It also echoes my (baseless) assumption that the main reason that we have this idea that music a few decades ago or more was somehow "better" is that anything that wasn't at least above average is completely forgotten by now i.e. survivorship bias.

1. Pure nostalgia.

2. The selection effect.

3. I've grown more tolerant. I now happily (though not ecstatically) bop along to songs which I hated back in their heyday. Ice, ice, baby...

Probably (3) is actually partly nostalgia as well. But it is also that I am not as caught up in the petty jealousies and genre-fan-feuds that I had been as a lad.

I realize that it's no less cheesy or annoying but it's familiar enough yet I've not heard it in a couple of years. I can get down with a lot of music but hearing the same damn mediocre song every week, it goes from "eh, whatever" to "dear god why is this still around??"

There was a lot of crap in the charts, but I think the overall level of quality was higher. I think the reason for that higher quality was essentially negative - the routes to an audience were much narrower, so artists were practically required to get into the charts to sustain a professional career. A far broader range of artists were playing the major label game, because they didn't have many alternatives.

"Pop" is a much narrower term in 2018 than it was in 1978, because musicians don't need chart hits or radio airplay. Digital recording and distribution have created a much more fragmented music market, because artists can connect directly with audiences rather than relying on a very narrow funnel of publicity and distribution. Good music is somewhat more difficult to find today, but I think there's more of it and more definitions of "good".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_of_the_Pops

(proxy required outside the UK):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b00704hg

It is not obvious that you had to be a trained musician to succeed. Many who succeeded were, but many who succeeded are not.

As to the topic of the post --

In music production, you can think of the 'stage' available to the listener as a box. Pitch goes up and down, stereo pan goes left to right, and volume goes front to back. When you're producing, you can't have two sounds in the same space without them merging together in the listener's ear. In the early days of stereo music production, producers generally tried to place the sounds as if you were standing in the room, watching the band perform, and were fairly conservative with giving everything space, so that sounds wouldn't clash. As people got more sophisticated with production (think Dark Side of the Moon), producers started experimenting more with the listeners since of space -- surrounding them and enveloping them with sound -- but still generally trying to capture the sound of physical musical instruments. Even when they used synths, they tended to try and make them sound like "real instruments".

Once digital music production started becoming more widespread and sophisticated, producers started abandoning the pretense that they were faithfully recording the live performance of instruments and focused purely on sound as sound, and the new tools allowed them to perfectly place all the sounds next to each other on 'the sound stage' and take up all the available space. Which, if you're filling up all the space 'up front', as it were, necessarily means that the song is going to sound louder, if that's what people want to do.

Now, there are plenty of genres of even dance music who play with dynamics more -- think Deep House, for example -- even there, they're going to make the bass as loud as they can, because they still want to make speakers boom for the dancers -- and they can push them as loud as they can be, very precisely because ableton or whatever makes it simple to do.

I with agree that its got more precise, typically when producing a kick for techno I make sure that the power is exactly around the point where the sub is going to be able to play it back with the most impact.

Also with tools like Neutron we can make sure there is no overlap between channels.

I am probably a similarly age to you, but I hardly ever listen to anything more than 5 years old apart from as a learning exercise or if there are people in the same room as me.

Where does the idea that music output is equally good in all ages comes from?

The fine art world, and the literary world know very well from historical experience of centuries that there are periods of huge masterpieces and lots of great creators, and periods of drought. Heck, the classical music world knows that too.

Why would this not hold in the pop music world?

Music is another activity that is historically influenced by period, trends, culture, etc, and all of these have their ups and downs.

Whenever I see discussion on classical music, it's a fun mental game for me to imagine it's a forum for metal instead, and these (assumingly) well-to-do academics are all metalheads who have a strangely archaic way of describing the specific merits of songs.

I don't think that's much of a concern in practice. We celebrate lots of works that people didn't find particularly noteworthy at the time but were appreciated at a later age (Bach, for example, was out of fashion and nearly forgotten for a century or more after his death, Satie was not especially appreciated at his time, there are lots of other examples). In other fields too, e.g. consider Van Gogh.

Most of the works of obscure composers are known to fans of classical music (and musicologists), they are still occasionally played, but are still considered ho-hum.

I'd say good works tend to rise to the top, even if they're not popular at their time.

I think one way these articles could be more honest is if they did not compare the survivors to all modern top 40 hits, but rather to the most curated selection of culturally-relevant and generation-defining songs. I'm sure any avid listener to any genre/time period could find you 10 songs that will make you reconsider your perhaps preconceived negative opinion on that genre/time period, and 10 songs that will make you continue to generalize the genre/time period as low-quality music.

But this is non-trivial and prone to more bias, so we'll probably never see it happen. In the mean time we can continue to use this example of pop-statistics in journalism to remind ourselves to be wary of what we read.

There would be orders of magnitude more music published today because the tools are so cheap and available.

What you can do today with $2,000 of equipment is better in every single metric than what you could do in 1990 with $20,000 of equipment. (I’m excluding the costs of studio space here for simplicity, as that can be highly genre dependent: on one hand the cost of concert halls for a symphony orchestra probably hasn’t changed much; on the other hand new electronic music doesn’t need a physical studio at all.)

I don’t know about the economics of recording back in 1960 but I can say with confidence that even the absolute best equipment found in the top studios would be technically inferior to today’s $2,000 electronics. (Though they did use their genius to innovate sounds which we still love to emulate today, so those old studios may well be creatively superior. But we have all that creativity in the form of plugins and effects today.)

While this might be true for recording media (e.g. a DAW with high end SnR vs 4-track tape overdubbed to death), we still use e.g. the same microphones as back then, and they're still expensive. Ditto for all kinds of analogue musical instruments (guitars, pianos, etc).

Quality guitars, amps and microphones are vastly cheaper, because of the astonishing improvements in automation and far-eastern manufacturing. A $400 Squier Vintage Vibe strat is 95% as good as an American Fender strat from 1990, at about 20% of the cost in real terms. Budget condenser microphones simply didn't exist before the mid-80s, so you'd need to spend about $2,000 for a decent LDC mic; today you can get a very good LDC from Rode, SE or Aston for about $300. The same goes for headphones, monitors, outboard and all sorts of other gear - it's just ludicrously cheap in historical terms. A grand piano is still an expensive item, but you can get a beautifully detailed and utterly convincing multisampled piano plugin for under $100.

Good microphones were almost prohibitively expensive in the old days. Today you can buy something like an SM57 for €100, and that's normal retail price, no special offers or anything. Second-hand, they're usually less than half that.

Decent acoustic guitars can be had for less than €200, brand new. Sure that won't be a fancy name-brand guitar, but it'll sound good and play well.

All kinds of great outboard gear like the FMR Really Nice Compressor is €200, and it's one hell of a piece of gear, even at twice that price. Combine with an inexpensive mixer with decent preamps, and you're already well on your way. Yes, even Behringer is decent these days.

And you can run a pro-grade DAW like Reaper on an ordinary run-of-the-mill PC. An audio interface with a good amount of input channels is going to cost a bit, but if you're OK recording one or two tracks at a time, a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 is €120. And even inexpensive studio monitors have astoundingly good sound quality, compared to what people used to swear by.

You can get really far on a budget nowadays.

Also cheap electronics makes diy solutions more affordable. One could mike a drum set using cheapo low end Behringer dynamic mics paired with a self built preamp to get very good results for the money.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_Never_Knows

>Serrà acknowledged in an email that a bias due to the “test of time” effect is possible but argued that its influence should be small. For instance, he noted, the long-term patterns and trends that he and his colleagues identified also hold over relatively short—and relatively recent—time periods (say, 1997 to 2007), where the “test of time” effect should be minimal. “The same happens with close and not-so-recent time periods (e.g., 1960 and 1968), where both years could partly incorporate such an effect,” he wrote. “Since the trend is consistent in short time spans where you assume the ‘test of time’ bias is minimal and, furthermore, the trend is also consistent for longer time spans, we can assume it is a general trend and, thus, that the ‘test of time’ effect is really small.”

By that measure, older music was much better. Sure, the chart has flashes in the pan and bubblegum garbage in every age, but the difference in memorability between the Top 40 now and the Top 40 even 15 years ago is quite staggering.

However, at no point did someone as annoying as Ed Sheeran dominate the charts...

For political, financial, practical, and historic reasons, the "live" tracks were supposed to be rerecorded specially for the show. So often you'll hear a unique version on TOTP.

After about the early 70s it was damn near impossible to record and mix a single in less than a day. So what actually happened is that the TOTP producer responsible for the rerecording would be taken out for a very generous drink and/or lunch while the "session" was happening, and then they'd return to find that a master tape had magically been created in their absence, and not at all brought in by the band's manager, having already been recorded and mixed earlier.

It was a weird sleight of management that kept everyone happy.

Then the bands would go on and throw themselves around with no instruments plugged in. The vocals were often live, but everything else was literally just for show.

Debbie Boone? The Beatles before Dylan told Lennon that his lyrics suck?

Anyway, the issue with Ed Sheeran is that he appeals to the Tweeny Girls who are the only group still spending money on music. And, as such, the powers that be are going to flog him senseless until he stops printing money.

The issue is less Ed Sheeran being annoying than the saturation marketing reaching comical levels.

Older music was just as bad/good as today.

That's trivial to fix, just take the actual at-the-time top-20 of each year. Yawn.