why is today's popular music so rubbish?

[Shadow Wolf]

The record labels weren't prepared for the internet and didn't respond to it well. In turn they went with increasingly safer sells and processed sounds.
There's also less diversity when it.comes to record labels. There's local independent labels that tend to be scantly known outside the circles of those involved with it, and then there's the few major media companies that bought up damn mear everything else.
And has been pointed out there's actual science behind this and it's so bad even country went pop. And it's not that there's nothing good, it's just many have started to take a do it yourself approach which has helped and hindered the discovery of new music that's good.
But at least metal remains unchanged. Decade after decade it hasn't been killed and remains unchanged.

 

[PureX]

Yeah, the misogynistic pornification of pop culture is really disgusting. The music awards shows are basically just softcore porn to a large extent. I literally sit watching in horror and amazement at how trashy they are. They are literally just acting out sex acts on the stage or it's giant butts in your face. It makes Madonna's infamous Like a Virgin performance look modest (honestly, she looked more foolish than sexy there, rolling around the stage and panting, but whatever). Lol.

Porn is what results when sex becomes about money. Greed poisons everything and everyone it touches and turns it to crap. And because we keep indulging this idiocy as “art” because the greedy pigs that make it tell us we must, our children now think it is art, and that we must indulge it or we’ll be “oppressors of freedom“. Greed is “freedom” according to the capitalists that are exploiting it, and us, for their own gain. And we’ve bought this BS hook, line, and sinker.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

I remember an interview by Wolfman Jack who essentially said that music is actually being made by corporations using formulas based on likes and dislikes where the music is built around those formulas with the intention of creating revenue for both the artists, if you want to call such people artists, and the organizations wanting the profit in the music industry.

Like gaming, people don't take chances with music anymore and goes with whatever is proven and everybody falls suit which is why all music everywhere sounds the same and essentially soulless.

It almost sounds like he was describing the system behind Motown or the golden age of Nashville.

 

[Sand Dancer]

Yeah, the misogynistic pornification of pop culture is really disgusting. The music awards shows are basically just softcore porn to a large extent. I literally sit watching in horror and amazement at how trashy they are. They are literally just acting out sex acts on the stage or it's giant butts in your face. It makes Madonna's infamous Like a Virgin performance look modest (honestly, she looked more foolish than sexy there, rolling around the stage and panting, but whatever). Lol.

It's pretty shallow and base to focus on that stuff. Do they have so little talent that they have to resort to sexual performance?

 

[Firenze]

It's pretty shallow and base to focus on that stuff. Do they have so little talent that they have to resort to sexual performance?

Sex sells, especially in an intellectually immature and sex addicted culture. And what is this 'talent' you speak of?

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Yeah, the misogynistic pornification of pop culture is really disgusting. The music awards shows are basically just softcore porn to a large extent. I literally sit watching in horror and amazement at how trashy they are. They are literally just acting out sex acts on the stage or it's giant butts in your face. It makes Madonna's infamous Like a Virgin performance look modest (honestly, she looked more foolish than sexy there, rolling around the stage and panting, but whatever). Lol.

What time period are you thinking of when this wasn't a thing?

I mean, take the Beach Boys: they made their name with songs that served as the soundtracks to movies that were basically just an excuse to have teenage girls in bikinis on screen.

I can't count how many misogynistic songs there were from the 70s that would bother my mom so much that she'd immediately change the radio station as soon as they would come on.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Sex sells, especially in an intellectually immature and sex addicted culture. And what is this 'talent' you speak of?

Sex addicted culture? That definitely isn't the prudish and sex shamed amd starved America. (try Australia or Germany if you want to see a culture more sexually engaged than America).

 

[Sand Dancer]

Sex addicted culture? That definitely isn't the prudish and sex shamed amd starved America. (try Australia or Germany if you want to see a culture more sexually engaged than America).

US is weird in that it has the Puritan "ethic," which brings on the madonna/**** dichotomy. When normal sexuality can't be expressed, it comes out in negative and excessive ways. People rebel using sex. In Europe, where they have a healthier view of sex and the human body, it's not as bad. In Muslim countries it's worse, but they chop limbs off or "honor" kill females for the slightest "sexual" infraction to keep people in line.

 

[ADigitalArtist]

Popular music means common for the common denominator. It means the most produced for the widest audience. It's never been great. It's almost always been written by someone outside the singer with commercialism in mind (including crowd favorites like Elton John) and there's always been new technology involved or new marketing people hate because they percieve it as product over art. You've always had to go out of your way to sift grain from chaff. It's easier to listen to old music because some other passionate person has already done the sifting for you, because there was a similar ratio of crap back then.

So far, nothing new under the sun.

Now what is actually different today is the rise of self published music. Because of streaming apps you don't need to have a music deal or publisher to get out there, which both means the underground movement is bigger than ever, because more and more artists don't have to put up with industry crap to reach their audience, but it also means the volume (by number not sound) of music has increased. Because you don't need to impress a publisher to get music out.

What that means is that there is more music out there, both good and bad, than ever before. But instead of talent agencies and publishers handing you what the industry thinks is best, you get to network with likeminded listeners and find it in the ocean of digital services like YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, tiktok etc.

Networking takes effort, so there's still all the generic radio to be had. But if you're only looking for music in the same ways you did in prior decades, you're gonna have a bad time.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Popular music means common for the common denominator.

Actually popular culture stuff is basically what's massed produced. This includes many of the greats like Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.
And older music was better. It wasn't nearly identical, as formuliac or safe. It's just gotten more homogenized and crappy recently. There is actual science behind this.

Scientists Just Discovered Why All Pop Music Sounds Exactly the Same

Anyone who listens to pop radio regularly has probably been hit with this realization at one point or another – a ton of pop music sounds very similar. It seems like grandpa logic, but a growing body of research confirms what we all suspect: Pop…

www.mic.com

 

[The Hammer]

It is rubbish because we are getting old.

This ^^

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Research from a decade ago found music is becoming not only more homogenized but louder as well. This means "its too loud" isn't an issue of age anymore either. (i heard about this on RF back then).

The Million Song Dataset - Science Concludes Modern Music Too Loud, All Sounds The Same

Crotchety old men seem to have won this argument.Modern pop music is too loud and does sound all the same, just like angry old types have been saying for 70 years. A team from Spain analyzed music from a 55 year period, using an archive known as the Million Song Dataset, and found that songs...

www.science20.com