100% agree.
(even though I’m turning 45 next month)
(but I’m still constantly buying 4-6 new albums per month)
There’s this saying that culture is repeating and imitating itself in some 20-30 year cycles; right now we’re in the 90s again.
I read some book a while ago somehow making the point that because of the internet and its huge archive of everything being so easily accessible, there’s less of a desire to venture into new areas. Most of nowadays popular art - in a very broad sense - therefore has this strong element of retrospection in it. All this lofi production style or vaporwave or constantly referencing old material comes to mind. This is all in very broad strokes of course, sure there’s new ideas being constantly developed.
I don’t know, somehow I felt this was related to the topic here.
By the way, it’s really exciting to see these ideas being discussed more frequently around here, same with the minimalism thread!
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i don’t think any music genre was destroyed.
any genre can’t last forever and outgrows itself.
yes, even my favorite genres do so 
actually, what i see in 2010s is the afterlife of many genres that normally should rest in peace.
like afterparty, but afterlife.
the over saturation by distribution and the end of the locality that gave its unique creative expression due to the “global connection”…detriot techno, Berlin, etc…those are marketing schtick at the moment.
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Show me somebody that wasnt influenced by somebody from the late 70’s 80’s then
Notice something. Most influences are from that period.
I reckon people making dance music albums peaked in the 90s. But then dance music hasn’t really been about albums for most of it’s history.
I also think you can’t see what are the things with lasting legacy that are happening around you when you’re IN that time necessarily. Also, in the 90s the dance/electronic scene was much smaller and the bar to making that kind of music higher, so it was easier for it to coalesce around a smaller number of releases. Now there are hundreds of dance/electronic albums out every month, so it’s more fractured.
I guess the same happened with Rock and Roll a generation earlier - it diversified and grew bigger and splintered into different scenes.
final thought: The Prodigy Experience is better than either “The Jilted Generation” or “Fat of the Land”. Definitely than “Fat of the Land”.
source: I am well old.
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I think that’s more to do with the way the business has changed (lower revenues, less attention paid to charts by the public, major labels more risk averse, bigger division between underground and mainstream.) than it is to do with declining quality of music in general though.
Anyway, that last Bieber album has some great production on it.
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rock and roll died because it stopped to be the devil’s music.
(sad, but this also happened with sex & drugs)
That! Cos’ if you are, chances are that pretty much everything has peaked for you in the 90s and early 2000s. With regards to your original question: I think that’s highly subjective. One thing that’s certainly changed is that there doesn’t seem to be a concept of “tribes”, like mods, skinheads, punks, etc., as defining categories of youth culture anymore and that in my perception has changed the role music plays in (young) peoples’ lives quite a bit.
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rock and roll ain’t dead!
exactly. and that’s not just your perception.
music is not that cool anymore as it used to be, the question „what music do you like“ is not used anymore for any kind of identification, and will probably never be again.
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undead, i would say
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I pretty much agree with all of that, except experience better than jilted, no way 
I think like you say, all genres are affected by the current state of the music industry, the young are being force fed banal pop music by the same producers, r&b and hip hop full of swearing and gang culture cos it’s cool man (listen to a hip hop record in the charts and most of the words are missing), guitar bands that are just regurgitating the Beatles, the kinks, the stone roses etc
Yes there is some great new electronic music but it won’t become a classic album, and regarding nostalgia, I know more about new music than most of the young people I know, I don’t think the interest is there anymore
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forgot to mention.
album as a format is not dead yet, but definitely doomed.
and concept album as a format already became ultra-exotic and extremely rare.
and it’s not surprising, because current music is not purposed for multiple/repeated by design. which is, again, not surprising in the situation of overproduction.
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re: hip hop. I really think the industry has intruded on this a bit too. The major labels got all litigious because since everyone stole all of recorded music on napster they really really need to monetise defending all the rights they own.
Because of that, the idea of having big samples on tunes for lower level artists is just too expensive - Kanye West can afford it. A lot of people can’t. I think this has contributed to everything just being distorted 808 kicks and snare rolls tbh.
on the other hand: I’m old. Kids SHOULD be listening to something I think all sounds the same and is slightly mystifying!
(edit)… although it’s not like there’s no brilliant hip hop happening in the last few years…
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A bit off topic but I’m sick of listening to vocalists trying to sing in a ‘cool new way’ not pronouncing words properly, trying to stand out, Tom Walker is one that comes to mind and a plethora of female vocalists, plus autotune/ melodyne or whatever has been done to death in the charts, even on Madonna’s latest I can’t even tell what she’s singing half the time, and it seems it has to be on every hip hop vocal, Cher has a lot to answer for !!!
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I just turned 50 - sometimes act like a teenager and listen to anything and everything but not with the same attitude or wonder as I had back in the (70’s) 80’s and 90’s. I am typically hyper critical and find it difficult to be surprised and engaged by new music but that is also partly because I don’t understand what the fuck is going on anymore… and I am not impressed by complexity, trickery and tomfoolery in audio production.
I have an idea it has more to do with impetus or drive (in terms of social connectivity), attitude and the (relatively cheap generic sounding) tools available these days. It’s also easy to make and record music these days and to get it sounding pro. Even 20 years ago it wasn’t easy - technically and financially it was a nightmare for the majority. Nevertheless, technology isn’t always a great thing and I believe you can clearly hear it has flattened out a lot of the magic to the point of most music sounding generic across virtually all genre’s. Sometimes I feel like I am living in a deftly triggered sample pack.
There is also the argument that you don’t know when you are in an ‘era’ until it has passed and you can reassess what happened according to the current situation. Maybe in 20 years time we’ll be looking (listening) back at 2015/20 and thinking how incredible the music was.
I really hope so.
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If you can’t find good new releases to listen to the problem is with you. I’m in my 30s and recognise that a lot of stuff is no longer for me, but still feel like we’re living in an incredibly creative and bountiful time for music.
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That wasn’t really the crux of the question though, I agree there is a lot of great new music, I listen to something new everyday, I rarely listen to the older stuff, but it’s very rare I hear an album these days and think wow !!! A lot of today’s stuff is just gradual improvment, take autechre or Aphex for example, a lot of people regard these two as the pinnacle of electronic music for sound design etc, some of its brilliant, some not but it’s a refinement of a sound they developed in the 90’s. The classic albums sold big because it was new, no one had heard some of this stuff before, most of the modern stuff is just a very gradual improvement on what has gone before
If rock isn’t dead, then it’s dying. There aren’t a lot of examples of good rock music in a while (to me, at least). Rick Beato on YouTube has a lot of interesting videos about what he thinks has sapped the life out of rock music.
I’m kicking myself, but somehow I haven’t really listened to much Aphex Twin (and I’m in the waning months of my 30s). I’m going to fix that today.