Why is modern music so awful

[ROTMetro]

Modern business practice doesn't allow for value creation, only sucking out profits. MBAs, they're not just for destroying music.

There's still plenty of people making music around me. With rock dead it seems youngsters are now discovering making rock music (influenced by mystical t-shirts at Target, relics hinting at a lost golden era that had all the answers and something called rock) so that might get interesting.

[vurt]

rock is dead? again?
i remember the late 80s when dance killed rock.
the grunge resurrected rock, and so on...

[ghettosynth]

rock is dead? again?
i remember the late 80s when dance killed rock.
the grunge resurrected rock, and so on...

There's a pretty good video on how rock is making a slight comeback. I think that it's a Rick Beato video, but maybe not. At any rate, this one is.

[Bunny_boy]

Those two look like they are the representatives of today's youth movements

[_leras]

rock is dead? again?
i remember the late 80s when dance killed rock.
the grunge resurrected rock, and so on...

Yes didn't you read the title? Modern Rock is Awful (apparently)

But luckily the thread is based on bs from a bunch of fogeys that haven't heard rock since nirvana, or electronic music since Sasha and digweed.

[vurt]

But luckily the thread is based on bs from a bunch of fogeys that haven't heard rock since nirvana, or electronic music since Sasha and digweed.

as an official grandfather, and therefore fogey, i resent the implication we all have very limited tastes!!

[mjolnir]

I will level with you guys; I really like Beato's videos and rants. I am only a little bit younger than him (in terms of decades), and he seems to be spot on, right on topic, right on target. He really seems to have been paying attention to the history WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING. It might be easy for naysayers to criticize him if they weren't born yet or out weren't out of school yet. But what he says seems to match the history books and the recording engineering college books and a lot of artist interviews over the decades that I've witnessed too. Even the consumer angle he mentions with the old school CD prices matches up. Clearly, he was paying attention. I had some music industry business classes at college and what he's been saying matches what they taught us too. So essentially, thanks for the Beato videos. He's really being helpful, and he emphasizes witnessing change; he's not really cynical. Peace be with y'all, it's just like, my opinion, man.

[_leras]

But luckily the thread is based on bs from a bunch of fogeys that haven't heard rock since nirvana, or electronic music since Sasha and digweed.

as an official grandfather, and therefore fogey, i resent the implication we all have very limited tastes!!

"a bunch of fogeys that haven't heard rock since nirvana, or electronic music since Sasha and digweed."

[mjolnir]

[deleted]

[mjolnir]

[deleted]

[mjolnir]

[deleted]

[Sullivan_]

Oh damn, I posted the OG post on a now lost account, didn't knew it would cause all this interesting debate, I didn't read the 21 pages of it but few of them.

For myself I don't know much about music before 19th and after 20th centuries, and around the 2010s and forward. I'm formerly a classical music pianist and been involved into the Industrial scene very young. I do enjoy some more modern rock/pop like Apoptygma Bezerk or Klimt 1918 (I'm not sure if they are good reference) or some other artists I wouldn't dare to talk about in public. I do enjoy largely Russian dance music or Asian pop, but at the end, it gets like irreal due to the forms: mostly 2:30s songs, the synth sounds is non organic to me, etc, I enjoy also "dark house" such Park Hye Jin or upperclass' work.

I myself make french pop, but with an archaic touch, a bit of post-industrial and "glam literary" impressions, which I hope won't make you think "hey, this guy is complaining about modern music, but he does modern music himself."

True, the debate is societal matter, with the medias, streaming platforms, etc, people are creative yes, but it's just the format to correspond those medias and platforms that is bothering and how it has been the influence and chain effect from the birth of streaming on the internet to today, TV lives were OK before that. It also affects our daily lives, it's what we are listening to (for most of us?) and it's about complying to modernity not only in music and art matter, but regarding how our society is evolving, etc.

[Krakatau]

How much do you think, does the industry impose this assertion : make a maximum of profit for a minimum of efforts ?

[_leras]

How much do you think, does the industry impose this assertion : make a maximum of profit for a minimum of efforts ?

Err... Almost always.

If they think something can level up they may spend extra to hype it up.

In electronic music artists are basically expected to have fully formed well produced tracks. Some labels may remaster with their own team, but not that many these days.

[BONES]

i remember the late 80s when dance killed rock.

I don't remember that. I don't remember dance music ever being half as huge as rock was in its Halcyon Days. Rock died but dance music didn't kill it, not over here, anyway.

"a bunch of fogeys that haven't heard rock since nirvana, or electronic music since Sasha and digweed."

But that's the thing, it is so hard now to hear anything newer than Nirvana. Honestly, it is so much harder to find good new music today than it was 30 years ago. (I don't know who Sasha and digweed are.)

Anyway, what is "modern music"? To my ears neither Rock nor most forms of electronic music have changed much in the last 30+ years. In fact, in the mainstream there seems to be a deliberate avoidance of trying anything new. It's simply safer to continually regurgitate the same, tired old garbage, year after year, decade after decade.

I listen to a lot of new Post Punk music and none of the young bands, be it Actors or Moving Units or Creux Lies or Whispering Sons or A Projection, are doing anything new and/or fresh. It's not terrible, in fact a lot of it is quite good, but I don't know how you'd differentiate it from Post Punk from the 1980s, except maybe by the higher production values.

Then there are the old-timers who are still around, or back together, who often show these newer artists up for the try-hard wannabes they are. The March Violets, for example, released the absolute best PP album of 2024, possibly the best of the decade. It's f**king brilliant! Meanwhile, newer bands like Actors seem to disappear further up their own fundamental orifices with every new release.

Of course, with the other genre I have an interest in - EBM/Industrial - that's all just gone. Bands have evolved out of the genre in several different directions and everyone else has lost sight of what the genre was. There are probably only half-a-dozen albums of any value from the last 20 years (and half of those are ours).