When did music start to suck?

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I've never been much of a fan of most mainstream music...

There is a lot of good music, but it would seem most of it is not really mainstream.

Here is a video about the topic:

why do people care about modern pop music when there is so much better stuff out there .

Why is this being posted in the film/TV thread?

2013. That's when everything became way too electronic.

What *didn't* suck were the Beatles, Queen, Bobby Darin, Beethoven, Mozart.

But did we all think the music of our teen years was fabulous, and get all turned on when we hear it again?

1979 was the year when all the geniuses of the 1970's lost their creative flair and started to produce very market oriented music.

there have been many gems since by other musicians, but the bulk of modern music to me sounds uninspiring to me.

I think it kind of double dipped. It got bad in the early 90s with cheesy rap music. Then got better as the 90s went on. Then got bad again in the 2000s with more cheesy rap music.

It's all been downhill since 1750. Oh, Johann Sebastian, we miss you...

More seriously, I've always been puzzled by how a song (or a dance move, or a celebrity) is the Best Thing Evar one year, and like soooo lame and embarassing five years later. Was it actually good then? is it actually bad now? If our opinion on it HASN'T changed, are we admirably resistant to groupthink or just stupidly nostalgic? If it HAS changed, are we more discerning now or are we just fickle?

I think it is hard to have much patience for the lowest-common-denominator pop of a younger generation. At their age, many of us were just fine with the equivalent music marketed for our own tastes. Either our tastes have broadened since, or else we prefer our own generation's "manfactured pap" thankyou very much.

That said, the hit-factory side of the industry has been getting steadily more dominant since The Monkees back in the 60s. If not before. Probably best to regard it as a circus freakshow that's irrelevant to the greater body of current music. I didn't like most of the music they played on the radio when I was young, but it turns out there was plenty of good music going on, both underground and in the lower reaches of the charts.

Who Knows?

When MTV started playing terrible shows more than music videos.

Ok but why watch mtv in the first place, they have never played the best music.

From what I remember, MTV did used to have a fairly random rotation of songs/videos and some interesting bands would come on; especially on their side channel MTV2.

Anyway, I won't say MTV is solely to blame, but that seemed to be as a good enough a marker as any for the shift in music gradually starting.

I think a second phase of this trend was the arrival of American Idol.

Otherwise, I do think good music has been produced this whole time and it's out there for those looking for it; fortunately we now have the Internet. It's just that fairly banal music gets heavily promoted in major media events.

This and this. Especially today more than ever, music is completely disposable. People don't want to buy CDs anymore, they don't even want to buy MP3s, they just want to stream the latest hit songs, or whatever "classic hits" Pandora spoonfeeds them. There's a lot less money for artists and record producers to make, so they're more content with taking the path of least resistance and rehashing the same-old, same-old every year.

Even the real music fans are disappearing. Concerts are still doing okay it seems, but local shows, you'll be lucky if it's more than just the bands who are playing and their girlfriends. I remember in highschool (2002ish) the local punk shows used to be pretty packed. Nowadays, a good turnout is pretty rare.


I was going to say something along the same lines. I listen to WGVU's Oldies station on the AM a lot, and for as many great songs as they play, there's still plenty of stinkers that I would rather forget. Even some bands I really love had a song or two that I just can't stand.

I'd say around 1991, when grunge came on the scene.

Mainstream music has sucked for a while...I prefer to direct my searching elsewhere. There is certainly some good music out there, it just doesn't come on the radio.