On Modern Music

Anyone in the vicinity of musical discussions has heard this complaint before: It seems to me that modern popular music has declined in quality since the 1980s (and probably some before that) with the proliferated use and reliance upon technology.

There are still some catchy beats and easily-singable tunes, but it lacks some humanity. There used to be era-branded pop radio stations and time slots: 1960s, 70s, and 80s, but then you started to hear the "2000s and Today" even into the late 2010s - because there wasn't a distinguishable difference in styles.

Music today is far too easy to consume (people hearing without listening)
In ages past, music required effort and at least some small sacrifice to listen to and you had to curate your own collection yourself. You had to work work, save, go to the store, pay for it, bring it home. While streaming has allowed everyone access to everything for $15/mo, it has also increased the noise level. TV used to have less than 10 channels. Now there is an infinite selection of "stuff" to watch via TV or streaming. You have to be very intentional about curating your own channels out of all the fluff.

Music today is too easy to make (people writing songs that voices never shared)
This is where I think there is a creative and consumptive dependency on technology. I am guilty of trying to find "the perfect recording" of particular songs. "I want Beethoven's 9th Symphony from the British Philharmonic in 1953."
However, nowadays it is extraordinariliy easy to use software to achieve extraordinariliy consistent recordings, match beats, auto tune, etc. to work with the formula that recording lables know will sell. Recording lables do not want to take risks on new, different, variable, off-formula artists. Now, in the age of AI (2020s), there are AI models of artists that could be viewed as sophisticated plagiarism software. They genuinely content patterned after the formula, emulating and modify existing works by human artists. Music generated by AI may be "cheap", but could it eventually converge upong something like Beethoven's 6th?

Additionally, the content of music is not what it used to be. Lyrics used to be far more poetic and more complex and then tune could be added. Most pop lyrics today hardly rhyme, do not sound good when just read out loud, and often promote darker contexts (sex, drugs, violence). In cinematic contexts, many producers want vocals, but no real words.


In short, while there have been many advancements on the technological tools in music, I think reliance upon them has reduced the quality and effort in the majority of modern pop music.