10 Reasons Why Current Music Sucks So Hard(benjamingroff.com)
benjamingroff.com
10 Reasons Why Current Music Sucks So Hard
https://www.benjamingroff.com/blog/10-reasons-why-music-sucks-so-hard-right-now
42 comments
As someone who's been involved in music and also went to Berklee like the author, he's basically right about all the points except that he's talking about a sliver of the industry. Rather it's "Why does major label music suck so hard". He asks "ho - is the next David Bowie, James Brown, Prince, Van Halen, Joni Mitchell, Notorious B.I.G., U2, etc." - there isn't because the music industry has split into many many fragments each tiny label specializing in a niche.
A David Bowie wouldn't go through a major label because he would get treated a lot better with a smaller label, however wouldn't reach the same heights. Also there's honestly TOO MUCH good music out there, so major labels can't pick who they're going to focus ungodly amount of energy into promoting.
It's true major label music sucks right now, but honestly we're living in a golden age of music overall, it's just way harder to seek out and find.
A David Bowie wouldn't go through a major label because he would get treated a lot better with a smaller label, however wouldn't reach the same heights. Also there's honestly TOO MUCH good music out there, so major labels can't pick who they're going to focus ungodly amount of energy into promoting.
It's true major label music sucks right now, but honestly we're living in a golden age of music overall, it's just way harder to seek out and find.
Berklee will give you a warped idea of the music industry just like going to MIT will give you a warped idea of the tech industry.
Yes 100% - Berklee production folks fresh out of school have a reputation of being know-it-alls with next to nil real experience. I took a song writing class once and the main point was to repeat the title of the song at least 3 times in the chorus so people would remember the name. That's one for the conspiracy theorists - NLP techniques being taught in pop school.
On the other hand, if you repeat something in the chorus, maybe you should make it your song title. Like in the song “I’m Gonna Be”, or “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35”.
I can't read the article because it's down, but if you're listening to crappy music, that's all on you. We're no longer limited to the music that's on the radio, nor to the music that can be found in a record store, nor to the music with recording industry contracts. Music discovery has never been easier.
Yep. You can get decades of the best, on demand.
You never were. There’s always been regional music scenes and styles and pose networks of people connecting them through zines, mix tapes, etc. Easiee today though.
Yeah, there were regional and other niche music scenes. But you needed to be really into music. And you needed to buy music on media, trade tapes, etc. Definitely a lot more friction than looking up a band on Spotify or Apple Music (for most bands even if relatively niche).
That's his argument, but he comes to the opposite conclusion. He asserts that these gatekeepers drove artists to be better, the gatekeepers improved the music, and that the gatekeepers curated the music.
1 Reason Why Current Music Doesn't Suck:
- I like it
More seriously, I've been listening a lot to the mainstream pop songs on the radio during my car commute, and I don't know which carefully crafted formulas and laboratories those songs come from, but they're in sync with what my brain perceives as "good music" quite incredibly.
I genuinely enjoy listening to them.
- I like it
More seriously, I've been listening a lot to the mainstream pop songs on the radio during my car commute, and I don't know which carefully crafted formulas and laboratories those songs come from, but they're in sync with what my brain perceives as "good music" quite incredibly.
I genuinely enjoy listening to them.
The way that these laboratories work—most pop songs are made through collaboration, with a mixture of people working on it that are all really good at some part of songwriting, performance, or production.
You probably have at least two writers—maybe one person who’s really good at beats and arrangement, and one person who’s really good at topline. You have a producer, who gets good recordings of all of the parts and creates a mixdown. You have session musicians, who have dedicated their lives to an instrument.
It’s great watching interviews with the people involved with this process. The best songs often have serendipitous beginnings—somebody made a beat, and somebody else says “that would go well with these lyrics I’ve been working on”. Or something like that.
It’s a lot less factory-like than one might think. If you want to see factory-like music production, travel back to the 20th century, there was a lot of it. Look at the Brill Building, or Motown, for example.
You probably have at least two writers—maybe one person who’s really good at beats and arrangement, and one person who’s really good at topline. You have a producer, who gets good recordings of all of the parts and creates a mixdown. You have session musicians, who have dedicated their lives to an instrument.
It’s great watching interviews with the people involved with this process. The best songs often have serendipitous beginnings—somebody made a beat, and somebody else says “that would go well with these lyrics I’ve been working on”. Or something like that.
It’s a lot less factory-like than one might think. If you want to see factory-like music production, travel back to the 20th century, there was a lot of it. Look at the Brill Building, or Motown, for example.
I had that feeling 5-8 years ago but I think today's pop going through a bit of a lull.
This is an era where "what you listen to" is entirely a personal choice, no 2 groups of people hear the exact same set of songs unless they want to. Same goes for movies, TV, any consumed media really.
I think there's issues with "popular" music as the best selling music is usually middle-of-the-road to appeal to as many people as possible.
However, the lowered bar of being able to produce music from low cost equipment has opened up the world of music production to talented individuals that otherwise might never have produced anything. The trick is to try to find more unusual styles of music that don't have mass appeal as those artists will be doing it for the love of the music. (We've been to ArcTangent festival for the last few years and that's an incredible mix of different metal genres with a fair sprinkling of math-rock. There's a lot of incredible talent out there, you just need to look in the right places).
There's one aspect of modern music that I have come to resent and that's the death of sampling. I'm a huge fan of Tribe Called Quest and back in the day, they were able to use so many incredible samples of little known jazz tracks. It's so instructive to find the source of the samples and realise how they inspired Q-Tip to incorporate incredible musicianship into just everyday rap. Nowadays, it's a lot harder for musicians to navigate the legal minefield of sampling and building upon the work of previous artists.
I have to add that I've grown to have an intense dislike for "generic music" that seems to be used as a background for social media videos. Why does it all just sound the same?
However, the lowered bar of being able to produce music from low cost equipment has opened up the world of music production to talented individuals that otherwise might never have produced anything. The trick is to try to find more unusual styles of music that don't have mass appeal as those artists will be doing it for the love of the music. (We've been to ArcTangent festival for the last few years and that's an incredible mix of different metal genres with a fair sprinkling of math-rock. There's a lot of incredible talent out there, you just need to look in the right places).
There's one aspect of modern music that I have come to resent and that's the death of sampling. I'm a huge fan of Tribe Called Quest and back in the day, they were able to use so many incredible samples of little known jazz tracks. It's so instructive to find the source of the samples and realise how they inspired Q-Tip to incorporate incredible musicianship into just everyday rap. Nowadays, it's a lot harder for musicians to navigate the legal minefield of sampling and building upon the work of previous artists.
I have to add that I've grown to have an intense dislike for "generic music" that seems to be used as a background for social media videos. Why does it all just sound the same?
It truly is the golden era of music. There's always been an enormous amount of dross in music, with nuggets of greatness that have stood the test of time. There's both automated music discovery via services like Spotify, and successful hand-curated streams like https://www.thecurrent.org/playlist/the-current that employ real people to do the actual digging.
Criticizing "one person attempting to do all of this in a home studio" -- people have always been doing that, and sometimes being successful. Go read the history of the band Boston as an example.
Criticizing "one person attempting to do all of this in a home studio" -- people have always been doing that, and sometimes being successful. Go read the history of the band Boston as an example.
He does have good points about practicing, but you could also argue in reverse:
People idolized a handful of stars because that's all they had access to. If you turned on the radio on your daily commute, you would be subjected to the same two-dozen heavy rotation tracks that were nailed into your head with aggressiveness of a jackhammer, so that the labels can pump up the star and get their money back. No wonder the people - through repetition of the same limited stuff - have developed reflexes to treat those songs and their creators as the only greatest thing on earth (doesn't even matter that some of them were actually great).
Music discovery was a complete torture and non-existent compared to today: you had to browse music store inventory for what you visually might like (nothing to do with music so far), then pay a relatively hefty price of like $10-$20 bucks, sometimes before you even had a chance to listen. Sure, you could do mixtapes and niche music scenes but that is like horse-and-buggy compared to today's cars, I can discover any music that has ever existed in several seconds now. There might be fewer cultural idols, but there is also just more stuff to listen to, so no need to truly idolize anyone in particular anymore? and if you have a passion for 10,000 hours of practice and performing, you can still do that, too.
People idolized a handful of stars because that's all they had access to. If you turned on the radio on your daily commute, you would be subjected to the same two-dozen heavy rotation tracks that were nailed into your head with aggressiveness of a jackhammer, so that the labels can pump up the star and get their money back. No wonder the people - through repetition of the same limited stuff - have developed reflexes to treat those songs and their creators as the only greatest thing on earth (doesn't even matter that some of them were actually great).
Music discovery was a complete torture and non-existent compared to today: you had to browse music store inventory for what you visually might like (nothing to do with music so far), then pay a relatively hefty price of like $10-$20 bucks, sometimes before you even had a chance to listen. Sure, you could do mixtapes and niche music scenes but that is like horse-and-buggy compared to today's cars, I can discover any music that has ever existed in several seconds now. There might be fewer cultural idols, but there is also just more stuff to listen to, so no need to truly idolize anyone in particular anymore? and if you have a passion for 10,000 hours of practice and performing, you can still do that, too.
Imagine believing near-universal access to creative tools for individuals is a bad thing. What? The gatekeeping and condescension this article contains scream old corporate "music" man yelling at clouds. Embarrassing. Probably just mad the kids he usually lectures got sick of hearing about how their digital signal flow wont ever sound as good as his 67 tube marshall stack.
Most of the article boils down to: "labels are not gatekeepers anymore".
And there's an underlying equation of the title to "why isn't the music scene the same as it was up to 20 years ago"
There's so much amazing music being made it's hard to keep up.
The positive side of what the author talks about is the reduced need today of needing deal with people like the author in making music and sharing it with others.
Website is getting overloaded. Archive link: https://archive.is/YD7Sp
I don't think any of his points apply to K-Pop, which AFAICT is an intensely studio driven sound.
Which might explain why some people love K-Pop and some hate it.
Which might explain why some people love K-Pop and some hate it.
#1 "I'm old and I don't understand it nowadays and it's too loud"
Really, every single point seems to be about the industry, not the music, ie '10 reasons the (established) music industry sucks/has lost control'; where have all the reliable cash-cow megastars gone, etc, etc.
Music itself is fine, IMHO.
Music itself is fine, IMHO.
Lol, wait till this guy sees what the chat prompts are going to conjure up :-). And given like everything digital, spam takes over. You will get music spam, perfectly crafted to achieve the goal of being popular everywhere.
Lowering barriers to entry is an unqualified good for the consumer.
Sure we marvel at the thousand years it took to create a natural diamond. But the synthetic diamond is just as easy on the eyes.
Sure we marvel at the thousand years it took to create a natural diamond. But the synthetic diamond is just as easy on the eyes.
Mark Fisher would say current music sucks because it's lost the ability to articulate the present.
“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.
It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ
“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.
It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ
Should have been titled "10 reasons why I'm not fun at parties"
Not sure why this article is flagged. It's legitimate and accurate in my opinion. He's not saying it's bad to democratize music, he's saying that nobody has the money or the inclination anymore to DEVELOP new artists. As a result, we don't have a good soundtrack for our lives anymore. There's presently just very little comparable to past decades in terms of artistry or performance. There are quite a lot of current artists that would benefit from better management, better oversight, and honest feedback.
Put another way, the songs that get popular will always be the most accessible of the set of songs created in a particular year, but the sheer amount of quality songs we have to choose from is 5% of what it was in 1974, 1984, or 1994. That's not a subjective boomer or xer opinion that's simply an objective fact. And the reason for that is the lack of curation and oversight that the labels, love them or hate them, used to do.
Ever listen to the first album of a now-famous artist? It was often only so-so. Very rarely did an debut album come out well. Most of the time it took 2-3 albums and many years of performing before an artist really found their sound. There are 100s of examples. Yes, occasionally there's going to be a Boston record, or a Billie Eilish, or Appetite for Destruction, or Pearl Jam's Ten, but it's actually quite rare and when you read into it you find out that those artists were often working musicians for many years first and the band was manufactured by the studio to ensure complete success.
(2021)
Pretty much anybody who plays an instrument figures out why after a while.
This was perfectly demonstrated 13 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
I know a lot of comments here are trying to show how hip they are and that garbage on top-10 Spotify is totally good for you - commendable attitude. Truly. But happens to be misguided if you develop your ears. Which you should. Has nothing to do with being an old fogey, pop music really has gotten worse for various reasons.
Start here, maybe it will hook you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt2zubHcER4
Once you understand you can't unhear it or pretend otherwise.
This was perfectly demonstrated 13 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
I know a lot of comments here are trying to show how hip they are and that garbage on top-10 Spotify is totally good for you - commendable attitude. Truly. But happens to be misguided if you develop your ears. Which you should. Has nothing to do with being an old fogey, pop music really has gotten worse for various reasons.
Start here, maybe it will hook you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt2zubHcER4
Once you understand you can't unhear it or pretend otherwise.
Get out of here Chicken Little
Don't you know that things go in cycles?
A style of music becomes popular, it takes over and everyone copies it so that they too can be successful. Then, it becomes stale and boring to young-uns who associate that style with their parents and jump on a new style of music and so that then becomes popular.
Rinse and repeat.
A style of music becomes popular, it takes over and everyone copies it so that they too can be successful. Then, it becomes stale and boring to young-uns who associate that style with their parents and jump on a new style of music and so that then becomes popular.
Rinse and repeat.
> Don't you know that things go in cycles?
The way that Bobby Brown is just ampin like Michael?
The way that Bobby Brown is just ampin like Michael?
It's all expected, things are for the lookin'
If you persist in your efforts
You can achieve dream control
..How are we feeling today, better?
You can achieve dream control
..How are we feeling today, better?
We've got artists revolutionizing their own respective niches, this all just happens in complete disconnect from major label music, and from the general mainstream.
The fact that he goes through the entire article without even bringing up examples of modern artists which impressed or didn't impress him is weak. No mention of the windmill scene (eg. black midi and black country, new roads)? No mention of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, who gained some amount of fame for releasing five (5!) really solid albums in a single year? No mention of Death Grips, who revolutionized modern hip hop music? These are all names which should be familiar if you're paying attention.
Instead he brings up Drake (and Kendrick, to be fair) as an example of "artists setting the bar incredibly high" and "setting new trends for new generations".
Either way, I'd hate to have this guy on my party.