Music nowadays sucks, because MANY young people music taste nowadays sucks?

most of the music you gave for reference: blaaah, I mean the beatles are iconic, but yeah, the carpenters? vomit. and the movie the sister act- I couldn’t sit through it for even a few minutes- I don’t know but I think the music now is better than any—sister act puke—

@trailsillustrated then give me examples of great music today
ie: by great music I mean a music that either or both: stirs the emotions, creative, innovative music composition & arrangements, in melody & harmony, music with heartfelt, meaningful lyrics, have actual real charisma…i’m sure u know what I mean.

@niki anything by the shins, james mercer and dangermouse , try listening to silversun pickups ‘the royal we’ meets all your criteria

@trailsillustrated cool! thanks for the examples. i’ll surely check ‘em out, so I can have at least some fresh new hope for today’s music.

@niki you can’t help but like broken bells

Today its about attitude that sells, not good lyrics, I’m sorry to say, OMG. That’s an Usher tune. Bieber is the 70s donny osmond.

I do like some new stuff, but I’m a part time promoter, and I go back to jam bands that stretch out the music.

You said “nowadays” eight times throughout the post. Which has nothing to do with anything, but it caught my attention. :P

Anyway, while I’m not a fan of Lady Gaga’s music, I appreciate the social messages she constantly pushes – women’s rights, gay rights, etc. Although part of it is definitely marketing, she tries to show skin in certain ways, for certain reasons. Anyway, along side of all the meaningful music from the past that you mentioned, there was an equal amount of mainstream fluff, too.

Some mainstream artists that go for meaning include Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Tool, Nine Inch Nails… etc.

There’s always been a mix of fluff and talent.

The problems is not that there is not great music. There is just less of it.

It is too easy (these days) to cut corners and push it off as music.

Time, effort and experience gets lost in the translation. Because it is not there.

I don’t know, there are bands like Band of Horses, Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective… There’s good music in every genre, even pop, but one has to look for it. Everything is niched off, and there is no larger cultural arena that brings all sorts a music together in one place and lets people hear everything. When I was a little girl, this was FM radio.

Today, when MTV no longer shows music videos, and there’s 500 niche channels on TV, internet radio with aggregators that guarantee you’ll hear nothing except what sounds the same, cable TV radio (in NYC, there’s about 40 different music stations on my cable system and none of them overlap), finding what you might consider the good stuff is going to be a bit of a slog, but unfortunately you’re going to have to seek it out. There’s no DJ able to play solely what he or she likes, as it was back in the day.

Of course Top 40 is geared to teens who don’t know about music. It’s not to create art, but to make money. There was a lot of junk in the 70s, 80s and 90s as well. People just remember the classics, and forget the crap. Even with Lady Gaga’s personal beliefs out in public and some really great production values, I think the music itself is the same overheated teenage sex tripe that been the same for the last 30 years, no matter how catchy and hooky it is. It’s why I stopped listening to most Top 40 once I turned 12. I hear some of it in the shops to relate to my teenage nieces and nephews, and that’s quite enough.

You see the big problem with music my friend it is mostly all just one giant opinion.Get over it.

What are you going to do deem someone to hell because that music “sucks” or people’s musical taste “sucks” nowadays.

Bloody dam ridiculous…...

Are you being forced to listen to this stuff? Like is there only one radio station in town? Do you have no portable music player?

The answer to your question is no. Music does not suck because young people have bad taste. It sucks because you don’t like what you’re hearing.

The solution is to change what you listen to to something you like. It is not necessary for you to force yourself to listen to music you hate. Or if it is, I would dearly like to know why. I’m 53 and even I know how to get the music I want to hear onto my smartphone.

Both are to blame.
Music and musical taste are interdependently coevolving, feeding off each other.
The music available shapes the taste of those who listen to it, and the taste of the listeners shapes how the music itself develops.
Like bees and flowers.

I’m sick of these same questions that assert that someone has better music taste than everyone else and that music today sucks. So fuckin’ what. No one gives a shit what you like. If you don’t like it don’t listen to it. Turn off the radio and look for something else.

Music today does not suck, quite the contrary, there are some amazing cd’s coming out all the time. The thing is, however, popular music is absolute garbage.

I feel radio is to blame for a lot of this. Its just so commercialized constantly playing the same 10–15 shitty songs over and over, pounding it into peoples heads. I suppose it would be easy to accept this type of thing as good music if you were never really exposed to anything “outside the box” Sooo this music becomes popular and people demand more…just like it. Now we’re stuck in, what i like to call, the circle of shit. Forced shitty music=shitty overall taste in music=demand for more just like it=forced shitty music.

You’re old.

@uberbatman A circle of shit? I like that…

The problem all starts because we have made musicians such icons. When a musician hits a certain amount of record sales, they are skyrocketed to a spot that is reserved for movie stars and a few athletes. People see that and want a part of it. It seems so easy to learn how to write music and lyrics so everyone seems to think they have what it takes to do it. Which leads me to my next point…

It’s become so ridiculously easy to make music with all the beat machines, auto-tuners and music software that is out now. All the new technology can be a great tool for musicians to use but problems arise when people who don’t know much about music get ahold of these tools. They tinker until they get something that sounds good to them and… viola! They become “musicians”. Music can be made that way but it’s rare for it to turn out pleasing to most people’s ears.

Then comes the REAL problem behind us, the consumers, having to hear the crappy music. Most big music labels are to blame for that. They get one of those tinkering kids who don’t know enough about music and give them a shot at fame because they have a certain look and think they have what it takes to be famous. The label pumps so much money into the production of building up this “artist’s” name and putting a record together. By the time the label realizes that the “artist” sucks, they’ve spent $5 million getting them out there. Well, NO ONE can take a $5M hit so the label continues to pump money into them so that the music and the “artist” will be in front of the consumers face until the learn to like it. Eventually, the label sees a return in their investment, the “artist” has become an icon and we, the consumers, are left with, as @uberbatman put it, the circle of shit.

Some people think that the problem can be fixed by toppling the big labels. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. The arts (painting, drawing, music, sculpting, ect…) are a poor field. As an artist, you have to create something that moves people in a way that they will want to pay you more for something than what it cost you to make it. With music, it gets expensive and time consuming when you buy all the instruments, learn to play them and buy the recording equipment or pay someone to record you. Then the real hard part starts where you get yourself out there and hope people enjoy it. With the internet, it’s becoming easier but it’s still a chore. The record company makes it 100x easier to make a name but that sometimes comes at a cost. They have the money to throw around and they aren’t going anywhere.

As far as fixing the problem, the only thing we can do is boycott the shit. Easier said than done because people are blindly believing that everyone likes the shit so they themselves start to like it to blend in. Shit music is here to stay until the music industry collapses and artists aren’t viewed as heroes anymore.

very well put sir.

^ +1 Well said.

Boring music has existed for centuries. Not everything Haydn wrote was brilliant.

What’s new is that there’s actually CDs with one hour of noise without any harmonies let alone melodies in them. Numbed minds probably can’t tell the difference. Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto probably both sound unappealingly un-noisy.

Young folks who learn a musical instrument will soon discover that there is actually more and less intelligent music out there. There is plenty of great new music. Soundtracks are one good example. Another one are bands like bands like Nightwish and Within Temptation.

How to define good music? Very simple: People will still listen to it in 50 years.

lol, as if you didn’t listen to shitty music when you were kid.

Popular opinion doesn’t always = good music. Personal opinion is the only one that matters.

Who can blame them? They don’t know what good music is because they’ve never heard of any——the music industry and radio stations all put out crap these days, and most young people fall for it, thinking it’s great music.