Everyone who doesn’t think music isn’t getting worse should post examples of recent good music they like. As a lot of people who claim this often like generic shitty music.
IMO metal has gotten much better. For example, I think bands like Serpent Column and Blood Incantation are doing amazing things for black metal and death metal respectively.
I feel similarly with Hip Hop. But I admit both genres are oversaturated with bad music.
I’m pretty sure Rick Beato only listens to shitty music.
He sounds exactly like the dude who taught me guitar. He’d balk at any modern (at the time, which was the 90s so Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Soundgarden, etc) when I’d ask to learn their tracks saying I should only spend time learning the “classics” which to him meant the Beatles, Hendrix, and the like. Not saying those aren’t classics, but I’d consider the grunge era to have a lot of classics as well. Seems like Rick is “stuck” in the same era and unwilling to budge.
Man, I kind of hate this guy’s videos. He really just seems like he likes to hear himself talk more than he wants to convey meaningful information.
Rick Beato’s video titles have got too hysterical compared to the actual content and he’s doing himself a disservice (e.g. when he listens to the top ten he usually likes at least some of it, but the titles are like “This is pop music now?”). I see titles like this and just lose interest.
In regards to there being an abundance of songs, I’ve also found that this kills off my motivation to make music.
For one, because well, obviously there’s musicians out there that produce music at a much higher skill level and production value, so it’s easy to just never even try ‘competing’ with them, even though with a bit of effort, I definitely can create something that a certain niche will enjoy.
But similarly, it also feels like every niche is covered. Any song I’d want to make, I would just need to search long enough and I’d find something similar on the internet.
I myself don’t have a real demand for the songs I create. I don’t expect to create something that I would find so much better than what everyone else does.
I do get the bonus of writing exactly the songs that ding the neurons in my brain, but those other musicians get the bonus of having more skill and production value and being the proverbial infinite monkeys with typewriters.
At this point, I tend to go back and forth between listening to all the excellent music out there, to try to keep my own creativity up to speed, and then for a few weeks, I’ll only listen to relatively mellow songs, so that the songs I’m writing actually sound decent in comparison and I get the motivation to continue working on them.
I blame the defunding of reliable curators. The good gets lost in the torrent of mediocre content. This isn’t just music, but videos, news, art, and so on. Most anything that both craftsmen and amateurs can produce is now easily accessible to everyone everywhere. In addition to the old method of producing albums where the band had to go to some location and work on it as a regular job, and with the label sending in extra musicians, equipment, professionals and such, there used to be trusted critics.
Historically, we had a short list of vetted reviewers who could point us towards the best stuff without the need to wade through the rest. Even if it turned out that your aesthetics did not match that of a given critic, you could probably see why such critics held their opinions and could quickly locate a critic whose tastes did align with yours. Now we have a billion fake review sites run by the companies and/or families of those being reviewed. They are not trustworthy. A person is left to try everything on their own and we often run out of time looking for ‘good’ and settle on ‘good enough’.
Clickbaity titles on videos or news sites is the new standard. I watched it. The point he’s making is basically that music was harder to make/produce some 50 years ago, so there was more incentive to “make it worth the effort”, compared to today. And the 2nd point he makes is that music consumption is now so easy as well (listen to whatever you want instantly) compared to when you could only listen to something when you bought the physical album, that there’s also less incentive for the listener to really get involved into some albums.
Personally I think these are valid points on the surface but they are not “the answer” to this kind of multi-faceted question. They’re at best a factor but we don’t know how big these factors are. Also I think one big reason he thinks that way is because he grew up in that environment and so he has a bias for “owning physical copies of albums”.
I also think music hasn’t gotten worse, the market is just simply over-saturated because there’s just way too much music, you’ll never be able to listen to it all. And there are absolutely hidden gems or really good bands/artists forming even today, it’s just much harder to find them. Generally a problem of today’s age: it’s likely that what you’re looking for already exists, you just have to find it within a whole ocean of content.
If you’re looking for innovative or non-standard stuff, you can always look at smaller artists or the indie scene, same is true for movies, games, music. The big producers always have a tendency to stick to what works and what’s proven to be popular so everything becomes similar. But smaller artists do not have to care about such things, they are ready to risk much more and in doing so, you might just create a real gem or something that was never or almost never tried before.
Who thinks this this beautiful song is not “worth it”
The crux of his argument was that scarcity serves as a catalyst for the perception of value. Constrained access to music prompted people to appreciate and savor it more intensely, leading them to invest greater time in its enjoyment, analysis, and sharing. This phenomenon also resulted in people incorporating their musical preferences into their self-identity, as their selection of albums conveyed significant information about their character.