I think the internet and free universal frictionless undifferentiated unbiased access to recordings has made all sounds equally available at all times, starting somewhere in the 90's, and that has made anyone who was born after that point perceive them a bit differently than before.

I have a neice who was born in 96. When she was 10 or so I found out she was listening to both Green Day and Patsy Kline with essentially equal interest.

That's when I got this idea.

She was born entirely after not only the existense of recordings that go back at least a few generations, not only after the existense of the internet, but after the mass adoption of the internet, digital copies of recordings, and countless distribution means, both centralized and peer to peer. The essential nature was not that different from today, the day she was born, let alone 10 years later.

For me, Patsy Kline was only on the oldies station at my grandmas house and the barber shop and which actually called itself the oldies station, and my parents wouldn't be caught dead listening to Green Day.

For my neice they are both just content.

Born in 2001 here, and can confirm.

I can go from Yes, to Twenty One Pilots, to Kansas, to TheFatRat, to Johnny Cash, to random youtuber, to Linkin Park, to Guns 'n Roses, to Elvis, and so on.

They're all just there, there's good stuff from every time period - why would you limit yourself?

I think there's a technological aspect too where after 2000 or so, nobody has really figured out as many new novel sounds to make with synthesizers or turntables or instruments or whatever. The technology of music instrument/tool development plateaued, so the novelty started to as well.

I’d definitely disagree on that front. Though I do think there’s been a bit of a logarithmic curve, the difference in what was possible in 2000 vs 2022 is pretty huge. Like, listen to Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009) or any of James Blake, Jamie XX or Burial’s stuff from the past decade. Not all of that was impossible before 2000, but you’d have a hard time finding people making music with those timbres (outside maybe some really cutting edge IDM).

Oh and don’t forget auto-tune ;) Although there are a few examples of it being used for pitch correction before 2000 (+ that Cher song), it wasn’t until the 2000’s that it got ratcheted up to T-Pain levels.

How does the magnitude of that difference compare to vs 1980, and then to 1960, though? Both in terms of the possibilities and in terms of how much the possibility space had been explored?

>But I think someone could make the case that the 80’s have just become the permanent retro decade, and that everything since 2000 has been subsumed into a sort of “infinite present”.

As if we lived in the Matrix.

That may be true culturally in general, but my theory is just that the 80s marked the end of the period where the sound of pop music was heavily constrained by the technology of the instruments. After that, synthesizers got good and didn't have to sound like synthesizers. There was a little gasp of that when Autotune got overused, but otherwise, music can sound however you want it to sound now, so there's no consistency of style.