When did music start to suck?

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I dunno, grunge killed hair metal and that in and of itself redeems grunge.
On the otherhand, grunge hurt thrash metal quite a bit (after riding on it's coat tails with many grunge bands opening for thrash bands), so that certainly takes a bit of the shine off of it.

I'm not really much of a music fan, but when I posted earlier, I was talking about the first time I was ever exposed to music that was "current" and "hip" at the time. It was at high school, and the fellow students that were listening to this kind of music seemed really "sheepish" the way they were saying stuff like "all kids listen to this". Before then I only listened to Big Shiny Tunes CDs, and a local 80s/90s adult contemporary station. New music seemed really repetitive, with every song sounding the same, certain songs being sped up for no reason, with the vocals becoming slightly chipmunkish, robotic autotune, gratuitous explicit language (even though most of it was either implied or censored), teen/child pop stars acting like sluts who seemed like they were managed by PedoBear, sampling from/remakes of older, better songs, annoying local commercials that cost 1 cent and tried too hard to be "hip" and "cool" and ended up being 5 to 30 years behind the current target audience (like how The Emoji Movie felt to every parent who was forced to watch it by their kids, but even worse), FOUR live-action Alvin and the Chipmunks movies, watered-down "kidz bop"/"radio Disney" versions of popular songs that were still inappropriate for kids, even after the censorship, rushed nostalgia ("remember the good old days from 2009?")..... (sorry, this really bothers me very much)

a musician acquaintance of mine who plays guitar in a metal band hold the opinion that music reached its peak in the 70s and the 80s was an absolute disater. Prolly because synths replaced most other instruments and you could basically use an 8 track recorder and run a drum machine through the whole song and add a few synth parts while letting it play.

I actually am fond of 80s music, I like it alot. so it's subjective. Today's music is zombie music imo, too compressed and heavily autotuned. People just don't make music as melodic as it's used to be... It's a $$ machine.

Around the 1990s, moreso around 1993. Hasn't recovered since

But 36 Chambers came out in '93, that was a great year and lots of genre defining classics followed.

I don't think music ever started to suck.

There have always been amazing musicians in every era, even if they aren't mainstream.

I prefer music from the 80s or before…..but there’s good music in every decade.

It's really weird, when I was younger it was always accepted that music from the 80s was crap. It was referred to as "The decade that style forgot". Now it's fetishised and emulated much like the 60s and 70s were.

For my money, even music from the 80s that I like, Talking Heads, bits of Paul Simon and Bob Dylan - that stuff suffers from the production values of the era, I seek out live recordings that have a bit less polish.

I think people mainly mean popular music, the stuff you hear on the main radio stations, when they talk about modern music sucking. There's always interesting stuff happening if you're prepared to venture out into the wilderness and find it.

But it definitely gets harder as you get older to invest as much time and energy into finding and enjoying music as you get older. I think that's a big part of the reason that whatever age you are, you tend to think music peaked in your late teens/early twenties and has been rubbish ever since.

I would agree with the above.

I guess there’s a strong “nostalgia” component with the music I enjoy. I associate it with a “different, simpler” ethos, though in actuality, the ethos was similar to what it is now. I probably just incorporate the good aspects, say, of the 60s, and ignore the bad aspects.

It's all been downhill since 1598, when Jacopo Peri's opera "Dafne" started the slide from proper, dignified choral counterpoint to witless caterwauling prima donnas, crappy modern instruments like the violin, crude superficial "orchestration" to disguise the lack of real tunes, and technical nonsense like so-called "chord progressions." I blame Monteverdi: he was perfectly capable of doing the old, good stuff, but he sold out for the applause of screaming teenyboppers brainwashed by La Scala.

I can't stand most '80s pop and rock, and I was a small child then. I carried on ignoring mainstream music through the '90s, but later looked back and thought that decade was actually pretty good. Since then- more and more, there are two sides to 21st century music. Nothing interesting EVER makes it into the charts now, but that's not because nothing interesting is being recorded. Far from it. But you have to turn off Radio 1 (or the equivalent in your country) and go exploring to find it.

February 3, 1959.

Mid 1980s.

Check out 'Wake Me Up Before You Go Go' by Wham.

Says it all, baby.

But crossover wasn't even invented until the mid-80s.

End of 1980.

The day the music died.

Shortly after 12:55 am on February 3, 1959, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Jiles Richardson (the Big Bopper), and local pilot Roger Peterson were killed instantly when the aircraft crashed into a frozen cornfield five miles northwest of Mason City, Iowa airport shortly after takeoff.  The three musicians, who were ejected from the fuselage upon impact, suffered severe head and chest injuries.  Holly was 22 years old.

I think everyone gets to a point where beyond the age of say 30-35 we stop listening to new music, coming to the conclusion it isn't as good as it was back in our 'day'. Everyone is the same like this. It's happened for ages, and will no doubt continue to.

What would Tyler Durden say...