Music is dying

Great tune :slight_smile: Co-written by the excellent Emiliana Torrini.

Youtube is full of outstanding musicians that have 200-500 clicks per video.
I became a fan of many tiny accounts there over the last years.
You just have to do the work and filter them out

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IMO the video made a valid point that most of us like the familiar over the unusual. I still remember people having a very - letā€™s call it - conservative opinion about the music of the Beatles.

IMO the masses never have been demanding new music or new genres. They appreciate and enjoy what they are used to. That can be tunes from the past, where everybody can chime in or dance instantly.

The problem is that some industries have understood this and exploit it to their advantage. They drown us with so much familiar stuff that many might not even notice that there is more. How often has this industry been successfull to catch us only with a new face, a sexy body movement, a horny lead or background voice, or a beautiful woman lounging in a video? :wink:

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We may not have much new music at all created in 50 years time.
Ive been reading that prediction by so called time travellers :slight_smile:

Music isnā€™t dying, but there has definitively been an inflation of it and decline of craftmanship in popular music.

Thereā€™s great many factors behind it, but I think it all basicaly boils down to the fact that music is much less important to the general listener base than to those who make it. And since the technology to make music has become democraticized everybody who is really into it can be, or at least try to be, a creator of it too.

So outside of popular music or music trying to be popular it has largely become a case where people who are passionate about music make music for people who are passionate about music.

I think music really peaked with portable listening technology, and then started declining as other forms of portable entertainment became viable. I remember back in the days before social media and smartphones people would haul around their portable players. It felt like in the 00s everybody had earplugs all the time. Now itā€™s much rarer to see people listening to music in public. They are instead on social media.

More than auditory animals humans are visual and social animals, so if swiping Tinder, oggling at Instagram or posting at Twitter gives recreation while creating that convenient bubble of looking occupied lest they be harassed By strangers, what role does music have?

The music buff has always been an exception. For most people music has always been background noise, or something you listen to while you drunkenly sway to in search of sex or something you go and experience once in a year for real in some festival. In late modern society music has been filler and a frame for occasions. Now the need for it to be filler is fading and what is left is it being a frame for occasions. People still go to clubs, people still go to festivals, but the music is honestly just a tiny part of it all.

I sometimes feel like the music industry has hacked into this and is almost like playing a game where they try to see how bare you can strip popular music before it becomes too repulsive for the general population. Rap killed the need to sing, dubstep and EDM killed melodies and harmonies, now we have people screaming over trap beats being pushed as the next pop. Yeah sure, a lot of people say contemporary EDM or rap or whatever is bad. But they still go to clubs where it serves itā€™s purpose as background noise and the companies get the royalties. This is because it never really mattered. For the vast majority of the people on this Earth music never really mattered all that much.

Humanityā€™s first music was ritual drumming, and I canā€™t help but to think we are going back to it. Eventualy someone will be able to brand minimal techno as sexy for the vast majority of the people and thatā€™s it then. The full circle. Nothing but drumming. The entire western music tradition might have been just one huge historical anomaly in an extremely stratified society where there were strong forces composed of a group of few exceptional people who thought it was their mission to tell everybody else what is good to listen to. There is a reason why music that is so stripped down, so percussive, so bass heavy is so popular. Itā€™s the most universal form of music there ever was.

And donā€™t worry. There will always be the few freaks who are really into music. EDM didnā€™t kill rest of the electronic genres, rock didnā€™t kill jazz, rap didnā€™t kill opera, pop didnā€™t kill classical, whatever. Secularization didnā€™t kill religions, industrialization didnā€™t kill people longing for nature, modenrization didnā€™t kill mystics.

Heck, music is still so popular that the percentage of people who are really into it might be closer to something like 25-33 percent of the population. There will always be people pushing the limits, exploring harmonies and melodies, trying to combine the old with the new, looking forward to something. They just might now have the status as they used to have once in some mythical past, some tiny sliver of time when musicians were gods on earth.

You just have to think what is it that really matters to you in music. Is it the listens, the attention, the hope of being seen as exciting and sexy, hopes of fame and money? Or is it the pure joy of self-expression, the ability to sculpt wiggly air into something aesthetic, the ability to make yourself and others dance, to trigger at best borderline religious feelings when rhythm, harmony, melody and texture mesh into something that triggers something inexplicable in the brains of those who are really capable of listening?

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Depends on ones definition of music.

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oh come on, that Lā€™il Pump song bangs.

:wink:

(although 808s and people mumbling about takings drugs is pretty much peak ā€œwhat the video is aboutā€ I guess)

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Music is as good as ever and progressing to new places, but music blogs are dead, music criticism is dying / becoming obsolete, music discovery is relegated to personalized streaming music algorithms (often effective, but not transparent and designed around payola) or less than a dozen influential tastemaker publications (no monetary incentive to do serious discovery of unknown artists, caters to pageviews and clicks), streaming music is not artist-friendly or self-sustaining as a revenue model, mp3s are deemed inconvenient and expensive, and thereā€™s little to no middle ground (bandcamp is an exception). so iā€™m not concerned about music, but everything else about the state of music is a bit shaky right now in my opinionā€¦

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Music is a living breathing forceā€¦as old as societyā€¦

The music industry is cancer reducing everything to commodities. Saleable buyable merchandiseā€¦music is not deadā€¦but industry is of the old picean ageā€¦where time was money.

The Aquarian age will change that to time is artā€¦so donā€™t dispareā€¦

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This video is selective facts, confirmation bias garbage.

In 1967 for every Beatles there was a Monkees. For every Diana Ross there was a LuLu.

Now for every Drake there is a Kendrick. For every Chainsmokers there is a LCD Soundsystem or even Bowie.

Donā€™t expect labels and streamers with bottom lines in mind to help anyone be a discerning listener.

Mad respect to Max Martin but seriously eff him. Ikea of pop music. (Sorry Swedes! You obviously do good things too ;))

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Iā€™m with the Grohlster

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Iā€™d much rather be listening to current pop than the Beatles or Foo Fighters tbh.

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Iā€™d rather be hacking my foot off with the blunt end of an Octatrak than listening to the Foo Fighters tbh, but everyone has different taste, and thatā€™s why itā€™s such a wonderful world.

:wink:

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Everlong is a jam.

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I could listen to The Beatles all day long. Still spins my head how ahead of their time a huge chunk of their latter stuff is. Tomorrow Never Knows being a fine example.

Anyway, the state of music today isnā€™t much different to when I started getting into things 20 odd years ago. Thereā€™s still a few borderline mainstream acts that catch my attention but your every day radio stations are still full of muck. I came across an old Now tape (27 I think) and Jesus it was full of shit (that Doop songā€¦ Cringe).

I gave up on radio during my teens. Canā€™t stand it. Iā€™d much rather trawl forums and reviews. I even work through Amazonā€™s recommendations to see it anything is good. I also check Rough Trade monthly for their best of the month list. Usually at least 3 or 4 interesting albums.

Having said that, a little bit of me dies inside every time someone uses the term EDM. I utterly loathe that Americanism, even more so now that itā€™s snow balled into this catch all thing.

Cutting to the chase, I discover just as much new music these days as I always have. Music is fit and healthy to my ears!

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i do wonder if rap/hip hop died many years ago , the more money in it , the more i seem to dislike it.
iā€™m a bit stuck in 90ā€™s era hip hop , public enemy , rakim .
never understood the popularity of tupac, the other oneā€¦ dre ,eminem , snoop etcā€¦ though i liked straight outa compton.

ive listened to recent drake (vocoder , auto tune , 808 , heā€™s only 1 of many other people on ā€˜hisā€™ album ) ā€¦ run the jewels , ā€¦not my thingā€¦ i liked ā€˜this is americaā€™ and the other one it could be a derivative of ā€¦ iā€™m old.

not a fan of foo fighters , red hot chilly peppers , possibly 1 or 2 nirvana tracks ā€¦

You donā€™t have to like the Beatles or the Foo Fighters music to agree with Dave Grohls POV that if you get a bunch of like minded people learning to play together they will have fun, and some of them will have so much fun that they will actually become good > manufactured acts based on reality shows where they are judged so hard that they might give up. Obvious I think? No?

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Worst case scenario music is returning to itā€™s folksy/community origins. Itā€™s mostly becoming so commonplace that itā€™s entering a modest charm of it being a commonplace form of expression. Itā€™s good. Itā€™s wonderful. Everyoneā€™s a musician. We create own little musical communities and share our craft locally with friends- form bonds with other musicians based on our shared love.

Best case: the importance of music(and every other medium of art) is evolving to the, to date, greatest artistic medium: video games.

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Music has never been healthier. Any decade you care to look at since the early 1900ā€™s there has been a generation saying its dying offā€¦ it isnt. Underground techno. dub techno, ambientā€¦ its never been better. Modern pop is terrible, of course it is!! thats because kids with a smartphone glued to their nose arent interested in the content. the fact is that most normal folks that dont really have any interest in production values are always quite happy to go along with the latest rubbishā€¦ to them thats fineā€¦ ignore it.

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I have to say, this is up there in my top least favorite Elektronauts threads ever list. The only thing dying is old people who canā€™t hang with young people.

I have to keep up with the most current popular music all the time because I DJ gigs regularly that require me to do so.

Personally, I prefer making the hotties lose their shit to current music more than playing 90ā€™s music for moms who left their kids with the babysitter for the night. But I do enjoy it all.

I love Drake. Iā€™ve been doing a Drake dance night for several years now in the First Ave. Mainroom, and itā€™s a ton of fun. Hereā€™s a pic from the one we did a couple months ago. These parties always end up being like 80% girls.

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