different business model now.

Old curmudgeon here...missing the time of cars having a single speaker radio. By surfing the AM band, one could probably drive from coast to coast while finding radio stations blasting the "Top 40" format.

One of his comments rings true...I know who Taylor Swift is, but wouldn't recognize one of her songs if I heard it.

Another rabbit hole...
432 vrs 440 hz.
432 is the natural frequency of the universe and has calming and healing properties.
440 is slightly static and causes anxiety and aggression.
Why were we forced to use 440 hz?

https://steemit.com/music/@rossenpavlov/why-and-why-changed-music-s-tuning-frequency-from-432-to-440-hz

The video and your comments are very insightful, Mike. It is not just music, it's everything.
The current world feels like everything is coming at us all at once. It is anxiety producing. When I visualize it, it feels like the difference between tootling down the highway watching the world slip by through the windshield of a VW bus, and rocketing through space looking at the world through the windshield of a starship, watching streams of stars shoot past at .9C.
It is too much, so overwhelming that it makes me want to pull away and not look.

So the release of "A Complete Unknown" may describe what a "defining era"is all about.

I surely feel you on that anxiety issue WD.

Is this just what getting old does to us? Or is this unique to our time?

That said I take most of what Beato said as fantastic for music fans. I don't need a recording exec and radio station owner to tell me what I like. Nor do I need to hear 20 rehashings of the same song by different 'artists'. The era of 'here's the sound we're gonna make for the next several years' sucked ass and was, imo, the very antithesis of creativity and soulfulness. As an example to me Chris Cornell and all that he did was the best of grunge and Pearl Jam was the polished up for the masses garbage served up by big music. In todays music world I don't have to suffer the watered down bleh of the Pearl Jams to get my fill of Soundgardens and perhaps more importantly other bands that haven't been filtered and packaged for mass consumption.

Bottom line I'm thrilled I no longer have to rely on some knuckle dragging radio personality to curate my music library.

I gave up on radio many years ago. Just constant commercials, and the same few songs played every day. I have all 140 of my CDs ripped to a thumb drive in both of my cars, and set to random. If a song comes on that I don't feel like listening to, I hit the next button and a different song comes on.

At home in front of my computer, like right now I listen to Pandora. I trained it long ago with a thumbs down to not play some songs I dislike. Now it plays some new releases, but mostly all classic rock.

The golden age of great music has gone away as the band members get old and die. ZZ Top had the same original band members longer than any other rock band. Only death broke them up.

Pandora has introduced me to many bands and songs I like that were not in my collection. I bought the CDs and added them to my thumb drives in the cars. I have no problem buying the music I like

The old saying that Rock and Roll will never die is unfortunately not as true as it once was. Few new artists are any good. And the new "music" that they blast at F1 is just noise of thump thump thump and not really music, just noise blasted loud.

Need to remember that anyone under 25-35 has basically never not had what makes up the current internet, especially once they reached the age to be able to create content, etc Youtube is 20 years old now, and mp3 sharing is 30

So basically anyone has been able to self publish any kind of music they would care to create. Combine tgat with word of mouth, maybe some big social media stuff, and while your heavy metal
mongolian throat singing Elvis tribute/ cover band may only appeal to 0.1% of the population, it is possible to be found by them (or shown to them) without any corporate marketing/decision/influence at all

Apropos of this thread, there is a new thread here about Dan Gurney's '61 Chevy race car. It includes a picture of the rear of the car. I identified it right away, it's almost a reflex. I'll bet most of us could ID almost any 1960s car on sight. Today's cars - ha! There must be 10 times as many makes and models on the road and I couldn't identify a single one by sight.

Radio Paradise has introduced me to some great modern-ish music.
"broadcast" in FLAC, as well.

Thanks for posting. I watch Rick occasionally for some nostalgic riffs.

Overall, I think it's a good thing. Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts- but- Internet sorta quashed the corporate pop mechanism. Zappa would be proud. Even the dead played for Clive.

That bossa nova song Rick played from his kid was something I'd infinitely rather listen to than today's stadium pop country product, which still gets kicked out in every auto parts store/gas station in america-(and to me it's worse than any smell in the bad smell thread :) ) so I guess pop country genre still lives, but now, people can put out whatever niche music they want, and those who like it can access it.

Pending the ultimate commercialization of the internet, trending habits, paywalls, and such, I was pleasantly pleased.

My dad hated the beatles. I love them. I don't like grunge. Rick loves grunge. Now I can search out what I want without the top 40 overplay. I would have done just fine never hearing anything from the 90's, but that's just me. No right or wrong.

Good times, everyone's gonna be nostalgic to some extent, but I'd wager some of the young ones out there are putting out much better music than we were exposed to. A dental assistant once told me (fairly recently) I needed to listen to a famous guitarist Andy Mckee. I told her he once owned one of my guitars, and hung out at my house one night as he was coming through town. Most people have probably never even heard of him. She melted as if I was friends with John Lennon. I'm so happy she listens to Andy over Justin Beiber. She also likes Taylor Swift, but I'll let that slide! Wild that Andy's up there with Taylor!

I have faith in these young ones! :)

I think it's the other way around. There are some musically talented kids out there but I think they are far and few between, compared to decades past. And the way that the music industry is now structured, it's unlikely that they'll get the same chances to record as in days past.

YouTube videos aren't a record deal.

Then you have a few with both talent and backing (Taylor Swift) but if she's ever recorded a good song that will survive the test of time, I haven't heard it. Forgettable crap.

Ricks a talented guy, I watch all his music theory content and his What Makes This Song Great series.

I don’t know what today’s music is, really, but can only report what I am told by my 20-something kids. There are absolutely songs and artists that sweep the country - at least, the country of young people who are into popular music. At any given moment, there is a “song of the summer” that everyone - again and I won’t repeat this anymore,”everyone” means “every young person who is into popular music” - knows and is listening to. The song of the moment and the artist of the moment changes, more rapidly than it used to perhaps, but there seems to be a general style and type that stays strong for longer cycles. Like, my daughter will make me listen to [inset name here] and all her friends are also listening to, or at least have listened to, the same artist.

So it is not wholly fragmented.

Of course, not everyone is literally listening to the same song. Maybe that was the case at the height of Elvis or the Beatles, but soon after that popular music started to split apart. By 1970, the people into Hendrix were different from the people into Yes or the Moody Blues or Steely Dan or Credence, or country, or soul, or whatever.

In the 80s we had MTV, which maybe dragged the threads back together. Instead of dozens of radio stations, there was one MTV. And since a lot of us came of age in the 80s, that might be our frame. Sure, at one point whoever was dominating MTV was dominating music . . . or were they? There were hugely popular bands not part of the MTV pop world.

I might question if popular music is that much more fragmented today than in the 60s, 70s etc. Someone could study this: just calculate the concentration of record sales or radio plays by artist, and compare to the concentration of streaming plays by artist today.

I’m speaking of this like it’s a theoretical thing, admittedly, because around 1980 I got sucked into jazz and for the next twenty-plus years, unless you were a Mega pop star like Michael Jackson, I didn’t know much about you. You know how I defined “everyone”? I became “everyone else”. When my friends were at concerts listening to who-the-f that was, I was crawling jazz clubs listening to Pharoah Sanders.

+++++ and Soundgarden shall forever be the better band over Pearl Jam for sure. "Louder Than Love" was my introduction to Soundgarden!!!

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Haha, I started that thread, Lol! I totally agree. I can remember as a kid that when we were traveling somewhere, I used to see how many cars I could identify and see how far away I could first identify them. It was a fun game that I still do to this day. It used to be somewhat easy to identify brands and models, now, with the cookie cutter styles, not so much.

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Back when I was a teen in the 80s, it seemed that in my circle of friends, we all had our favorite band. Mine was Rush. One friend liked Ted Nugent, another liked Queen, another that had an older sister was really into The Beatles. We all had our favorites but we all listened to each other's bands and other music. Favorites were, The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Yes, Steely Dan, Frank Zappa, Van Halen, and more. This was in the 80s and we mainly listened to older stuff.

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If I understand correctly, Rick is saying we were basically force fed what the labels wanted to market. Now we are free range music consumers.
This might be a return to local acts doing their thing. It's a transition. Who knows?

Best
Les

Except a lot of small local venues died out during/after covid and quarantine .... finally starting to come back but still has a way to go