> But I would hazard to say that the quality of well written likable music that will stand the test of time and keeps people interested has nose dived with the progression you outlined.
People have felt this way since time immemorial: the music they grew up listening to in their formative years was just better than whatever exists now.
Your dad's dad, or his dad depending on your age, thought that Led Zeppelin was just a bunch of talentless idiots making noise.
People probably have, but now it seems to be getting some backing by statistics.
This isn't me just saying something random, it's something I've read about recently and had come out of studies of changes in music over the last 60 years.
Unless those studies have managed to verifiably predict the future and quantifiably measure how a particular album would affect the industry decades down the road, I wouldn't put much salt into those "studies". And if they have somehow managed to successfuly accomplish that, I think that only raises way more questions.
There have been quite a few examples of albums that were bombed on release by both critics and the audience, but then ended up as critically (+publicly) acclaimed and massively influential (+still standing the test of time) many many years later just from the past 2 decades. That alone tells me that whoever claims they have a method to predict the future influence and "standing the test of time" on aggregate is just playing around.
Yeah exactly, two examples that immediately come to mind during my lifetime are My Chemical Romance - Welcome to the Black Parade (the song more than the album) and Green Day - American Idiot. At the time they were released, many people saw them as emo-pop dreck, a complete departure from "real" punk-rock music of the 80s and 90s into something far too watered down and palatable for the masses. Now if you look at YouTube comment sections for those songs, it's full of people wistfully remembering the good ol' days when people played real music with real instruments.
Hell, even Limp Bizkit, Limp fucking Bizkit, has been widely retconned into being a charmingly nostalgic relic of music at the turn of the millennium instead of just, you know... bad.
A study in 2022 saying that most people say music from before 2010 was better is meaningless, because a study in 2032 will show that music from before 2020 was better.
And coming from a completely different genre, 808's and Heartbreak by Kanye from 2008. Hated on release by everyone (both critics and the audience), it wasn't "rap enough", people weren't thrilled by electronic tons and sadboy singing.
Less than half the decade later, the critical and public opinion took a full 180, with plenty of new major artists (like Brockhampton) claiming they owe their entire music career to that album. You could easily hear the influence of that album pretty much all over other artists' works.
Disclaimer: yes, I am aware that over the past few years Kanye had become a person doing things that are hard to defend in any way, but that's not something I am trying to do here at all. A lot of those actions are pretty much indefensible. However, his personal behavior doesn't change the impact of his music from 2008 on the industry and music as a whole.
People have felt this way since time immemorial: the music they grew up listening to in their formative years was just better than whatever exists now.
Your dad's dad, or his dad depending on your age, thought that Led Zeppelin was just a bunch of talentless idiots making noise.