I think the early success of sh*tbags like Madonna, began that long downward spiral (definitely aided by MTV).
Look at the famous(ly crapty) boy bands. Not a real band but a corporate creation to again pacify the masses with yet another diversion on society.
Pretty good piece, there. I think that, currently, there is a Shotgun Effect of Talent, where kajillions of pellet-like artists go blasting out and hope to hit multiple playlists. I suspect that, eventually, this will be honed down back to a Tin Pan Alley Effect, where a select few have been settled on and thus fill up single playlists that are massively shared. That used to be Radio. Tune into the city's favorite AM station in the '60s, and you and your friends were assured of hearing the same songs, able to like or dislike them, share your favorites in malt-shops and burger drive-in's, and go to school the next day and ask about hearing That New One. And someone would surely respond. Today's Playlist Mentality is basically "Every Listener Is An Island" with their playlist isolated from everyone else. Until someone shares one. Then probably shares about 100 too many and finally I cut them off and only pretend to accept downloads or invites. And I'm back to my own playlist. On that island. I think the simplistic argument presented in this YouTube video misses other issues: just about every popular album has unfavorite songs, too. The songs handed to Ringo during the first half of Beatles recordings were simply terrible choices - until he did the most excellent ACT NATURALLY with George's fantastic guitar work - which was merely modeled after the Bakersfield Buck Owens style. But there are plenty of clunkers on sooo many albums. It's just that the Hits were played ad nauseum over a town's Top 40 radio and 'everyone' agreed this was A Hit. There is no consensus like that now because there is no dependency on any single Top 40 Radio. Or Radio, at all. This is not the musicians' fault. This is entirely the labels' and distributors' fault. THEY created this monster. I think the music world would be far better off using the KAZAA model of music distribution: where Counts are public and available, not Apple/AndroidPlay where all accounting ripoffs mimic record-sales ripoffs against the artists. Except now, the A-PLAY facilities require almost no capital expense on the distributor's part - they don't hafta pay for vinyl or CD-petrochemical blanks, or liner notes, or freight and shipping. Maybe pay a photog for an "album cover". Or maybe they'll create a half-million-dollar video when all I ever wanna do is just seem them play the song. Live. With great audio fidelity. The demise of the record industry is THEIR creation, this is what THEY asked for. I'm just glad that so many musicians are still out there, entertaining anyone who wants to sit and listen.
Don't forget the early "video" (16mm film) jukeboxes.https://www.cultofmac.com/326640/kitschy-scopitone-jukebox-brought-the-jams-before-mtv/
...there were about 715 (Scopitone) machines in the U.S. (by the late sixties).(Bob) Orlowsky said there are a number of reasons why the machines never captured nothing more than a passing fascination in the U.S. Tone-def executives failed to see the cultural revolution unfolding. Rather than play a part in the rebellious spirit of rock and roll, Scopitone tried to appeal to mostly middle-aged white men.“Scopitone was on the wrong side of the cultural divide,” Orlowsky said. “They placed their money on men and standards and acts that were going rapidly out of fashion.”
I want to continue the argument about radio's demise being linked to the perception of 'no good modern music'. There's the opening lyrics to FUN FUN FUN...Well she got her daddy's car And she cruised through the hamburger stand now Seems she forgot all about the library Like she told her old man now And with the radio blasting Goes cruising just as fast as she can nowPlease correct my before-my-times lack-of-memory... this scenario seems to suggest that kids went to a hang-out spot, had windows open, tops down and radios were probably tuned into the same station, everyone listening to the same songs. OR if there were competing stations, cars were probably organized one Station 1 in this parking area, Station 2 in that, etc. This is the Shared Experience I think of, and without Shared Experiences involving the same music being played at the same time, same place with the same people, there is no communal 'bonding' with that music.
No "Remember Friday night's a Al's, listening to music, eating burgers, drinking cokes?" Is this a correct scenario? Was it common? (I never had any of this until I settled down and Hubby knew these places to frequent. I would have loved these, as a teenager. They are still cool places, too.)
We live in the loudest of times. It all began about twenty years ago, when new digital technologies started to radically alter the way music was made, refined, and shared. It suddenly became fairly easy to endow songs with a more aggressive presence: with a click of the mouse, you just made it all—especially the quiet parts—louder. Since then, there’s been a debate over the effects of the “loudness wars” on our ability to appreciate nuance, particularly the dynamic range between loud and soft that, in the parlance of audiophiles, gives music the room to “breathe.” As musicians from Iggy Pop to Christina Aguilera began making their music as thunderous as possible, our standards and preferences gradually changed. Loudness has won. We have come to crave music that is garish, punchy, and, according to the anti-loudness partisans, poorly engineered. But now that we listen to music everywhere—often in a semi-distracted state, across a range of devices and settings—it should come as no surprise that artists want their music to come pre-coated with a glossy immediacy. First impressions matter. Why not insure that you can’t be ignored?Think of how many contemporary pop hits sound as if they were being belted from within a jet engine. The quiet parts of a Taylor Swift song buzz more boldly than the brashest moments of a heavy-metal album from the nineteen-eighties. The imperfections that resulted when artists pushed their recordings past peak levels have given way, in pop music, to new techniques, textures, and tastes. It’s just how music sounds now, from the noisy, self-conscious revolt of Kanye West’s “Yeezus” and the distorted crunch that occurs when a pop song hits the chorus to the way that MP3s gleam with a pre-formatted sizzle.
And boy bands... nothing new there, either. There have been 'put up' singers for decades, maybe forever. Brian Wilson fairly eviscerated his group into little more than a Boy Band standing on stages while their albums were assembled using sessions musicians.
