

“Music was better back then”: When do we stop keeping up with popular music? - eloy
http://skynetandebert.com/2015/04/22/music-was-better-back-then-when-do-we-stop-keeping-up-with-popular-music/

======
mcdougle
I think the real point is that "pop" music sucks and has always sucked, for
the most part at least. A teen is more likely to listen to "what is popular"
rather than "what I like best" to fit in, but once they grow up they realize a
lot of it sucked.

The music we remember being good "back then" is really just a hand-picked set
of artists/songs that stand out in our memory. I remember listening to a
Classic Rock station in high school with my dad, and him commenting on how he
loved the station -- it was the music he listened to when he was young, but he
didn't have to sit through all the crap, since it was basically a "Greatest
Hits" from an era. I mean, we tend to regard the 60s and 70s as a great time
period for music, but how much of that music was terrible and has since faded
into obscurity?

I guarantee the old, grumbly people who say "music was better back in my day"
can find artists and songs they like in the current generation of music. It's
probably going to be _different_ , and they're probably not going to find it
on Top 40 stations or whatever (so yeah, they're less likely to try if it
takes effort), but it's out there.

~~~
Swizec
I think what you're saying is: Survivor bias. We are comparing _the best_
songs of the past to _all_ songs of the now.

That is not a fair comparison. I think that there is _a lot_ of very good pop
music being made today. Non-pop as well. Just a lot of very good music in
general. But you have to give it a decade or two to really separate the grain
from the chaff.

I'm 27 and I discover awesome new music I like almost daily. These days a lot
of it is pop because pop is amazing music to work to. Upbeat, high tempo, just
varied enough, plenty of loops. Can't think of anything better for getting in
the flow.

I also think pop these days is more varied than it was in, say, the 90's. For
instance both Uptown Funk[1] and Summer[2] fall into pop[3] even though they
sound like different genres.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPf0YbXqDm0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPf0YbXqDm0)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebXbLfLACGM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebXbLfLACGM)

[3] pop defined as hitting tops of charts, getting thousands of hours of radio
play, and winning pop music awards

~~~
PopeOfNope
> I think what you're saying is: Survivor bias. We are comparing the best
> songs of the past to all songs of the now.

I hate how quickly people are to trot out "survivor bias" or "survivor
fallacy" here. It doesn't apply to his argument at all. He's saying 90% of
everything sucks and this includes pop music.

He's also saying that we form emotional attachments to less than stellar pop
music for reasons that have nothing to do with the music. In high school, we
signal social (ie: tribal) alliances by dressing a particular way and becoming
fans of particular things. People tend to like things they normally wouldn't
because popular people they respect like them. Social proof. Unfortunately,
social proof doesn't hold up after you leave the social structure (ie: leave
high school). Hence, how we can love something in the 80's that we despise a
decade later.

We also associate the music with other things that might have been happening
in our lives at the time. For example, Barbie Girl by Aqua is a terrible,
horrible song that deserves to die in a fire. But, it will always have a
special place in my heart because of a radio show in 2004 where my co-host
decided to sing both the ken and barbie parts himself on the air.

He's also saying time has very little effect on musical tastes. If you liked
the musical brilliance of 80's hair bands, there are still newly formed bands
pumping out new music that sound very similar. Because of that, the whole
concept of "new music sucks" has no basis in reality anymore since you can go
out and find whatever tickles your fancy.

As for "pop these days", I'm not sure the term even applies anymore. After
digital music displaced the radio, it's much harder to figure out what
qualifies. It's no longer curated through an individual system, as it was in
the past.

------
QuercusMax
I don't quite grasp why they use those spiral graphs in the article. They
don't seem to give any more information that a plan old line graph would.

~~~
username3
Graphs were better back then.

------
bane
I definitely do not like most current pop-music. But I never liked most top-40
pop music growing up in the 80s and 90s either. I was always into oddball
music genres, and though I do a lot less exploring than I used to, I still
constantly find new stuff to enjoy.

There are, however, genres I definitely stopped growing with and a few I fell
out of love with. I'm pretty sure the only rock music I really like happened
in the 70s and 90s -- I lost interest in 80s rock, especially hair-metal. I
love 80s New Wave and Synth-pop/rock, and its grown on me more over time. Some
of the really experimental EDM from the mid 90s still gives me goose bumps
(the Artificial Intelligence #1 and 2 collections are my favorites, but old
Moby, Underworld, Orbital, Autechre and the Orb are still amazing all these
years later). I love the new revival of 80s type music, Mitch Murder, Com
Truise. I like more poppy modern-rock, but the hard stuff comes across as
trite and angsty, which doesn't resonate with me any more -- but there was a
time when I would have soaked it up like a sponge.

I go back and forth on World Music, Trance (especially Goa), old 78s Swing and
Jazz, Classical (especially Baroque period and older), demoscene music fairly
regularly.

I'll put in an Huun Huur Tu
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0djHJBAP3U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0djHJBAP3U))
live performance and absolutely milk it for weeks and listen to nothing else,
and then I'll be ready for something else. Maybe M83's newer stuff for a
couple weeks.

Shuffling my music collection is annoying because there's too many genres to
make a cohesive listening experience.

But I find that many groups and bands I _really_ like for a period...it ends
up being the only period in their discography that I like, ever.

~~~
colordrops
Are you me? 100% 1:1 with the musical tastes, including Huun Huur Tu. Just out
of curiosity, I will list a few more and see if we still coincide:

Web-of-mimicry style, e.g. Mr. Bungle, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Faun Fables,
Fantomas, John Zorn and other avant-rock-jazz Nu-Jazz/electro-acoustic: Floex,
Hidden Orchestra, Bola, Moon Wiring Club, Alif Tree, Mr. Projectile

~~~
bane
I'm going to say I've never heard of any of these (except for Bola who I quite
like), I did a quick check:

Likes right off the bat: Faun Fables, John Zorn, Floex, Alif Tree, Mr.
Projectile

I think I might like right now, but have to listen more: Moon Wiring Club,

I think could grow on me: most of the rest

Thanks for the list!

Here's some more I like (going through my list): Abakus (great coding music),
AKOV, Alpha Conspiracy, Amon Tobin, Autechre, Bibio, La Bottine Souriante,
BT's more experimental stuff (this Binary Universe is amazing), Crystal Method
- Vegas, The Cure right around Disintigration and All Mixed Up, Deli Spice,
Emiliana Torrini, Cinnamon Chasers, Empire of the Sun, Friendly Fires, Imogen
Heap puts out the occasional amazing song, International Observer, Iris,
Johnny Clegg and all his various bands (Gijem' Beke is one of my all-time
favorite songs), mid-90s Juno Reactor, the recent M83 post-rock stuff is
great, the original Mike Oldfield Tubular Bells, Mree (her covers are great
stuff), The Naked and the Famous, Psy-S (an amazing 80s Japanese Band), Sasha,
Smashing Pumpkins (Gish, Mellon Collie, Siamese Dream, all the recent Solar
Fields music (especially Movements, OMG it's absolutely amazing especially
"Discovering"), Steve Reich's later music, Tangerine Dream has some great
music, Toro y Moi, Cocteau Twins.

------
dragonwriter
> at any age, people with children (inferred from listening habits) listen to
> a smaller amounts of currently-popular music than the average listener of
> that age.

Wait, did you just use listening habits to infer a non-listening habit
variable and then correlate that inferred variable back with listening habits?
Because it sounds like when you unpack that, what it really sounds like you
found is that "people who listen to a higher ratio of (particular not-
incredibly-popular-subset-of-music) to (overall music that they listen to)
listen to proportionally less (incredibly popular music)." Which would seem to
be an obvious conclusion whether the subset of not-incredibly-popular music is
one that you assume correlates to having children or not.

~~~
marssaxman
They looked for people who stream kids' music, then removed the kids' music
from those profiles and compared them against profiles which never contained
kids' music.

------
evanpw
Relevant SMBC: [http://smbc-
comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2253](http://smbc-
comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2253)

------
r00fus
I wish they'd include a graph with "free time" as an axis on that list. When I
had lots of free time, I loved to listen to music.

Also of interest is the rise in popularity of podcasts and other audio
material (audiobooks) - much more available since the iPod era than before.

~~~
QuercusMax
I think it may depend on your work environment. I listen to music all day long
while I'm coding.

------
sharkweek
This really hits home for me. Back in my late high school / early college days
I was obsessing over not only finding new music but being the first to
recommend it to my friends.

Some professor in college made a comment once about how at around his mid/late
20s he stopped putting much effort into finding the latest and greatest bands,
and just kind of got comfortable with what he already knew and it seemed to be
a common thing among his peers.

I vowed to never let this happen to me, but here I am at 29, comfortably
listening to _most_ of the same music I did in college, with little new
addition over the past 3-4 years.

~~~
dfxm12
Back in college, you probably had a lot more free time to seek out new music
to listen to. There are lots on confounding variables. Maybe your budget for
entertainment was such that you could only afford to go to concerts or buy
CD's (compared to going on a vacation, or buying an expensive meal at a trendy
restaurant, or fancy bottle of wine). Maybe you were more willing to go to
"bad" side of town to see a new unpopular new act. Maybe since you've
graduated college, you've found other hobbies that you care more about than
music. We're the same age, and these are some things that I've noticed
happening to me.

According to the article, when you become a parent your music taste stagnates
as well...

------
spacemanmatt
Over 40, still enjoying new albums, artists, and genres. I hear about this a
lot, but it didn't happen for me. I blame being a band student, as well as my
general love of getting into new things.

~~~
baldfat
I have been a kid of the 80s Punk and New Wave era. I never liked Pop Music. I
listen to new Indie music all the time, but Pop Music drives me nuts as much
as it did when I was a teenager.

~~~
kpil
Maybe people learn to apreciate talent and quality more with age? Combine that
less time to find new music, and the case is closed.

And alright, people that wasn't that musicalical to start with probably just
can't be bothered. Given whats on radio I guess that's perhaps the most common
case.

------
vectorjohn
Interesting data. I just disagree with the interpretation. It could be that
teens are just new to the whole concept of music, of course they go to the
first thing they hear about which is the currently popular stuff. Because by
definition it's played in the main stream. That quickly (as the data showed)
changes once they start to think about what they actually like.

It's like, if you were new to programming you don't dive into some obscure
lisp dialect to start off. You probably go with what is currently the most
popular thing, the thing you were most likely to hear about first.

Then as you age, you start being more adventurous and thinking for yourself
about what you like. There is so much music out there, it isn't a one
dimensional slider of bad to good. So with all that diversity, if people are
exploring and making up their own minds, by necessity it won't be "popular"
music.

------
bachmeier
> That’s why the organizers of the Super Bowl — with a median viewer age of 44
> — were smart to balance their Katy Perry-headlined halftime show with a
> showing by Missy Elliott.

I'm 41. I listen to Katy Perry all the time. I've never heard of Missy
Elliott. I can dismiss that by saying maybe I'm not average.

> people with children (inferred from listening habits) listen to a smaller
> amounts of currently-popular music than the average listener of that age

This is one that I have a hard time believing. Now that my son is starting to
listen to music on his own, I get exposed to currently-popular music all the
time. For a long time I only listened to the old stuff. I don't know anyone
for whom that is not true. I don't even understand how that can be true in
principle - is it really the case that being exposed to currently-popular
music causes you to listen to it less?

~~~
smrtinsert
Missy Elliott was big your college years. Katy Perry was for the younger ones
I believe.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Missy Elliott was big your college years.

Not really visibly so for someone who was 41 and had the normal timetable
getting through college; she didn't start to become a big name until the late
1990s, first as a songwriter/producer and later as a solo artist. Someone who
is 41 and graduated from college at 22 would have graduated before her solo
debut, and in the same year as the Aaliyah album for which here work as a
songwriter/producer/feature artist was credited with first bringing her into
the public awareness.

~~~
bachmeier
> she didn't start to become a big name until the late 1990s

That would explain it. I was in grad school at that time. Taking time to do
the laundry was a luxury, to say nothing about listening to music.

------
cardiffspaceman
My buying habits in music have skewed towards pop in my 50's. In my teens,
while I did have Frampton and Fleetwood Mac as anyone did then, those were
gifts and most of my collection was of ELP and Tangerine Dream. So I enjoy
"discovery" but I'm taking a conservative shortcut by buying off the "new"
rack at Barnes and Noble or chance encounters on Conan O'Brian's show, instead
of whatever it was I went by in the record store as a teen. I do own CD's of
ELP and they are imported into my iTunes, but my most important playlist is
the 2000-or-later list.

So I feel like the phenomena in the article have happened to me, but I don't
necessarily exemplify the data.

------
pchristensen
The way I think about it is that music is associated with emotions, people
have a finite number of emotions, and can associate a finite number of songs
with each emotion. Once you "fill up your slots", there's less incentive to
find more music (or rather, it's harder for a new song to earn its way in).
Good luck to any aspiring songwriters looking to unseat "Walking on Sunshine"
from my happy slot, or Baby Mine from the 'love my child' slot, for example.

------
BrainInAJar
I'm not sure that the "Music was better when I was a kid" conclusion follows.
Anecdotally I'm a childfree male in my 30's and while the popularity of the
music I listen to definitely has diverged since I was younger, I'm listening
to new obscure bands, from genres that aren't the same or especially similar
to those from my highschool and college years. I find pop music to be roughly
the same, and I got tired of it.

------
dgallagher
Semi-related topic, NPR put a podcast up earlier today talking about
simplicity vs. complexity in pop songs (4:29):
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2015/04/24/401925095/all-s...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2015/04/24/401925095/all-
songs-plus-one-why-we-like-the-music-we-like)

------
coldpie
You can tell I'm old because it took me longer to decipher that Missy Elliot
tweet's meaning than it did to read the rest of the article :)

------
cJ0th
When do we stop keeping up with popular music? Well, I guess it depends to a
great deal on the day of your birth - seriously! The pop industry is like
every other industry in that its products (songs) are defined by the last game
changing technology. Whenever a new paradigm shift occurs, two things are
given:

1.) incumbents who rely on old technology are not all too creative (and this
for already quite a while). As with other mature products it is not so much
about creativity/expressing yourself but optimizing processes. At this stage
(and many people don't agree with me here) a MBA could become a pop music
producer as everything is set in stone by now. Things just need to get done
causing minimal costs. At this point "pop music sucks"

2.) New artists enter the scene. It is again about making the perfect product.
Every few weeks you hear something really exciting. At this point it does not
matter whether or not you master the new technology. What matters is that you
are truly expressing yourself and this (thanks to technology) in an exciting,
new way. For example, the Beatles weren't great at using the stereo field but
they started to use the "modern studio" as an instrument. A few decades later,
another major change in technology occurred: Producing records in your own
bedroom became affordable. And so Rave music was born. By now, electronic
dance music (at least the currently popular form) has matured. As a result we
have (imo) to listen to shit again.

~~~
baby
Personally I find the new stuff coming from people's bedroom the best in what
electronic I've seen. Reading you I have a hard time understanding if this is
what you're referring as shit music, a few examples:

Madeon, Teemid, overwerk, sound remedy

~~~
cJ0th
> Personally I find the new stuff coming from people's bedroom the best in
> what electronic I've seen.

Yes, I do not disagree. What I am talking about is mainstream music that has
matured. For example, Trance music was exciting when it came from bedroom
studios in the 90s. You could hear individuality. Nowadays it does sound very
same-y because, for instance, every one uses the same presets.

So what I meant was: The kind of music that has been founded by the first
generation of bedroom musicians is boring by now.

If I were to go out on a limb, you could perhaps arguee that the artists
you've named certainly rely on bedroom technology but also have something new:
access to huge online networks. For example, progress in electronic music
would have been slower if there were no youtube tutorials or soundcloud to
find like-mindeded musicians etc.

------
cthalupa
I'm in the latter half of my 20s and am discovering new music at a rate faster
than I have ever before.

Granted, none of this is popular music - the latest discographies I've added
to my collection are some unsigned metal bands from the Middle East - but I'm
curious how this changes when you go from just pop music to music discovery in
general.

~~~
chubot
Which metal bands? I'm in my mid thirties, but in my late twentites I was also
discovering new music I liked at a high rate -- and playing in a metal band,
which helps a lot. Invariably musicians are listening to things that most
people don't; they're on the leading edge.

In other words, I think you can avoid the frozen dad syndrome by hanging out
with musicians :)

~~~
cthalupa
There has been some recent press on AlNamrood, so I went and looked into a
bunch of other bands from the region - basically went to metal-archives.com
and searched by country, and went and grabbed a bunch of stuff off bandcamp

[http://www.metal-archives.com/lists/SA](http://www.metal-
archives.com/lists/SA) [http://www.metal-
archives.com/lists/BH](http://www.metal-archives.com/lists/BH)
[http://www.metal-archives.com/lists/IQ](http://www.metal-
archives.com/lists/IQ)

(The country list feature on MA is pretty awesome! Plan on using it some more
in the future to try and find interesting bands)

------
ashmud
I had a bit of shock when I recently heard my grandmother singing a song
probably from her childhood and realized that much of what I listen to, she
would probably not even consider music. I be curious to see a timeline of
music "ages" (a la Baroque -> Classical -> Romantic), but for more styles than
simply classical music.

~~~
sp332
It's true, my grandmother described some of my music as "just noise". On the
other hand, I had a woman only as old as my mother say that about jazz music,
so maybe it's just what you're used to!

------
kcovia
[http://www.hypem.com](http://www.hypem.com) is a great way to stay on top of
what's "trendy". Quality can be hit or miss, but it is a great way to stay in
the loop.

------
spydum
i suspect there is more to do with music discovery becoming more accessible
today than it was 20 years ago. Nowadays you have online streaming of
seemingly unlimited sources (soundcloud, spotify, pandora, etc). The only
large-scale access to music before the internet was based on retailer
shelfspace, popularity and public broadcast.

I suspect this is the cause of the more-or-less flat line around 33 years old.
Most people older than that dont have familiarity with these new streams of
music discovery which are now available. I suppose we'll see in 10 years, if
that line moves out quite a bit?

~~~
normloman
If spotify et al helped people discover more diverse music, you should see
popularity in teenage listening habits decline, since teens would get exposure
to more diverse artists.

~~~
spydum
i dont think they would decline immediately, peer pressure and societal norms
still push popularity in their face. I'm just saying their divergence from the
mainstream might happen much sooner, and continue into old(er) age, and not
plateau like it seems to on the graphs these folks are showing (look at 33+,
it's relatively flat).

------
SovietDissident
Dern kids and their "Romantic" claptrap. If Jean-Baptiste Lully was good
enough for the French court, it's good enough for me.

------
wnevets
I stopped at the age of 13.

