No fate but what we make. You can put in the effort to keep your mind and your ears open. Absolutely worth it IMHO.
Why should I bother when all the best music came out before I was 35?
Because some of that new music came came out before I was 35
Edit: Voyager is acting weird
Gosh, absolutely. I'll go on a nostalgia trip now and again, but there are soooo many artists doing such fantastic things nowadays.
I try my best to do this, and find lots of great new music.
I still find a lot of new popular music just doesn't do it for me, and I think it's because as you've heard more music, the it's harder to find something that sounds fresh.
When I was in the peak of that chart I was really into stuff like Spacehog, who seemed really cool to me at the time, but probably would have sounded a bit derivative to my parents. At the same time my dad loved Smashing Pumpkins enough to buy all their albums...
Certainly, of course all the old stuff is good because that is the stuff that you already curated into your personal preferences. There was a LOT of shit from pretty much any era, its just that the younger version of you already pawed through all that shit. Listening to new music means having to paw through a lot of crap, which is always harder than just listening to stuff you already like.
Not just music! (Though that is probably the strongest example)
It's telling how many people are nostalgic for a society that only existed before they were born. Recent History education sucks.
Damn we humans are bad as shit as forming our subjective opinion that doesnt get extremely distorted by nostalgia
I always go back to that line from Men in Black about the difference between a person and people.
In aggregate we really are the worst.
People often forget that nostalgia is the secret spice that makes the past great.... not the actual past.
And nostalgia is nothing more than there's shit happening in our brains at 10ish-20ish that doesn't happen any other time. Hormones and energy and lack of responsibilty and first experience bias combine to create a dopamine cocktail we cannot recreate.
I mean, I'll die on the hill of 90s was the best music, TV, movies, video games, and fashion. But I know that it's not objectively true. But that's how it feels for sure.
I'm way too analytical to fall into that curve, and I'm sure most people on Lemmy are like that too. Like, we literally have data going back decades on most of these metrics, so why are people even going with their gut? Quite a few are literally numbers you can check!
But alas, your average nobody ignores data...
Keep your statistics to yourself, I'm over 40 and love discovering new music.
"No! You're dumb and your opinions are poorly justified! You must listen to us instead!" - billionaire media
This may be true for casual listeners but it fails miserably for people who are "into music".
i'm not. it definitely applies to me. and i'm guessing it would for the majority of the public, too.
The fuck? Fontaines DC, Tyler Childers, Janelle Monae, Leon Bridges, I have never stopped finding new music I love. This graph makes no sense. Modern music is so good. Old music is so good. I do not have a preference for any particular time period when it comes to enjoying music.
Uh it's not an objective scale. This is the result of a survey
I'm 41 and I think some of the best music of my life has released in the past few years, personally 🤷♂️
Only most people.
Some of us keep listening to new music throughout our lives
New stuff isn't tied to memories from youth though
Bro I smashed the shit out the like button for angine de poitirne, and I don't even think they're human. How do I have nostalgia bias for music that isn't from this dimension?
They are fire
There was a period in my life where I didnt have time to listen to new music and I thought I could get by on Metallica, maiden, misfits, and (at the time) my favorite band, Fear factory. I distinctly remember telling people, I'll listen to this til the end of my days, I don't need more.
Then covid happened and I was stuck at home, no longer interrupted by random work or life stuff when I picked what music I put on for hours, and it got stale (No shit). And I started to listen to so much more.
Now my wife and I go to multiple shows a week, hearing all the latest and coolest shit from our local scene (SF); we tell all of our friends: $BAND is coming in 6 months, buy your tickets now, it'll sell out. Or: free show on Saturday, want to come?
We are on friendly terms with members from multiple local bands, we go to album release shows, we get signed merch just by being chatty/friendly, we are helping bands, promoters/venues book with each other by putting them in touch.
Honestly it's pretty incredible. When someone says "there's no good music these days" or "rock/metal is dead" i just ask them... "Well what are you into? I can recommend something". Because they're so wrong...And if thry see what I see, they'd never say that in the first place
"How people who only ever listen to the music that's played on the radio feel about music"
Time is a very good filter of what's worthy and what's not. You're living now and you're witnessing good stuff, but you're also witnessing bullshit before it's had the chance of being forgotten. If you look back 40-50-60 years, will you think of The Beatles, ABBA, Freddie Mercury, Jimi Hendrix, or will you think of someone who maybe released a couple of songs or an album and dropped out of existence? Yes, I thought so.
Honestly I don't like the music I listened to in my teens anymore, but also rarely hear new music I really like. I'm usually listening to older stuff.
Sauce: https://www.jstor.org/stable/48812575
This study builds on decades of work that makes less and less sense every minute of the digital age. Each year we're further from a semi-homogenous group listening to Casey Kasem's Top 40 (or whatever). Most people have a fairly clear, shared concept of 60s/70s/80s/90s music, but ask ten people about the 10s/20s and you'll probably get eleven different answers.
In addition to changing mass listening habits, the digital age untethers us from time and wildly diversifies "new" music. You can hop on Youtube/Spotify/etc and listen to the Glenn Miller Orchesta as easily as the newest Drake singles, which with radio/MTV/etc was historically not the case. Those platforms also have allowed a world of music diversity and access that completely changes the paradigm. For example, some of the best "80s Music" in existence was released in the past few years.
There's been great music forever, there will continue to be great music forever.
The hard part is finding it.
Good and bad music exist since the existence of music. The problem with bad music began from the music industry massified it with criteria more commercial than artistic, this is why good music did not cease to exist, but you have to look for it more than before. Whether you like it or not depends only on personal taste, not on type or style.
And I'm over here mostly listening to music from other countries and loving it.
Sometimes it really is that the music in the U.S. isn't as good as it used to be.
I'm glad I still play new music and find bangers, but I've always done that. Dont think growing old will stop me.
I wonder if the difference is between people who like music primarily because of the memories it evokes vs people who just like music for its own sake. I'm sure this is a gradient, with most people probably falling closer to the former category and those at the other end of the scale seek out new music.
Pop music now is better and more diverse than it ever has been. And I say this as a 45 year old
iHeartRadio / ClearChannel Radio destroyed the music of my childhood by overplaying the same 20 songs per station.
This graph is worse than useless to me. It is an insult.
So what I'm getting from this is if you want success, market to 15-year-olds
My music taste is like the inverse of this graph.
You just gotta know where to look. Music is an industry, so the people who view songs as products will push their favored products in front of as many of their target demographic as possible. They want those tween-to-twenties locked down. They decide what's cool, so if they like your products then you're cool. So if you're 40 and only listen to top 40 pop stations, you're probably in for a bad time since none of that shit is really trying to court you in the first place. I'm in my mid-late 30s and I'm still discovering bands and current releases that I'm into. Just gotta look a little harder.
I think that as we get older and consume more media, we experience a sort of fatigue of simple and easy structures, so we desire something more complex. But we grandfather in the stuff that we imprinted on in those formative years, and that's why that younger demographic is targeted; they'll keep coming back to their comfort media for their whole life.
Pop music is (usually) the middle ground between nursery rhymes and something like djent or cool jazz or math rock or whatever other more nuanced genre you're into. "Products" in those genres just aren't gonna sell like boy bands do. Some pop music is actually good and complex, but it's just not my thing and mostly never has been. I'm not trying to insult people who like Bad Bunny or Kendrick or whatever, but yeah Black Eyed Peas and Kid Rock fucking suck. Don't @ me.
I'm making an effort to listen to newer music by swapping albums with colleagues of younger generations (in return I get them to try records I'd just have assumed everyone has already heard). I like a lot of their recommendations but I don't know if anything's really going to stick. Maybe though!
I've discovered a new subgenre or other every few years and I still find music that's just as good in my thirties as when I was a kid. Trick is I don't care when it was made, I only care that it's in the style I want. I also have never listened to what anyone would really consider radio friendly music so it helps filter out the product placements disguised as artists. Stay curious and find music yourself and you will never experience this curve.
Man I must be an outlier apparently, I don't listen to any of the music from my teens or even my twenties except in rare nostalgia trips. I'm constantly finding newly released songs that I like and even cringe at some of the music I liked as a youth. I don't think I can even define an era of "best music" - there're so many great songs across all music.
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