Why New Music "Sucks": The Duality Between Quality and Accessibility
“Music sucks nowadays.”
You’ve definitely heard someone say that phrase before. In simple passing, they’re right. You look back at the playlist on your phone and realize that all the best songs in your playlist are at least a few years to a few decades old. I personally see this in my playlist too (I only have one Spotify playlist with a couple thousand songs. I’m that guy.)
You look back at the best songs ever. Timeless creations that are remembered and passed on generation to generation. Bohemian Rhapsody, Beat It, Space Oddity. These songs are monumental achievements to whoever was involved in their creation, yet, we don’t see many of these songs that show signs of being generational release in the last 10 years.
Fans of specific genres usually flock to one popular song in said genre that came out somewhat recently and claim it to be on the level of any of the aforementioned timeless classics, but to the average joe, they just don’t live up to the same expectations.
In short, anyone can deduce that there has been a bit of a drop off in the quality of music in the past 20 years or so. Why is this happening, and what specific set of circumstances allowed this to happen? Why is the belief that new music lacks something resembling a soul such a popular idea?
In my opinion, it is an unforeseen consequence of the rise of streaming services.
Before continuing, I thought it would be really cool to share this clip from 2003 of Ben Affleck. In this interview, he, to almost perfection, predicted the concept of movie and music streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify. Check it out below:
Ben Affleck nailed it on his prediction. Five years later, on October 7th, 2008, Spotify released to the public. The rest is history.
Streaming services are, objectively, the best possible way to experience music. Better than any vinyl record, cassette tape, or CD. Pick any song you want at any time, granted you have an internet connection, and most of these services stream it at lossless quality. No compression. Beautiful.
The convenience of distribution services, coupled with their small fee of eight or so bucks a month to access it (for the rest of this post, the abbreviation DS will represent distribution services). It’s much better than CDs, having to buy albums and having to use proprietary computer software to manually add the songs to a mobile device. Not to mention, these albums on CDs are not cheap, and one album usually exceeds the cost per month of Spotify and Apple Music.
Music is more accessible than ever.
Within this conclusion lies the issue, the double-edged sword: accessibility. That price barrier behind each album you had to cough up at the register, the trips to the electronic stores to reload on some new releases, the pain in the ass of having to use the worst piece of software ever, iTunes, was all just part of the game. Using iTunes to transfer MP3 files from your CD to your desktop to your phone was so unbelievably convoluted it almost seemed intentional in order to force one to buy the songs digitally off their online store.
But behind every price tag on every album was intention. Before you bought a new album, if you didn’t pirate the MP3 file from Limewire or some other means to listen to it ahead of time, you had to rely on other means to hear the song and make the decision to buy an entire album just for one song. Radio was usually a great way to expose music, much more effective than it is today. Music videos of popular songs at the times would pass on television, on channels like MTV. This ecosystem that surrounded the music distribution space made it so that albums were forced to be of a certain standard of quality to attract potential buyers. There was only so much money that a man or woman set aside a month in order to use on new music CDs. There was an intention and true interest behind most purchases.
This ecosystem doesn’t exist in a space dominated by DS, and because this ecosystem doesn’t exist in this space, the art of the album is dead.
Due to the massive reliance of DS, artists have to shift their approach in creating music completely. Albums from the biggest artists are rarely less than 12 songs long. There will never be another “Yeezus”, which, ironically speaking, was labeled as the death of the CD and the rise of internet music. Albums now are incredibly long and over drawn with music, the equivalent of throwing shit at the wall and hoping it sticks. Instead of taking time and releasing 10 songs that an artist put their 100 percent into, they now release 20 or more songs that they put 50 percent into, hoping that by some stroke of luck one of those 20+ songs sticks to the wall and blows up. Music is a subjective thing; some people will listen to a song and it will move them to tears and others will listen to the same song and turn it off by the 30 second mark because of just how unbearable it is. Artists, and to their greatest extensions their record labels are aware of this.
With this trend, the album is dead. I had mentioned the word “intention” earlier when concerning the consumer in the music distribution industry of yesterday. That same intention also applies to the artist when they release albums. Because of the limitations in music distribution in a world before the common DS, it took much, much more effort to release music, and a greater intention in doing so. An artist, his team, and label had to push singles off the album to radio, make music videos for said singles and distribute them via YouTube or TV broadcast, create packaging and inserts for the release, go on press tours, etc. It was a logistical nightmare sometimes, with so many moving pieces that it would make anyone’s head swirl. Would an artist and his team jump through all these hoops to release some junk or something that they have no confidence in? Now all it takes is for the artist to post an Instagram story announcing some arbitrary release date to gather that same hype.
Limitation breeds creativity. It brings the beast out of someone with a will to create something great. Why aren’t there any wonders of the world on the same scale as the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Colossus of Rhodes? Our modern wonders are but standard skyscrapers who’s only appeal is how tall they are. We have all the tools to make something on the scale of these ancient wonders, exponentially more advanced than the ones the humans of past had. Limitless opportunity accomplishes the exact opposite of what it sets out to be. This mindset applies to nearly all outputs of creation: automobiles, video games, movies, etc. Music included.
For the foreseeable future, there will never be another “Thriller”. There will never be another “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”. There will be big, anticipated albums yes, but they will never reach the same heights or traverse cultural circles in the same way. Music no longer appeals to the masses as it once does, it is fragmented cross smaller cultural groups. There will never be a musician as famous as Michael Jackson ever again, or a band as big as Queen. The corporatization and explosion of DS’s are rightfully to blame in my eyes, as they not only killed the album, but modern music as well.
Why make great music if it won’t get the same streams? Stream farming is the new wave for artists: make music that is so easy to consume and stream that numbers get inflated and royalty checks get a couple extra zeroes added to the end of them. That is why 20+ song albums exist, to cannibalize as many album streams as possible. It is not organic in the slightest sense. It is an exploitation of the people and their time.
Taylor Swift, arguably the biggest artist in the world, is one of the most violent offenders of this. She will rerelease the same exact album two or three times and label them with some arbitrary suffix to make it seem as if it is new music when it really isn’t. “Taylor’s Version”, “Midnights Version”, etc. These are all the same album with minute tracklist or production changes. Once the original album’s streams begin to stagnate, swap the order of the tracks a little bit, edit some of the lyrics and instrumentals, throw in a throwaway song at the end, release it as “Taylor’s Version” and boom. Streams explode all over again, with the illusion of a new album being released. A complete perversion of the idea of deluxe albums, an inherently good thing, all to farm as many streams as possible from her diehard fans. Same music, double or triple the money. Kanye, my favorite artist, does this too, as do all the big name rappers. It is an exploitation of the industry and fans.
This exploitation is why no one artist transcends their status and enters the mythic. David Bowies and Pink Floyds will never exist again. Some will point to Drake or The Weeknd as artists that enter this plane of fame, justified by their absurd streaming numbers, but go to any Joe Blow and there is a much greater chance that they don’t know them than you think. Artists no longer transcend their country’s borders and gain unchecked international fame. It is a bit poignant. Taylor Swift is the biggest artist in the US, but what song or couple of songs that she has released since 2018 does the entire country know? She is famous because of the cannibalization of streams, not for hit songs. Shit, when she blew up in the early to mid 2010s, even I knew all her big songs. Now, it is nothing. Except “cardigan”. I like that one.
The sale versus the stream is the same animal but a different species. Chasing albums sales versus chasing streams are two different fights for an artist and their team. The sale is organic, with money on the line, the stream is exploitive, with the listener’s attention on the line. I doubt this will ever change. We as a music consuming mass of people are in way too deep with DS’s. They are making too much money. Yes, CD’s and vinyl records exist still, but they are a minority in the presence of their digital counterpart, a shell of their importance during one point in time. They are now a novelty, a companion to the main release, targeted at die hard fans that will pay 20+ dollars to listen to an objectively inferior version of a song. Vinyl shills will argue that if you spend thousands and thousands of dollars on speakers and record players, that it will sound better than the Apple Music version. It fucking doesn’t. Nothing will beat the raw file being exported from the sound engineer’s computer. Stop lying to yourselves. Unbelievable levels of cope.
I just finished reading “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick, and the dichotomy between humans vs androids that are near perfect renditions of humans reminded me of the problem at hand here. New albums may look, sound, and consume the same, but they aren’t. Songs no longer have intricate layers and distinct structures. It is now Hook, Verse, Hook, Verse, Hook. No bridges or refrains. No funny skits or interludes that mean something. Just that simple structure: HVHVH. Boring as shit. Both the same, but also completely different.
We see platinum and very rarely multi-platinum albums today. What was the last real diamond album? How does Billboard find a streaming equivalent of an album sale in the first place? It is all so arbitrary and inorganic. Human versus android.
While the death of the album is the greatest culprit for this fall off in my eyes, a secondary, more overlooked reason is the relative ease of creating music nowadays versus back then. Music is just easier to make now. Instead of having thousands and thousands of dollars of equipment in mixing boards, turntables, keyboards, sound proofing, microphones, computer software, among other pieces of equipment, all it takes to make a rap song with the same production quality as the number one hits is a shitty Yeti microphone with a sock over it, coupled with a random version of Fruity Loops or Garageband that is pirated from some torrenting site. The limitation that there once was for small artists to distribute their work no longer exist. The small gigs, the physical CDs that were created and passed around, all which bred creativity and greatness doesn’t exist in the same vein as it once did. Now we all upload our shitty songs to the same DS as the biggest artists in the world. Slop that multiplies indefinitely. Real instruments replaced by MIDIs and shitty samples ripped from Youtube on shitty ripping sites. All inorganic.
Funnily enough, Philip K. Dick’s book also has a term for this trash that replicates itself when it isn’t looking: kipple. It is in the same vein as slime Tik-Toks and shitty Disney+ shows. You turn your back on it for one second, and it multiplies to levels in which you couldn’t fathom.
This ease of making music is another double-edged sword in this equation. It allows anyone to get into it, which is a good thing, but it over saturates the market as well. It takes three minutes to upload a song to Soundcloud. With our country no longer having this cultural hive mind that connects us as a whole, our fragmented culture props up a few of these “underground” artists to a little bit of fame within their circle, but to not much else. I am a firm believer that not everyone is destined to make great music or great works of art that capture the minds and hearts of millions. This seems a bit authoritarian and stubborn, but it is truly the way I see this. The music industry was already over saturated with people making music, and Soundcloud and DatPiff did not help this at all. The access is great, and I admire the people chasing their dreams to make music, but sometimes it is just a bit overwhelming. Everyone must start somewhere, and luckily it is easy to discern junk from gold pretty quickly.
Side note, I think the funniest thing ever are influencers that take up DJing as a means to justify their fame. People with millions of Instagram followers hanging out with the rich and powerful as their only contribution to society telling everyone they DJ now to show that the aren’t a product of extreme luck or their parent’s empire is always hilarious to me.
Rambling aside, the reasons above are why I think the music of today just kind of sucks. This post was shrouded in a bit of pessimism, but still do think that quality music releases nowadays. It is just worse than what it was or what it could be across the board. I plan on making one of these posts with why modern video games suck, as well as why modern car design sucks as well, but that is a bit down the line. For now, I will be listening to “Yeezus” from top to bottom again.