When was the last time you heard Elvis? Or the Beach Boys? Or any male singer from the 40s and early 50s other than Sinatra?
Sirius XM just bumped their 60s channel up out of the bottom of the dial in preference to pop. The 70s and 80s channels are still down at the bottom. That speaks to the audience.
I remember xm used to have a 40s and 50s channel. Of course that was 20 years ago in its infancy. IANAL, but an interesting case could be made that by the ‘public’ (radio) no longer broadcasting music that they are no longer asserting their copyright. Similar to trademarks that are no longer defended. If there are satellite and or terrestrial radio stations playing something the copyright expires.
Aside from movies that are set in those time periods I doubt it.
I don’t think the Beatles or the stones resonate with millenials and younger much. I’m in my late 20s, grew up on classic rock and still fairly fond of Pink Floyd and Rush. I’ve seen Keith Richards perform live. By all means the songs are good but they mean very little to me. I’m probably top 1% in terms of classical rock knowledge within my age peer group.
Franchise movies made by or targeted to boomers, sure, but I think it’ll slow down quite a bit over the next couple decades.
When I was a kid, I learned about classic rock through the radio because that’s all my dad played on the radio. This isn’t the case anymore. Now you aren’t limited to a few stations all favoring the most mainstream subsets of music.
And that’s cool. Music has never been so diverse. The accessibility of artists is so strong and there’s lots of great talent
Music from 1965 to 1975 has simply never gone out of style. In the 1970s you never heard any music 50 years old.
I was listening to the radio today, and the current hit has the legendary lyrics "A B C D E" (yes, saying the alphabet) and the singer had to have the autotune turned up to 11 to apparently get on key.
Though I do have to admit Gloria Estefan had a "hit" where the words were "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 I'm gonna keep on counting" (please stop!).
It's easy to point at bad (subjective) songs today and compare them to good (subjective) songs in the past, but remember there was still a ton of garbage music back then, it just got lost to time. There will be hits from every decade that will continue on into the future, but most will be largely forgotten.
The issue for contemporary music is not that it's bad. Pop music has always been 99% bad. The issue is that it's not possible to create successful new IP anymore. We see this across entertainment. It used to be that a disc jockey in a mid-sized market could find a record, spin it a bunch, create a regional sensation that would eventually break through nationally. That just cannot happen anymore. Instead, there are YouTube and Spotify niches that go deep like Lofi Chill Beats to Study To or whatever, but they can't break out and grow. They just keep getting the same audience but deeper instead of broader.
Because even the biggest music stars right now are nothing compared to the reach of even the middling music stars from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It's not even close no matter how you count it: touring numbers, sales numbers, broadcast numbers, etc.
Think about the command that groups like Van Halen, Journey, Depeche Mode or Metallica had at their zenith. Nothing comes even remotely close today--and I'm not counting groups like the Beatles, Queen, or Led Zeppelin that are absolute legends.
And it's not like these groups were a rare occurrence.
Personally, I think it's just a matter of too much competing entertainment rather than the modern musicans sucking. Video games were compelling when you had to go to an arcade and pump quarters into them. Once they entered the home there was never any question that they were going to absolutely devour the spare time of teenagers who were always the primary driver of pop culture.
I’m a fan of acts like Poppy, Joywave, Hop Along, Lost in Kiev, 100 gecs, and Sir Sly to name a random mix. They’re pretty successful. They’re not super stars and probably won’t be. But why would they? They’re doing their own thing and it’s not going to appeal to most people but it’s weird and it’s cool and good.
I don’t see why you would label this a problem. There’s no such thing as too much competition for art
I am a 40 year old man, so obviously, I am totally out of touch and lame, but I have not heard of any of those groups except Poppy, who I haven't listened to since ~2016. The algorithm on YouTube stopped recommending her and she completely disappeared from my life.
However, I find it impossible to believe that my dad at age 40 would not have heard of Madonna, Salt 'N' Peppa, Ace of Base, Milli Vanilli , etc. Even my dad in his peak lame years would have been aware of the Milli Vanilli scandal as it was happening.
Oh, well check out poppy. She does metal and grunge now. And unlike her earlier stuff, is just unironically good. Still does weird videos every now and then.
My point is more so that these artists are better without striving for mass appeal. It’s ok that they’re not mega stars. They’re doing just fine.
> It’s ok that they’re not mega stars. They’re doing just fine.
But are they really doing fine?
My "go to" example for this kind of thing was the lead singer from one of the metal groups based in Southern California. They had just done a West Coast tour and then did the festival circuit. The interviewer asked him when he was going to tour again. His response: "Well, I think we maybe came out about even from the touring. And now my tattoo business is now pretty much booked up for the next 12 months. So, probably not for at least a year. Maybe we'll probably play some local shows every now and then."
That doesn't sound like an industry doing "just fine" to me.
Among other trends radio stations stopped giving large numbers of DJ’s freedom to select individual songs and thus allow for organic growth in song popularity across regions. While susceptible to a payola it did introduce people to a lot of new music from relative unknowns.
Honestly the reality is there are few to no DJ’s at radio stations anymore unless you’re listening to college-run stations. But outside of colleges? Hell half those stations are running pre-recorded “DJ’s,” ads, and playlists built from the billboard 100.
Most radio has been pretty much the top 40 to my memory of the last couple decades. However, there used to be more independent radio stations which at least played the top 40 of a different style. And there were more shows even on those stations that broke out of the box. Now I swear the company that bought the companies that bought up all the stations has decided that that was way too much variation and put an end to it. I've got at least 4 country stations I can get on my radio that play the exact same songs as each other until whoever is in charge releases another set. I don't know if it's gotten worse in the last 5 years because I gave up listening to the radio.
Now I've got a music app that mixes up the smaller, more specific genres I prefer. Basically the drop in the quality of radio caused me to go to streaming which has caused me to develop a taste for less common subtypes of music. If country radio had continued to play anything besides guys with fake southern accents singing about girls in cut-offs and trucks, I'd probably still be listening.
Because it isn't caused by the moral degeneracy of the youth but by media landscape changes driven by a combination of technological change (the Internet) and government policy choices (not breaking up the YouTube monopoly, not creating a compulsory streaming license).
“Kids these days” is wrong because it falsely posits that different generations are more or less moral or lazy or discerning when in fact kids are always dumb and then get smarter as they mature, which leads to an illusion of degeneracy. Your position appears to be that change itself is impossible even at an economic, technological, or political level? I don’t understand what you’re arguing for. Obviously things do change and quite a lot too. It’s just that human nature does not change on the scale of generations.
It's a "kids these days" problem in that the same "XYZ thing in the past was better" trend has happened time and time again over history. Music production and distribution isn't even close to being as new as tech, so any changes there feel more unique even though it's already happened in the past times before.
Heard the Kreepa track 1000 times and didn't realize it was sampled. Amazingly one of the Shangri-Las is still recording recently. I wonder what they make of what's happened to their song? Unbelievable. No possible way to predict that over 50 years after they recorded that track it would be cut and remixed into a catchy 30 second chunk of rap and played billions of times to weird videos that people spend a dozen hours a day watching on their handheld gawk machines.
Some interesting tidbits about this song, if you're interested, from its Wikipedia page [0]:
- The song was written by 2 people of Armenian heritage. One was the Pulitzer-winning author William Saroyan; the other, Ross Bagdasarian, is better known for his creation, Alvin and the Chipmunks.
The melody is based on an Armenian folk song and the song is based on the Armenian custom of generously plying guests with fruits, sweets, etc.
- The song became a hit when it was recorded by Rosemary Clooney (George Clooney's aunt). When the song was presented to her, she hated it and only sang it because band-leader Mitch Miller threatened to fire her if she didn't record it (this [1] was the result and, yes, that rollicking keyboard is, in fact, a harpsichord).
This is wrong. In the 1970s there was for instance a big revival of ragtime, popular music from 50-60 years ago (then). Then there was of course the blues and various other folk revivals, which had a tremendous influence on all that 1965-75 music which is still popular.
But of course there were both technical and copyright reasons they didn't just re-release recordings from the 20s!
It's pretty interesting if you go back 50 years from the 1960's and 70's you wind up in the middle of World War I, just before that you have things like Igor Stravinsky causing riots in 1913 Paris because of how extreme his music was.
I think major reason earlier music was not as popular was due to how people consumed music. For a long time the only way a lot of people would get to experience music would be to attend concerts, which was a relatively privileged thing to be able to do. Records were one of those things that didn't really take off until post world war I.
There were a ton of technological changes to electric instruments that only became possible in the last half of the 20th century. People aren't making music on wonky synthesizers anymore because they don't have to, and the style of pop music doesn't need to reflect those tech limitations.
We shouldn't forget the Jackson Five hit where they say "A B C, 1 2 3". When it's pop, especially bubblegum, the lyrics tend towards being a bit dumb and repetitive.
you can be really reductive about most genres of music if you try hard enough.
most western choral music is pretty repetitive lyrically, because there are only so many ways to sing about how much you love God that people appreciate. and I say this as someone who did that kind of music for years.
We'll still be putting The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Zeppelin etc. as the soundtrack to these movies.
I think they are worth the money.