Comment by syntheweave
2 years ago
There is something I saw on YT a year or so ago from a guitar teacher who said that his students have changed over the past 15 years: they used to come in and say "I want to learn this song from my favorite band" - and now, overwhelmingly, when asked what they want to learn, they shrug and start scrolling through their phone to try to find an answer. They want to learn, but not anything specifically. And often when they have something, it could be the most random old thing, from any era.
That is, the song catalogue has stopped being something that has turnover, it just keeps accumulating into a library of dusty shelves, and that makes it hard for young people to assert norms as in days past and tell everyone "this band that was marketed to my demographic is totally the best and nothing will ever beat them" - which is where a concept of "best song" is going to come from, because hardly anyone is trying to assign letter grades to their listening.
Instead you'll see a more apocalyptic Fall-of-Rome tone in the comments of old hits: "I'm only 13 but I wish I were in the 80's, best decade for music nothing like today's crap". It's so common a sentiment as to be memetic and widely riffed upon.
Something has definitely changed in the music business.
There are elements where sound has deteriorated, functionally, from what used to be common practice. (this is of interest to me as it's 9/10ths of my day job)
Handled properly, modern digital audio is easily capable of containing the magic sounds of particular classic time periods: not just the 80s, if you really work at it you can get late 70s represented properly, even without using period recording equipment. But you cannot mess around, you have to do it a particular way.
People aren't significantly different from the 70s or the 60s or the 80s, as far as music creation goes. But the common practices are wildly different, and technology had a forcing effect causing the sounds of a decade (or time period) to take on a consistent quality based on the available tools and distribution media. That's all. You know it's not just 70s and 80s: there's electronic genres where the 90s fill a similar nostalgia role, and coincidentally have an obvious, distinct sound that is not heard today, and can to large effect be recalled through determinedly sticking to the period tools…