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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.
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.
Who thinks this this beautiful song is not “worth it”
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.
Anyone have a summary? I don’t want to watch a video.
IMO, music isn’t getting worse. Maybe popular / radio music, but not music in general. There’s so much good music from smaller artists these days, you’ve just gotta look.
If a video title or headline claims that there is one single reason for xyz then most of the time it’s clickbait.
Just about every video that pops up on my feed with a title like that or “is this ________ now?” gets “not interested” or “don’t recommend channel” clicked.
I don’t care if the content is good. The fact is that we do judge books by their covers - that’s the business model.
Sounds like neither of you watched the video. Fortunately, I did so here’s a quick summary. The thesis is that music is getting worse, for a few reasons. Author argues:
- Auto tune and other modern digital sound production tools are overused to correct pitch and timing, making music too synthetic. Real music has imperfections that makes music just sound more artificial. Basically, taking the human element out of it.
- Streaming has cheapened the value of a single song because of how easy it is to skip to another song. So arguably it is not technically just worse music, it’s our appreciation for it.
The first point has been touched on by many other people. It’s a common trend in a lot of places outside of music too. People are replaced with machines and processes in a lot of settings especially in corporations and commerce, and while that’s great for efficiency and predictability, it creates a sterile landscape devoid of human expression. This is not to say all music has this. But mass market music is a chief culprit.
The other point really resonates with me with videogames and videogame sales. You can get a dozen great steam games for the same price as a single Nintendo title, yet I probably put 10x the time into that one Nintendo title than all the other steam games combined. Had to get every bit of value out of that expensive Nintendo purchase. YMMV on this point though. I don’t stream music so I can’t say how it has affected me personally.
"Sounds like neither of you watched the video. "
That’s. The. Point. I neither watch videos nor read articles that suggest having boiled down a more or less complex topic to ‘the real reason (singular)’. Maybe it’s bad wording, maybe it’s on purpose. I’ll never know.
The autotune “argument” is sooo narrow. There are many many genres that generally don’t use autotune at all (eg. metal).
I feel like Rick is just another old white guy who’s mad about Hip Hop but doesn’t want to say it directly.
Old man shouts at clouds hating on democratisation of music production tools and digital distribution, while sitting in his $x00,000 studio, wanting to consume music that uses laborious methods of manufacture and distribution and seeing it has no value if it doesn’t.
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.
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’.
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.
Yeah, I prefer What Makes This Song Stink.
