number of songs added to my music library, by year of release
I‘ve been tracking developments in popular music for over 60 years. And although my ‘ratings’ are necessarily subjective, they seem largely consistent with the assessments of many others who have been following pop music culture for decades.
Most musicologists seem to acknowledge the 1960s as the ‘golden age’ of rock music. My sense is that this was the result of a lot more cross-genre and cross-label collaboration, along with some impressive new developments in music technology (anyone else remember mono records?)
And then there was another, smaller burst of well-composed music in the mid-1970s as more synthesizers and multi-track recording enabled more sophisticated production and asynchronous song development and recording — the ‘layering’ of composed music. I’ve called it the “Yacht Rock” era, because a lot of the hits of the time were filled with mellow longing melodies and lyrics, with lots of rich string and synthesizer harmonies, and quite a few were about the freedom of being on the ocean.
And then everything seemed to fall apart. The 1980s music scene gave us disco, punk, and hip-hop. Music was stripped down and increasingly repetitious, lyrics were simplified, and often stolen or ‘sampled’ from other songs. The music “industry” clearly knew that dumbed down, derivative music, just like the dumbed down, derivative movies of the time, were cheaper to make and captured a larger audience than more complex offerings. Of course, I’m an old geezer and very biased; YMMV.
In the late 1980s I almost gave up entirely on popular music. Only my kids kept me listening.
The 1990s gave us grunge and rap. But it was also the start of a quiet revolution and the emergence of independent artists and studios. Most noticeable about this revolution, IMO, was a surge in the production of music written and sung by women. The Lilith Fair women reasserted the importance of skilful composition and reintroduced nuance and reflection in song lyrics.
This dramatic shift in gender balance increased again in the 2000s, as buyers rebuffed the formulaic, patriarchal music pushed by the music oligarchy in favour of music that was not only sung by women, but written, backed, and produced by women artists as well. New technologies enabled “kitchen table” production of high-quality music. The patriarchic music oligarchy refused to acknowledge this, and more and more listeners found their music online and through networks of friends, rather than what they heard “on the radio”.
The patriarchy continues to this day, with a disproportionate number of songs pushed to us on recommendation engines still being written and performed by men. Still today fewer than 1/5 of popular songs produced by major studios are written by women (considerably more are performed by women), about the same percentages as in the 1950s. And quite a few of the songs attributed to women writers in recent decades are for songs ‘headlined’ by those women, with male writers also credited. Long way still to go. Only 2% of oligopoly-produced songs are produced by women. The result is an enormous drag on creativity, innovation, variety, and quality in ‘western’ popular music.
Giant corporations are wrecking the arts, especially music and film, just as they are wrecking other industries in pursuit of profit over quality. To them, musicians are just a product to sell, use up, and then throw away. Music is a tough gig, even for male writers and performers.
Corporatism might have spelled the end of the road for quality ‘popular’ music (2012 was a particularly dismal year for the “industry”), were it not for another unexpected phenomenon: Until about 10 years ago, the music industry oligopoly scrupulously (and unscrupulously) shut out independent music and music not produced in the ‘west’, by controlling airplay (paying what were essentially bribes to radio stations, MTV and its wannabees, and other emerging vehicles listeners used to discover new music).
But suddenly, with online music services and ‘streaming’ services unrestrained by bandwidth, anyone with music could get their songs listed on these services, and anyone could find and access them. And hence, all over the world, music producers flooded these services with songs that were often hugely popular in their native countries but unheard of in the west. And songs popular in one country quickly get picked up in others, so control over what ‘western’ audiences heard was irrevocably lost.
So now, songs from Latin American, Asian and African countries have become international best-sellers. Bad Bunny, the world’s highest-selling pop musician today, whose music is sung mostly in Spanish, is produced by an independent Puerto Rican label. K-Pop music, produced almost entirely in Korea, often using classically-trained music arrangers, writers and instrumentalists, and mostly sung in Korean, has become one of the dominant fixtures on the pop music charts. And a large proportion of the buyers and streamers of this music are in the west. You like music from Haiti, or Brasíl, or Republic of Georgia, or Iran, or Mali, you can find it and play it easily now.
My library has more songs released in 2023 than in any other year, even more than in the heyday years of the 1960s. Fewer than half of them are from the ‘west’, and fewer still produced by the American music industry oligopoly. About half are written by women.
But to my dismay, since 2023 some of the amazing musicians of the past decade, musicians all over the world, have started issuing repetitive, bland, unoriginal songs. Since I’ve become a fan of K-Pop, I listen to every new K-Pop song that comes out, since I was always sure to find a few new gems every month. Not so anymore. Of the 86 new K-Pop songs released in February this year, not one was worth a second listen. Infantile rhythms, melodies and lyrics. Boring or non-existent harmonies. These are nursery rhymes, not pop music. My scouring the new releases of Zouk and Kompa music was similarly disappointing.
Each year it’s become a little harder to find well-crafted popular songs. Each year I have had to listen to proportionally more songs to find my quota of high-quality music. But it has always been worth the effort, because I love popular music. It’s one of the things that keeps me happy and sane in a tragic, crazy world.
But what will the next frontier be? Women have started to break the barriers preventing their work from being heard. Musicians from all over the world are now finding audiences all over the world. But when it all starts to sound derivative and unimaginative, where do we turn next? Just as we’ve kept our economy from collapse a little longer by scraping for more and more expensive and difficult to find fossil fuels, have we now reached ‘peak music’, where well-crafted music has been so exhausted there’s none of any quality left to find? I can’t believe that, but I’m finding it damned hard to find popular music anywhere that isn’t simply mediocre, even picking carefully through the ever-larger mountains of dreck.
Other people have lamented this, and since many of them are geezers like me, perhaps I’m just listening to the jaundiced music critics. Rick says the problem is that music is too easy to make and too easy to consume. (<- Watch this short video — there’s a lot of insight, and a fair bit of nonsense, packed into 12 minutes.) But while there are hundreds of videos about why pop music is getting worse, there are almost as many arguing that it isn’t.
My sense is that (1) music quality is largely in the ear of the beholder, so a blanket statement about its deteriorating quality over time is suspect; (2) people’s taste in music changes over time (like everything else, we’re conditioned by what we’re exposed to), so it might be that some of us are just getting harder (or in some cases easier) to please; and (3) if Rick is right, then the explosion in the amount of content available to us means that really good music is less likely to make it through the endless stream of crap to be recognized as such, and hence less likely you’ll be exposed to it.
The music “recommendation engines” I follow, and had started to become a bit dependent on to find the good stuff, are now crapping out. Like an engine with too much sludge in the crankcase, they are so overwhelmed at the sheer volume of unrecommendable music in the line, that they can no longer spot the rare music that’s worthy of being recommended. (Or, if I were to be uncharitable, maybe they’re being paid off by the corporate music industry to deliberately recommend certain crap to you instead of the stuff that’s actually good.)
So maybe we haven’t reached ‘peak music’ and never will. Perhaps it’s just getting impossibly difficult to find the same small number of well-crafted, well-produced, well-written, well-performed songs that continue to be produced each year. From that perspective, if we can’t possibly find it in the mess of mediocre music, does it even matter that it exists?
Of course, everyone is weighing in about AI’s role in creating this mess. I’ve already weighed in on that: AI is yet another tool, one that will be fun for lots of amateur musicians and music writers, underused or overused or misused by many, including many ‘professional’ musicians, writers, producers and corporate exploiters*. It will be useful for a small percentage of users who appreciate it as a learning tool. It will probably make a comparable number of users who might become excellent musicians, lazy and dependent to the point that they will never realize their potential. And IMO there is no reason to believe it will have any significant net effect on the amount of truly well-crafted, well-produced, well-written, well-performed music that’s produced each year.
The challenge will be finding that music, not only in the endless firehose of AI slop, but in the endless firehose of plain old fashioned, human-made, mediocre, bad music.
Wonder if AI might actually be able, not to create that exceptional music, but to find it in the firehose, and pull it out for us, before we drown.
* If you use Shazam or a similar tool to identify music you hear in public places — restaurants, shops, parks, offices, elevators etc — you may have discovered that in the last year or so the proportion of music it is unable to identify has soared from near zero to as much as 30%. That’s because ‘background music’ players, Spotify being the biggest offenders, are creating and producing free AI slop to toss into their playlists. They can create it free, pay even less to artists than they were already paying, and for the most part nobody notices.
