The Real Reason Music Is Getting Worse

[Guy Rowland]

I like Rick Beato, and I think he has a pretty persuasive case. But I wanted to pick up on a few points.

1 - Humanisation. This was a weak part of his video (circa 2m). He plays a hard quantised clip of John Bonham to show how music has become more machine-like, and it loses the swing of the original. There are so many problems with this example. First, it's deady easy to quanitize in any DAW WITH swing - quantising does not mean a lack of swing. Second, everyone knows you don't hard quantise on any feel if you want to retain humanity. Third, plenty of classic music IS machine-like, deliberately so.

What his example does illustrate is it is easy to sound competent, and yes that needs less talent. But that's different to everything sounding the same and machine-like as a blanket criticism. Where I agree though is that people do slavishly follow trends, and that has become super easy whether it is a Trap beat or T-pain vocals. Speaking of which:

2. Amp modelling. This is even weaker than (1), but it has the same underlying truth - easier to sound competent, but not the case that it makes everyone sound the same.

His first broad argument - it is too easy to make music - is pretty sound as a whole. But it doesn't make any of those tools bad in and of themselves you can still be as ramshackle or robotic as you like. You can pretty much do anything you want for very little monetary cost, and that can't be all bad. Put into the hands of creative people rather than those who slavishly follow...

3. No value. This is his second argument, and is compelling. Streaming everything for £10pm vs saving hard and buying one record you listen to over and over - and if you don't like it you keep listening until maybe you do - is a fundamentally different paradigm. Listening required work and effort, and when you connected with something it was special and yours. So yes I think it does devalue. However:

4. Fans and stars. Taylor Swift is the biggest artist in the world now. Apparently she's 10th in terms of all time album sales - above Elton John, Led Zep or U2, so not too shabby. Her fans are fiercely loyal. When she re-recorded her back catalogue in a record company dispute, her fans stopped listening to the originals - because they care about HER. So I it would be wrong to say no-one cares about artists any more, and people are happy with generic filler.

One of the most prized commodities today is authenticity (and if you can fake that, you have it made...). I think fans today are pretty savvy, and they won't ever care about AI songs in the style of Taylor Swift, so there's an over-exaggeration of some threats. However:

5. Inequality. What I perceive is that just as the rich get proportionately richer in the world while more fall into relative poverty, this is true also in music. Drake, BTS, Sza are brands. But it's harder than ever to survive as a band further down the ladder - hence so many more solo artists and DJs vs bands. Bands = too many mouths to feed.

One reason I'm so positive about Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift is that a) they write great songs and b) their fans are INTO them. They care about them and what they sing about. But that's not the whole picture. Whenever I do post about those people, few here comment because we're mostly old. We grew up in the 60s-80s where music was everything. Now music is A Thing, competing with many other things, literally pushed into the background. And with 100.000 new songs a day, it's harder than ever to break through. What I think is happening is that more effort goes into the few that have managed to break through. I'm supportive of them, but wish things were more democratized.

We have Glastonbury this weekend in the UK, and it's three days in the year where music goes front and centre. I love seeing all that youth singing their hearts out, caring about the artists in front of them, most of which I've never heard of. I have no idea how to make that passion full-time again, and that does make me sad.

[Lawrence]

Guy, what classic music would you consider machine-like other than, say, synthpop? And when you say classic music, how far back do you go?

[Linos]

This is a highly convoluted video. For one thing, is music really getting worse? As you write, Guy, this is a claim that isn't even discussed for a second in the video, let alone really reflected upon. If you think music is 'getting worse', you should first state clearly what it is you think is worse than it was. Is it less innovative? Is it getting too simple? Is the harmonic or melodic language becoming impoverished? State your hypothesis clearly and give some examples. Then you can look for reasons why this is happening.

The reasons given are not very convincing either. Music gets worse because a drum track can be quantized? It doesn't make the music itself worse - it might make it sound worse. That's my second big problem with this video. There is no distinction between the musical substance and the performance, i.e. the interpretation of the musical substance. They are not the same. And neither quantizing nor amp simulations make the music itself worse. They just potentially make it sound worse.

The second part, in my opinion, has more merit. Although the argument is still muddled. The problem, as I see it, is not that access to music has been democratised. Isn't it a great thing that more people can listen to music? Is Rick really arguing that access to music should be harder and more expensive so that people value it more? I don't think that works. If you think about orchestral music, the cost of a ticket can be quite high. And it has to be, because it is prohibitively expensive to put a good orchestra on stage. Do people value an orchestral concert more because it costs more than, say, a singer/songwriter concert in a small venue? I think that's an absurd statement.

The problem I see is that people are not willing to put in the work to get better at something. Hell, many don't even acknowledge that you can get better at something if you study it, practise it, put in the work... The argument is always that in art everything is subjective anyway. So who says that what I do is not good? If you have that attitude, why bother studying anything at all indeed.

[Guy Rowland]

Larry - well an obvious starting point would be Kraftwerk in the 70s - not sure if that's classified as synthpop. But take something like Sexual Healing by Marvin Gaye - unthinkable without that 808 pattern, it's totally metronomic and has an incredible feel to it. Very different to 60s soul, neither better or worse in my book but something very different for the genre at the time.

Linos - yes to all that. There's no real argument on how to change things is there? I like his advice to just sit and listen occasionally with no distractions, but that's not a plan for systemic change.

I think your orchestra vs singer / songwriter is a very interesting question. I suspect many WOULD put more value on the orchestra. There's a lot of very talented people working together to make that happen. A singer songwriter is just three chords and hopefully the truth. But I'm with you, I don't view one as worth more than the other necessarily.

Putting the work in - that's just it. You don't NEED to put the work in to create or listen, to get something that sounds great. But I guess what I long for are the people who can still do something beyond competency, something individual. Billie Eilish's Lunch leapt out to me recently, I've never heard that combination of instruments and production before, it felt fresh and exciting in a world where we've heard it all. Her and her brother are really something. Finneas wrote "10,000 hours" above his bedroom door, so there's a perfect example of putting in effort. Not that he's isn't stupidly talented too...

[Lawrence]

FWIW, Kraftwerk’s entire oeuvre was being cold and mechanical, at least in my opinion. Also, it doesn’t matter what you put under Marvin Gaye’’s vocal because there might not ever have been a more human, soulful sound than his voice, so.

All that’s a minor point though. You bring up a number of interesting issues. I love Beato but being (I assume) close to my age he’s probably in the “get off my lawn” phase of his life, much as I am.

I LOVE what Billie Eilish and her brother are doing, and I much admire Taylor Swift’s work, but like Beyoncé and Gaga and Drake et al, their cult status and rabid fans put them into a new category. Whereas once only a few bands or artists ascended to those lofty heights, now there are Beatles and Elvises galore. Working in the trenches of the biz is another matter. There may be more opportunities for self promotion via the Internet, but man, it’s a hard road.

Is music “worse”? Some is. I can’t listen to soulless, endlessly autotuned mechanical perfection. Nashville pop is an example-fantastic, clever songs produced perfectly for robot listeners. Same with radio hip hop. I prefer more organic music, and the music of the 50s, 60s and 70’s sounds much more organic to me than a lot of modern pop music. Is that an age thing? Maybe-but moving into the 80’s I could listen to “I’ll Stop the World and Melt with You“ forever, and into the 90’s I loved Oasis and nirvana unreservedly. I think I like my music a little less perfect.

Oh, and I miss Instrumental solos in pop songs. Guitar heroes. Crazy good keyboard players. Saxophones!

Per my brother in the record biz, record companies are often kept afloat by catalogue sales. Younger people rediscovering older music is a huge market. I think there are reasons.

End of rant for now.

[Guy Rowland]

I may be missing a ton of stuff, but hip hop got really depressing. In the 80s it was a joy - and gloriously messy. De La Soul, Arrested Development, The Real Roxanne. Public Enemy were awesome. Then it all became guns, bling, bitches and hos, it all sounded the same and it was all just horrible. And RnB with that T Pain horror. PAH.

[The Saxer]

There is so much good music out there and there are so many fantastic musicians out there too. Much more young players of very professional performance level than decades ago. I don't see that there is nobody putting work, time and love into their work.

The only thing I see is that nothing of that is reaching the charts. Promoting and selling music has always been a business and today it follows more the Hollywood way: no experiment, promote the things we already have or some kind of remake of it. Feed people but don't surprise or demand them.

I'm from Germany and when I look back to the charts and radio titles back then there were some greats songs but also mostly a ton of bullshit songs I'm glad I don't remember all of them. A lot of them poorly produced and performed.

But the chart and radio selection was more colorful. Different length of songs, different styles, even long instrumentals. Radio moderators could choose the songs they presented. New songs sent to the radio stations were discussed in a listening session. More surprises and individuality and less survey results.

[mickeyl]

But the chart and radio selection was more colorful. Different length of songs, different styles, even long instrumentals. Radio moderators could choose the songs they presented. New songs sent to the radio stations were discussed in a listening session. More surprises and individuality and less survey results.

This is true. But then came the internet, and when last.fm was initially introduced, I was a happy camper: I discovered hundreds of previously unknown to me artists through their "similar bands" feature. For some reason, their algorithm was matching my taste much better than the "similar artists" found these days in Apple Music, Spotify, et. al.

I'm grateful that internet radio stations exist. I'm a big fan of Soma.FM, which has so many niche channels that I find "new" (and good) stuff all the time.

[Ashermusic]

It was ever thus.
My grandmother could not understand why my mother got so excited about Sinatra, "that skinny Italian kid" when Bing Crosby, well he was a REAL singer.
My father, a drummer, couldn't understand why I was so excited by The Beatles and other British Invasion groups. He thought they were third rate musicians.
A lot of today's music holds little appeal to me, not surprising for the same reasons.
What has empirically changed is that the technology now does not reveal necessarily how well or poorly someone sings or plays their instrument, where it used to be fair more obvious.