One interesting explanation I saw was it was a way to get exposure - few people are willing to do it, so for those who do, it's basically a right a passage and a way to show that you're the real deal. I saw an interview with Lil Xan talking about his face tattoos where he basically said as much, and on purpose made his first tattoo his mom's name so she wouldn't kill him for taking the plunge. His next tattoo was just 'zzz', which he stated was an act of branding due to his association with xanax.
It seems to me this is a pretty big difference between say an indy rock band and an indie rapper. The rock bands act like the business side of things is something they'd rather not deal with - they just want to make music and do shows. The rappers first and foremost are focused on themselves being the core of a business in which their image needs to be carefully cultivated, the support group around them needs to be taken care of, etc.
In the words of Jay-Z, "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man!"
FYI: You probably mean "rite of passage".
I've got quite a few CD's like that. So I'd say - plenty.
The difference I believe is that activity seems more reactive than preemptive. Case in point, the mixtape as a precursor to the album, which exists primarily as a promotional vehicle. Even rappers that have already made it continue to do mixtapes for more experimental work or as a thank you to their fans.
Close to a million.
But here's why this isn't the case:
Twenty five years ago, CDs were expensive. Because they were expensive, listeners were compelled to listen to them over and over and over again.
Remember buying two CDs for $40 and playing them endlessly?
But in 2018, music is basically free. And because it's free, nobody has a vested interest in investing a lot of time getting to "know" an album.
So you wind up where we're at now: a lot of music that sounds alike, plus a ton of music that's derivative of music from 30 or 40 years ago.
I'm 40. I play a lot of music with people in their 70s who were professional musicians in the 70s. I don't know if it's ever been really any different. Mostly, it's been more homogenous at a national scale, at least in the living memories of the people I play with.
In the late 60s and 70s, they could learn a single top 40 list plus some standards and play their week-long gig at the ramada or whatever (while on or off tour, working their sessions or whatever) and make a living.
Music is way more heterogeneous now, IMO.
I don't think that contradicts your point about how freeking much music people have access to, I just feel like it's probably been moving this way at least since the invention of the radio, if not the wide spread availabilty of sheet music.
>So you wind up where we're at now: a lot of music that sounds alike, plus a ton of music that's derivative of music from 30 or 40 years ago.
There are plenty of different types of music being made today along with communities of people that appreciate it. These things aren't necessarily mainstream, but they're there.
What you say is absolutely true for mainstream popular music, and has been for a long time. But delve into niche genres, and the scenes are more vibrant than ever.
I'm a huge metalhead, and right now, I have ~150 albums in my "I should give this a deeper listen, it sounds interesting" folder on Spotify, and about an equal number of bookmarks from Bandcamp and the like from smaller indie bands and solo projects that aren't on Spotify.
This is purely within my preferred corner of death/thrash/power/prog/black metal. There are so many great, interesting and varied albums coming out all the time, that I actually have to be rather picky about what I choose to give more than a cursory listen. And I don't even really touch most modern "mainstream" metal, this is almost purely the nastier semi-obscure stuff (where 10,000 plays for a track on Spotify is huge).
Yes, a lot of music does sound similar to other music. That's what having an established genre means. But there is huge variety going on in the less mainstream corners, where fans are more dedicated and open to experimentation.
It always makes me laugh when a MC/DJ has to say their name during their music, because it sounds just like everything else and sampled pre-existing music so heavily that you couldn't identify the artist otherwise...
Music is 'homogenized' for the same reason products are: labels are making 'lowest common denominator' for the same reason 'Transformers' has no plot whatsoever.
Radio and Google searches, 'hype' are ironically more commercialized than ever before, ergo, music is more 'product'.
There is actually 'more diversity' in music - but you have to actually expend a little bit of effort to find it. An I mean 'just a little bit' i.e. a search on iTunes or whatever. Most people do not consume music that way - they just don't care that much. They accept what's on the radio, or what their friends tell them and esp. for younger folks, they are influenced by marketers trends.
Consider the parallel: there are more 'web sites' than ever before, and the web is far more diverse - yet - our time is more and more focused on a smaller subset of places i.e. FB, Amazon.
A couple of nuanced things:
'Making music' is easier than ever, and what is considered 'music' is more broad - so anyone can spend a few minutes using off-the-shelf software to make a few interesting sounds and voila. Eddie Van Halen spent a decade nerding out in his basement practicing to develop his talent - now - you don't have to like Van Halen, but if you actually listen, you can respect the talent. 'Talent' is no longer necessary - so this is a problem.
It completely blows me away that a lot of shows now are simply Kareoke - young guys were rapping over an mp3. Not very exciting to me, but even worse ... I saw something with 'Chief Keef' recently and he's not even rapping over a 'backing track' - he's literally just playing is regular release track and then drunk/high mumbling over top of the track. He stumbles around on stage with his buddies, and each of them mumble a few lines over top now and then.
Which brings me to 2cnd nuanced point: it's not about the music (maybe it never was) it's about the fame.
Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are in the same business. One is more lyrical than the other. (FYI I think they are both geniuses in different ways, and I don't care for either of their fare but they are brilliant nonetheless). It's about creating a 'meme' - and wether it's instagram, or bits of acting, or 'music' or appearances, whatever - it's the same thing. It's almost impossible these days for a pop artist to be huge without having a very visual aspect. Taylor Swift's Instagram is at least as important as her albums. Her shows are massively produced spectacles. She and Beyonce are better described as pop-figure entertainers ... with a lot of music in the mix.
So the focus on pop-culture, and the visual aspect, has truly and fundamentally altered things.
Maybe some of you are old enough to remember: 'Video Killed the Radio Star' - since the social media revolution, this is further blown up.
I love all genres of music - but every genre has been blown up with really low grade stuff, almost written by a computer and you can hear it. Obviously EDM is worse than others because of the nature of the 'E' of course, but it's bad.
Final nuance: a great deal of the 'art' has shifted from classical musical paradigms, into the Engineering. So now, the 'producer' is in a way the 'chief artist'. We saw this in the late 20th century when U2 got popular. Brian Eno and Daniel Lanlois were producers on their huge hits - and you can clearly hear their impact. They were 'part of the band' in Bono's words. Radiohead has used the same Engineering guy forever and he's definitely a key ingredient in their secret sauce. Max Martin writes 100% of Katy Perry and other's hits and he, together with Dr. Luke basically own the hot-100 of known entities.
And of course ... in the early 20th century if you wanted to hear music, someone had to play it really. You needed a full orchestra for good music. When the 5-piece rock and roll band came along 90% of horn players had to get other jobs. When Ableton/Steinberg/GarageBand came along ... well, you don't need any musicians at all to make music.
Clearly there's a lot of intelligence even in the most mundane pop music, just as it's not actually easy to make 'Transformers' films, but the artistry is more focused on production than art ... and with so much 'noise' in the long-tail, it's exceedingly difficult for decent talent to break through.
I was never a fan of Van Halen, but I happed to see them in an Arena concert several years ago and it was absolutely amazing. The music seems 'passe' and cheezy on the radio, but live ... it's basically exhilarating. They are the definition of 'Stadium Rock' and enormously talented. Imagine Dragon's doesn't hold a candle to them it would almost be comical listening to them side by side live.
Edit: should not that the biggest money makers are the 'established brand' live acts, like 'Journey' and 'Bruce Springsteen' are making zillions more money than ever in 2018, 30 years after the fact - i.e. 'new artists' now have to compete with massive bands that are still truckin'. Check Billboard 200 album list, towards the middle you find: Nirvana's 'nevermind', Metallica 'black' and Guns n Roses 'apetite for destruction' on the chart for like the last 6 years (!) and might be for another decade (!) so 'new artists' literally have to outsell 20 year old Metallica albums to get listed. Rough!
>> Obviously EDM is worse than others because of the nature of the 'E' of course
I don't think this is true.
I do think that the barriers to entry are the lowest in EDM - is the reason so much crap is being created there.
But those low barriers, that environment, is the ideal place for that lone creative genius, because, here it's all about the quality and quantity of great ideas.
No need for great band leadership skills. No idea will be "designed by commitee/band". No need for that great determination to learn technical stuff - maybe a quality less found in creative people. And it's relatively easy to form collaborations between geniuses, especially when everything is digital.
And at least if you love psychedlic music, the best EDM has to offer(say carbon based lifeforms or globular), is so much better than the best of what came before it(psychedlic rock, let's say pink floyd).
If Pink Floyd existed today - and - they had a brilliant EDM-ish producer, I think that would be 'better'.
I find myself turning to Jazz too often ... the 'final resting place' of a music snob :)
I know why folks don't like Coletrain, and I don't expect them to... but as a musician, I find it way more interesting to think about Giant Steps than to try and analyze, say, Townes Van Zandt singing White Freightliner... both are pretty cool things, but one has a lot more in it to play with.
I take your point... jazz is one of those things where that interplay is super important and can be enjoyable to see.
Also, I really enjoy playing in a string band / jam band. Essentially it's jazz, but with bluegrass instruments. But then, it's not clearly not "Jazz".
A lot of the musicians I know who are super talented don't like a jam. They want something totally un-jazz -like... they what Joseph Haydn, et cetera. In that realm, there is a whole lot of interplay between the musicians that is even subtler than what you get with jazz.
As a musician or as a listener (and, this is even more true for the better musicians that I know), I feel like there is a lot of road to explore outside of jazz even just in terms of the interplay between musicians.
... but people who listen to a lot of music tend to simply end up in Jazz because that's where the bulk of interesting live stuff is. It's one of the only genres that is consistent in it's kind of creative-intellectual appeal.
Hence the last regular exit on the highway ...
I generally agree.
A lot of the technical obstacles to taking technically-solid photos and videos have been removed and the barriers to making them available to everyone are essentially non-existent.
Writing hasn't been made easier to the same degree (although research is easier in many cases) but you no longer need to get a publisher to sign on--although there are some advantages to doing so.
And it's very hard to make money off of doing those things unless they're in support of some other commercial activity.
I've been an amateur musician for 20 years. I would never try to make a living out of it, it's so much of a craps shoot trying to get people to listen and focus on your music online. The best way is to simply go in front of them and make their eardrums resonant with your instrument directly. You may need another career to support this live-only lifestyle, but what's the point of dumping 100's of hours and $1000's in capital into a recording barely anyone will listen to?
I love listening to well-recorded music on my rather capable stereo or good headphones, but it just doesn't provide the same rush and sensation of seeing the actual musicians, live in concert, at a proper concert volume on a good live sound setup, handled by competent sound techs.
Over the last I-have-no-idea-how-many-years, I've averaged 3-4 concerts per month, and 3-4 festivals per year, and I've experienced both garbage tier gear/sound and the exact opposite -- concert experiences that bordered on religious experiences.
I especially appreciate small intimate venues, where you get right up close to the musicians and can really interact with them. The energy you feel in those situations is just second to none.
My musical niche as a listener is metal, primarily death and thrash. YMMV obviously, depending on genres and available venues. But for me, going to live music shows on a regular basis is absolutely essential.
Just for the people who don't get the reference....
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/1137910...
I'd pay money to see that.
This is true, but the flip side is that people will take more risks because there is no financial consequence to sampling previously unknown music.
Additionally there are still a lot of gatekeepers. When I talk about music distribution and consumption I always make a point of emphasising the difference between active consumers of music - those people who will actively search out new music, or even those who know what they want to listen to and will (for example) make their own playlists, and those people who just want a “make music happen” experience. The latter are more common and will typically fire up their stramaing platform of choice and select a playlist that matches their taste. For these people music is often somewhere between background noise and accompaniment to other activities, but inclusion on “premier” playlists (those with high visibility on platforms) is lucrative but quite rigidly controlled. You are probably less likely to be included on one of these if you don’t have a track record, or if you don’t have industry contacts. If you are included it can be a powerful way to gain new fans and get your music out to a much broader audience.
Before, if someone signed you, you were pretty much guaranteed some form of success.
I don't think that virality being required is a problem, all the songs I still listen from 20 years ago, and which are still played, I loved the first second I've heard and I would have shared them back then.
I think it has surprisingly little about content but with marketing and connections. I feel it is especially apparent on youtube where crappy content can thrive and excellent content can be buried where only a handful will see it.
Not terribly different from the old days.
Problem is, once you get over bad, once you've followed the rules that everyone else has followed, is where marketing and connections start to make a difference. But still, nobody's really going to care until and unless you can come up with something truly different that's also good. Bring an idea to a style from another style and make it cohesive. Play around with different types of lyrics and beats and energy levels.
I have a friend of mine whose been playing music for years put out an album of well, aggressively mediocre country-rock. No amount of connections and marketing is going to get anyone to care about it. There wasn't anything wrong with it, I just had zero interest in listening to it more than once. He needed to bring an order of magnitude more effort to the composition process to even come close to mildly interesting. This stuff literally fills the slush piles of music agents.
Once you have something new, good, and different, then marketing and connections again start to become important. Because there's literally nothing else that can move the needle.
Marketing helps, but it doesn't make you.
Not necessarily. I think my content is good, but if few to no people hear it, much less pay me for it, I don't have much incentive to continue making it. Or if I make it, I rarely bother to release it anymore. I just make it for myself, and no one hears it but me. It's just not worth my time to go to all the trouble of editing and mixing it, releasing it, making cover art, thinking of titles, uploading it, and maybe trying to get listeners for it if almost no one will ever hear it.
I think a lot of other musicians are in the same boat. We can't afford to make music for a living, so have to do it as a hobby, and if we struggle to get listeners even the hobby might not be rewarding enough to pursue in the long run.
Lots of good content can get buried in the avalanche of trash. It might eventually get "discovered", but that's far from certain. It might not happen in the artist's lifetime or at all.
There's still a lot of room for improvement in the field of content discovery.
Look what that has done to "Online Content-with-a-capital-C" at large.
If you launched an ad-supported website today and wanted to make any real kind of money from it, how many page views would you need? And how would that number impact the type of content you created for that site?
Well, an advance and a good time, but most ended up not recouping [1].
This is nonsense. First of all, there's no such thing as a digital sound. Once it's sent to the speaker, it's analog, regardless of whether it originated inside your laptop or from a guitar. I would bet that you can't tell the difference between a top-end VST emulating an analog synth and a real analog synth, or a Kemper Profiling Amp and the real tube amp it's modeling.
I enjoy the interplay between musicians as well but you can make a great album tracking all of the parts yourself and there are entire genres of electronic music where it's standard to not have more than one musician.
I've heard this so often that it lost all meaning to me.
I graduated from MTSU with a degree in Recording Industry. My favorite class was songwriting class where we were paired up with classmates to write songs for a grade. There was this one guy whoever knew he was the best in the class and he was. He went onto write tons of number one country songs from 2007 to 2016. Even being the best of the best didnt get him to that point rather meeting the right connection as my college g/f was just as good as him or better. She's a homemaker now.
Myself, I might be a decent songwriter, but Im a terrible singer. I get joy from others listening to my songs and say ing something nice lol.
Overall it's always been hard and if your not the best of the best or know the right person then well......
Now if you are only very good, ( which in itself is great, you could be the top 5% in the industry, or even top 1% ) you will need some connection and luck. The problem is there are only finite amount of popular song writer writing for best music. And that space is likely to be limited to a double digit personnel.
It is like Formula 1, there are only a handful of drivers in Formula 1, but they represent the best of the best in the world. You don't want a centimetre off Apex, you want them to be in millimetres. These best of the best may only be 4 - 10 faster even on the same cars, but you could spend the rest of your life time never be as fast and as consistent as they are.
Luke Laird was the best of the best in my songwriting class(out of 20 of us) and probably within MTSU at that time(2001). He wrote a good amount of Carrie Underwood's number one songs as well as many other well known country artists.
Most recently, I worked with a business analyst guy who was living in Nashville trying to get work by filling in for sick musicians and thereby making a name for himself. It was going, eh, okay for him. He still kept his day job, of course. The company I worked for back then had let him move to Nashville and work 100% remote. He was on point with a guitar and banjo, I'll say that.
For example : Prog is one such community. (Fourm : r/progmetal)
I have routinely discovered bands with <1000 listens on their top song on Spotify on that sub. I have seen these same bands grow to the point of gaining interest from a label. Interest that was fueled by forum members.
Since the genre rewards musical proficiency, even causal listeners (non fans) can have quality discussions with forum members and boost engagement.
IDK, if this works for other other genres too. But, IMO this is one of the better ways to survive in the new musical era.
I wouldn't think of guitars as relatively expensive. In fact, most instruments can be had for fairly cheap if you're not super picky. I own a decent violin that I got from a pawn shop for $60.
Can you please suggest few tools for this? TIA
Mainly just curious because I'm looking for new, free music in that genre. ;)
This leads to the GI Joe phenomenon: https://www.drud.com/ddev-local/the-website-rfp-the-impossib...
"features are cheap and details are expensive". Music is all features, code is a mix.
It's the never ending story, old people calling youngsters music garbage.
That is not true today ... is it? Any examples?
By the mid-1990s we had a very clear idea of what 80s music was (electric guitar, synth and rap) and even what 90s music was (grunge and all this electronic stuff that I thought was super boring but a lot of people liked so whatever). It’s 2018 ... I have no idea what 2000s music was. Everyone can probably name a bunch of musicians that were big then, but what sound was being pioneered? Messing around with vocoders / harmonizers? That seems very limited and small.
What is the sound of 2010s music? I have simply no idea.
* Arrangements are consistently built on samples and reconstructions of older songs. Big productions regularly credit a dozen people as songwriters: a Top 40 production is a factory process. * Awareness for new acts is built with fewer "big break" moments, and more of a grind with high-energy guerrilla marketing, endless tours, etc. Inclusion in a soundtrack is a common success milestone. * Live performance takes the form of: DJ set with a few vocal/instrumental parts, idol dance routine, acoustic cover - aiming to perform with a live performer on every part is the exception for acts driven by their production, though of course you still see traditional styles represented as a full live group. * 100's of amateur covers, "dance remix" and "nightcore" versions filter out over Youtube, Soundcloud and parts unknown. The sound gets curated by these fan groups leading to innumerable niches each with their own "canon text".
It really stopped being about the gear, and is only to a limited degree about mastery of traditional technique:"the sound" is always a commodity. But the brand is also more than the sound, and popular acts always get their branding on point now, which does include whatever aspects of the performance are necessary for "authentic" portrayal. Music is more than ever a tapestry with increasing extremes of "big heads" - constructed formulas - and "long tails" - folk vernaculars.
Is that really true, though? Most of the music that dominated the 90s, for example, wasn't created in the 90s. Grunge and Punk started in the 80s and were repackaged for mass consumption later.
The monopoly on what constituted "pop music" was largely destroyed by the turn of the century. That's part of the reason there is no particular sound of the '00s and '10s. I'm sure there was a lot of experimenting that's happened in the last 20 years, but they aren't being repackaged for mass consumption anymore.
Ironically, this has made the process of finding new music both easy and, at the same time, extremely difficult. As an indie game maker, I'm sure you can relate to the "discovery" problem.
If you compare music from 1960, 1980, 2000, and now (almost 2020) you'll notice that the 60's to 80's to 00's were incredibly different. Like, they clearly come from distinct eras.
While there is still innovation, there aren't dramatic changes happening as often in the past two decades. There are many popular songs today that could have been popular in 00's and vice versa.
Some rap seems to still be innovating, but rock, pop, and a lot of electronic music seems to be stuck in a rut.
I would agree quite strongly here. I make a point of grubbing through "new artists" and/or "new releases" on Amazon Music or Google Play Music.
"New Sounds" are simply extremely rare, or alternatively, inaccessible (by inaccessible I mean something like "I've Got No Chicken But I've Got Five Wooden Chairs" by Barton).
Of course, this is separate from my tastes - I'm searching for something that is an enjoyable new thing that tastes good and unlike my existing taste.
My personal guesstimate is that the wide availability of sounds has provided a too large landscape for newcomers to work through and then break out of, in general. It will almost take a naive art type to synthesize together a new sound that is both accessible and fresh - in my opinion.
Moses Sumney, for example, is incredible. Give this a whirl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPeji3NS4uE
Mr. Sumney is, I'm sorry to say, not dramatically variant in the indie folk sonic system. I would say that it is a somewhat more electric orchestration of someone like Jesca Hoop; the sonic textures are similar. I don't care for falsetto - tastewise - I've run into a few other groups that are similar sonically over the past half decade besides Ms. Hoop.
It's plausible Mr. Sumney will evolve for a time and be substantially different - Doomed from that video presents the possibility unambiguously - but musically I would locate him in the indie-folk sound, with a different instrumentation and more electric usage.
Wasn't that maybe because of the incredible evolution of music hardware? 70s music was IMPOSSIBLE to produce in the 60s, 80s music in the 70s, so on.
Today that hardware evolution is slowing down, so it's normal that the sounds don't change that much.
But neural networks are on the horizon, expect shocking things in a few years.
It's not just the hardware.
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring could have been composed hundreds of years ago on basically the same instruments, but it wasn't. Nothing remotely like it was.
Twelve tone music, Dada music, all sort of other types of music could have been composed hundreds of years earlier, but it wasn't.
It's not just hardware and technical capabilities that evolve, but musical tastes, ambitions, and understandings of what music is and could be.
Similar things happen in other arts. The Black Square[1] painting could have been painted at any time. But tens of thousands of years passed before anyone did it.
Art is constantly evolving, and the boundaries of what is considered art and what people appreciate as art is ever growing.
> Stravinsky's Rite of Spring could have been composed hundreds of years ago on basically the same instruments, but it wasn't. Nothing remotely like it was.
You are grossly underestimating the effect that technology had on music. Rite of Spring couldn't have been performed until the 20th century so there was no point in writing it.
Bach's children and Mozart (mid 1700's) were the first products of music pedagogy. Paper didn't become common until the 1800's. Interchangeable parts and factory practices made musical instruments much more consistent and available in the late 1800's.
All of this means that the average orchestral musician improved dramatically in capability over the course of less than 200 years.
> Some rap seems to still be innovating, but rock, pop, and a lot of electronic music seems to be stuck in a rut.
Now that everything is available on-demand via streaming services, new music is competing not just with a glut of contemporary works, but with the ever-increasing body of prior works.
Why try something new when you can listen to your old favorites at any time? Unless the new thing sounds a lot like the thing you already really like.
The difference is that with the benefit of time, we separate the wheat from the chaff.
What are the ones that emerged in the last 20 years ?
What i call garbage now isn’t music i don’t understand ( which would be what parents usually complain about), it’s music that i’ve already heard 20 thousand times before. The reason i can’t stand today’s music is because it’s copy / pasting itself over and over. This is new.
In the 2010s: dubstep (minor), trap
Isn't rock also a lot of copy pasting? Not to mention techno. There is only so much space in a genre.
Which leaves us with... trap ? Seriously ?
There are a lot of things you can do to create really new musics. Historically this was done by breeding with music from different cultures. India has quartertones and melody based rythmics, africa has polyrhythmie, etc. The problem is that nobody in the dying record company industry had the guts to finance the emergence of things created by innovators ( who obviously still exist somewhere), and since online music services recommend songs based on what you’re already liking, there’s just no chance you’ll hear those creations.
There should be a new section in apple music called « new things you’ve never heard that will probably take you a bit of time to enjoy, but then you’ll thank us for it »
The fact that this is not happening suggests that maybe it's just not so catchy. And something being innovative and original doesn't mean that it should also be popular. Not many want to live in a crazily organic shaped house by the famed architect, not even those who could afford it, most prefer the regular boring rectangular ones.
BTW, a long time I saw in a National Geographic a crazy african song, which seems to me to be an african polyrhythmie (not an expert). I think it's an amazing piece of music. But I also see why this has little chance of becoming popular in US, at least in this shape. Maybe some producer could "un-ethnify" it and make it more palatable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R6WnTCpjfM
You dismiss trap, but I've heard some amazing arabic trap. For some reason, arabic vocals work very well on top of a trap track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0xk1UQYcXs
https://www.ft.com/content/98c64ce8-8ff1-11e8-9609-3d3b945e7...
Deadmau5 uses polymeters pretty extensively and rap/trap uses polyrhythms all the time.
Yes there is a ton of electronic music and yes a lot of it sounds similar but there are new things coming out if you can dig through all the volume.
A lot of the innovation is also in sound design and not necessarily composition.
70s and (particulary) 80s were all about sound texture cloning. Were it particular guitar amp/pedal arrangement, or korg/roland sound du jour.
I don't think it changed much in essence, only in form of cloning flattery. Today, kids buy trap samples.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmT8S3qZnNk&list=PL210003EC6...
There's an absolute glut of content out there, due to two things:
1 - The increasing ease of making music. It used to be that you had to invest time in acquiring some skill, some relatively expensive instruments, and some in-person relationships with other musicians to make music that was palatable to a significant number of listeners. Today all you need is some free software on a phone or computer you probably already have, and it all but makes the music for you.
2 - The ease of distributing music. You used to have to get contracts with record labels, make other connections with the music industry, or spend a lot of money to get much of an audience. Now we've mostly cut out the middle men, and distribution is virtually free.
As a result there's vastly more content and much more competition between artists for an audience. No longer are consumers limited to a dozen radio stations or having to read music reviews, physically go down to the record store, listen to and buy records. The consumer has virtually the world's entire musical output at their fingertips and far more free content than they even have time to listen to.