This is no doubt true, but there are a number of studies which suggest that, at least in the case of music, things really have gotten rather worse over the last two decades, thanks to corporatization and consolidation of the production model.

That's very interesting, any sources?

There are more bedroom indie music producers than ever. EDM and "rap" are better than ever with many many good artists to choose from. One of the biggest breakout rap artist right now was just a random 20 year old working with other random bedroom producers just a couple years ago.

The research on this topic that I'm aware of fails to account for the fact that the top 40/100 lists are less representative of what people are actually listening to than they used to be. If Drake can drop an album and have every song on it chart on the Hot 100 for a week or two, that's going to influence the analysis. That simply wasn't possible before music downloads/streaming. You can see the impact on the chart records -- artists from the past decade dominate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_char...

ETA: And "worse" in these studies tends to be defined in terms of measurable qualities where contemporary pop music most differs from "classical" music.

I don't understand this view. Heavily commercialised music has almost never been all that great anyway. Except very occasionally. Most of it is LCD garbage. Maybe the garbage has become even more garbage, I don't know. But why judge an art form by the boring average.

There's so much great new music being made every year, new genres and ideas, etc. Film music seems better than ever recently. Especially for TV series. Lots of new styles emerging there too, see Mac Quayle for instance.

The really good, modern music was almost always on the fringes, and there's more of it now than ever before.

There might also be more garbage, but there's no need to listen to it.

I'm sure you can come up with metrics by which any given period of music was 'worse' than the one before.

This is only if you listen to the most mainstream, general audience top 40 pop content-sludge.

There is an overwhelming amount of good music out there. Pick an album top 50 list from 2022, for example fantano's, or pitchfork, check out bandcamp's staff picks, listen to other musicians that are on the same label as your favourite band, keep an eye on things like NPR Tiny Desk, KEXP, la blogothèque on YouTube.

Just start listening. You are almost guaranteed to stumble upon something you like. It won't come to you algorithmically but the effort required is really low.

My favourite new album I discovered last year was Immanuel Wilkin's The 7th Hand [1], I stumbled upon it by going through a top 20 jazz albums of 2022 list to see if I had missed anything, and it immediately jumped out at me as being exactly the shit I'm into.

1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=141y8ikOsyE

Society is more unhealthy, people are dying sooner, and there are more broken families than decades ago. So we might be right for once!

Can you provide some sources? Last time I looked into statistics on these topics I found the opposite to be true.

The brothers Rosling have a nice talk about how all the big stats are improving globally (gender equality, education, health, extreme poverty, life expectation)

https://youtu.be/Sm5xF-UYgdg

All the stats that we self-interested humans care about anyway.

The stats on the planet we live in are bad and getting worse. There is 30% more carbon dioxide in the air now than when I was born.

All the improvements in gender equality mean nothing compared to that and the trend behind it.

The parent I responded to was not talking about climate change. Sure that's a whole different debate

Sources on these? Society has been far better than 100 years ago. And broken families? Or people marrying early due to societal pressure and not being able to divorce back then (whether legally or societally), who are now finally able to do so. The divorce rate is actually going down simply because people are marrying when they want to, not when society pressures them to.

In the 1950s there was no metal, chiptunes, EDM and other stuff like that. We had all that by the 80s and 90s. But what can we make now that we could not have made 20-30 years ago? Seems like that we've reached "the end of history" in music. I haven't seen anything new appearing.

Computers can already generate every possible waveform that can be heard by human ears. There's nowhere else to go. Anything above 16kHz is useless and can't be heard anyway.

Just because we can generate any waveform doesn't make music "worse."

I'm not saying that music is worse. I'm saying that we have reached the "end of history" and there will be no more new radical changes like when genres like rock, metal and edm appeared.

That seems like a different point than the one I made that you replied to, so sorry for the confusion.

I'm not too sure about end of history, there might well be other genres and styles popping up. Just because we always had the ability to paint on a canvas doesn't mean pointillism or cubism didn't emerge. Just because we can put any letters on a page doesn't mean new genres of fiction didn't emerge. The fact that we can generate any waveform is analogous to these (ie, having complete control over a medium) and doesn't indicate anything about what might emerge in the future.

We've had that capability for at least 3 decades and nothing completely new has appeared since then. Something completely new like rock, metal or edm. You could not have made those during the 30s - the necessary technology hadn't been invented yet.