I'm kinda the opposite. Modern music (to me) seems to be largely consisting of artists who cannot sing and have no tone to their voice, relying excessively on autotune and copious amounts of other digital tweaking of their voices. Playing any instrument other than a guitar seems to have vanished. Sadly, nobody plays a trumpet anymore (see Chicago and Herb Alpert). No synthesized horn sounds remotely like a trumpet and a skilled blower.

So I go back to artists that were great in the 60s and 70s and look for other albums of theirs - found a lot of stuff I really like that way.

Somewhere in the late 90s to early 2000s, physical appearance was more important than actual talent for performing artists. The 70s and 80s had a fairly large amount of "ugly" artists.

I presume MTV changed that. You needed a great video to have a hit song. Hence Duran Duran, A-ha, etc.

Morten Harket also had an amazing voice though.

I have no idea how the Family Guy makers keep coming up with such great material. The whole Bloofis and Klunt routine still cracks me up days later.

The other thing is that what indie creators do now is different from what they used to. Blogs, Instagrams, YouTube clips, tweets, apps, games, etc. Making a whole movie, writing a whole book, nobody takes time to consume those things anymore, much less produce them.

>Making a whole movie, writing a whole book, nobody takes time to consume those things anymore, much less produce them.

Books maybe, but aren't people watching more movies than ever?

The thing is, they're also watching a smaller slice of the movies produced than ever...

Are they? I can't make it through a whole movie anymore, while I used to hit theaters at least once a week. Though maybe it is because of the lack of independent content, so a vicious cycle. Or maybe the streaming thing makes it too easy not to commit to the movie. Or maybe there is just so much selection that how do you even choose. Or, maybe I'm just getting old.

Maybe it's because we've seen these movies before. For example, the revenge movie. Such as Peppermint, with a totally by-the-numbers plot. The twist is this time it's a female lead, but she could have been swapped out for Bronson/Lundgren/Stallone/Schwarzenegger/etc without changing a scene or a line of dialog and it would have been exactly the same :-/

Then I watched "The Foreigner", yup, same old revenge plot.

It’s a different consumption mode. I watch short stuff during downtime. Lunch, waiting in line, etc.

But that’s not the good stuff. For the good stuff I turn to 18 hour audiobooks, real movies, deep technical articles.

Bite sized for staying in touch, long and in-depth for things that interest you.

>Are they? I can't make it through a whole movie anymore, while I used to hit theaters at least once a week.

It's not theaters, between Netflix and piracy, there are tons of more movies consumed. And whole TV-series, binge watched series by series, each of which amounts to 5+ movies running time...

I guess he's referring to the length of a single episode but, in a world of streaming, that seems a little arbitrary. At home, nothing keeping you from pausing a film halfway and picking up the next day just like a TV series. Obviously telling a single story in 90-180 minutes is a different form from telling a storing over multiple seasons of 30-90 minute episodes in different from a miniseries or single-season series. But they're all just artistic (and financial) choices.

While there's arguably been an overall shift to shorter content, I don't really see a marked falloff in movies being produced.

Book sales continue to decline in both physical and ebook format. I don't know if this is because people are reading less or because more piracy is occurring. On the other hand the sales of audiobooks continues to rise. At this point I think to have solid sales for a book it is almost a requirement to release an audiobook version. Unfortunately certain subject material doesn't work well as an audiobook (like most programming books).

I can only speak for myself, but for the past 10 years, audiobooks have been golden! I don't have time to read a book and nor do I want to. For example lying in bed with the light on parsing text, or sitting in a chair. It is boring when I could be resting my eyes in the dark and unwinding or even of late, I have been trying to make a wooden model of a boat. I still get to enjoy the benefits of a book passively.

I always find it difficult to multi-task with audio books. How do you manage with that?

Forgive my slow response! I think it just comes down to background noise. For example, people every day listen to Radio when driving, or have the news on in the background.

I don't think I could study something difficult with Audio Books or any noise, but for example, tinkering or life's chores like washing clothes, emptying dishwashers, hoovering, showering.... These tasks which must be done anyway can become secondary to an audio book which takes the prime brain space to the point that those tasks become "enjoyable". Especially if you find a good book!