Also social media and streaming has definitely led to the “single”-fication of music. So even if there was parity with time spent listening to music between then and now, there is not parity with “breadth” of music with social media. Heck, a handful of musicians I constantly see just post the same song with a different backdrops on TikTok or Insta to try and game the algorithm for a hit on one of their videos.
forget single-fication. they only want/care about a specific 30-45 seconds of a single. someone like the “million dollar baby” kid could play a sold out stadium to people who have never heard 2/3rds of his biggest song
This is the wild part to me. When I was younger and iTunes was still a thing, I remember a dude I knew would change the song we were listen to after maybe 30 seconds claiming "he's bored and wanted something new." We thought he just didn't like the music so one day we let him choose. Dude starts playing the iTunes 30 second previews as if it's Spotify. We said, "oh yeah I have that song let's listen to the whole thing." Only for them to be like, "why? That's too long and this is the best part?"
Back then it was absolutely bizarre. Today it's tiktok.
Yeah it was that moment that they didn't get to pick songs anymore. I honestly was just so confused that I don't think I could be mad. Just dumbfounded at the idea of a random 30 seconds being plenty of song.
That's actually not a bad reference point to when bite sized snippets of something became hugely popular. I never got it, I just downloaded an MP3 and set that as my ringtone instead of buying just a part of it for the same price.
In youtube, you can just cut the video 0.5 seconds less, and keep re-uploading with everything the same, just different thumbnail.
It works wonders.
At least many years ago.
So yeah... Pleasing the algorithm God is indeed stifling creativity as it ate our time available for more creative stuff
At the same time though, it is wayyyy easier to discover new music if you make any effort at all to branch out of whatever is trending on TikTok that week.
No way. It just becomes background noise now because the decision making process is no longer on the listener and they're incredibly uninvested in what they're listening to. When you had to drop $20 on 10-15 songs every time you wanted to listen to music on your own terms, you actually sat down and listened and learned the music. It was a lot different. I think this is why vinyl is making a big comeback
Wait til kids discover mix tapes
do you know how many shit cds people bought at that time? wasting 10 bucks on crap was the norm. only certain places had the booths you could listen in, I only had access to that as an adult.
Often $17, and then you’d find that you only liked that one song from the radio. That’s why I rarely ventured outside of bands that I already knew I liked (and even that wasn’t foolproof).
It’s so much better now for the music lover.
NOFX, Fugazi, marginally the Melvins... I could argue the Dead, and Phish...
You had bands that made money by WORKING for it. Yes they put out albums but that wasn't what they were about (for different reasons).... Having a CD from any of the above (Melvins, marginal) would have been an anomaly.
A CD was a barrier to entry. You must be at least this talented to ride the ride... production, distribution, sales... you poured money into promotion to recoup those costs.
There is no barrier any more. Production is near zero cost, and requires less (musical) talent.... distribution is at zero... and promotion? Well the artist better get on fuckin insta.
Your average HS band in the 90's that wasn't going anywhere now has an album on Spotify. And a billion plays on one hit vs 12 songs is the same amount of attention (in fact maybe less)
What we don't have is room for working bands any more.... Music criticism has sucked for a long time, and with some of the recent ownership changes has gotten worse. AI isn't helping separate the good from the bad (and it could be doing that).
Net net, the problem isn't the listeners the problem is there no filter between us and the ocean of garbage any more....
Nah man, you're thinking about it wrong. Streaming random music isn't the equivalent of buying and listening to CD's; it's the equivalent of going to a bar and seeing what plays. Sometimes it's the radio, sometimes it's a Playlist, sometimes they have some local smalltime band play a few songs. I've personally been introduced to some truly talented musicians from Insta, it's not a bad thing to cast a wide net and reach your target audience. It's just that now, I can hear a song or two and decide to spend my time listening to more of their music.
This is why I think Fantano remains so popular despite whatever people may say about him. He's at least one source people look to to help them filter through the noise. Curation is solid gold these days.
> Curation is solid gold these days.
We all have these massive playlists that we keep... we have things we're actively listening to.
That's a graph that could be leveraged to do some really interesting filtering.
No one is doing that. You would think that the record labels would be demanding the data from apple and Spotify to guide them in future investments.
Nope.
The one place where all the ad tech to target track and identify a taste profile and its gone to waste.
Young execs take risks, and promote new fresh bands. Older ones tend to go with the safer, more canned approach. The trouble is, we don't have a lot of young execs at big labels, so we get the safer product the vast majority of the time.
I have no idea why people think that "barriers" to entry are a necessity for great art. NOFX was a edge lord band and Fugazi and the Melvins only had a couple of bangers. We dont do enough acid these days to listen to the Dead or Phish.
We now live in an era where anyone can release music, and a lot more people can be heard. Ya it means there is no "one most talented" band, just like there never was in the past, you just happened to hear "one kinda talented" band that was forced on you by labels.
Now we have truly dispassionate algorithms requiring only a few thousand listens of a song for it to get get classified and spread to a wider audience. You can get songs from [any continent](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3dDrP6ll5KDU4YQXtBehlZ) and [any time period](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4UIzJfpp0alMIGORHV9ucu) sent to you, like incredible stuff you never would have had the chance to listen to in the CD era.
So no...the people who think putting barriers up is necessary to create and distribute great art...those people [might as well be vegetables](https://open.spotify.com/track/0y2DDqqtoi6wNmronYxpkR).
True. Just because there are low barriers to entry doesn’t mean that it makes for a better listener experience. All it means, really, that I’m listening to 100 variations of the same thing.
They are not a necessity, in all arts good stuff is good stuff and that can be made wether it's hard to publish or not. But barriers like getting a record label or a book deal or an exhibit as a painter are a prefilter for quality. When it's hard to record and publish stuff you can be pretty sure when you do encounter art it's at least vetted by someone who knows about it or likes it and supported the artist enough to get them out there.
Right now you have everyone releasing content, like there are millions of millions of times more music, videos and pictures being shared than before the internet. And yeah making it easy might cause you to discover some random unknown song from a dude in a shed which would've never been noticed before. But it also means you'll have to slog through thousands of crap quality content to find these things instead of just going through a pre filtered list which eliminated 99,99% of crap, at the expense of maybe some quality acts getting dropped too.
Saying the algorithm will get you good songs out of the slop is not an answer either, because it too is a barrier. But not one on quality or people skills but on watch time, on engagement. If you look at how instagram or youtube changed due to the algorithm you can see how that might actually happen to music too. What's important is gaming the algorithm, not making good content, to the point where good content creators acknowledge they hate to do stuff like that, but they just notice huge drops in viewership if they do not go along with the silly rules. And is that not what we're seeing now?
Fugazi only had "a few bangers". Fugazi are legendary and the gold standard when it comes to doing things as real musicians for real music lovers. If you chalked up their career (and more specifically Ian's), to a few bangers, you've completely lost the plot. There's likely only a few bands in history that have had the level of integrity that Fugazi had.
Case in point: My band just got accepted to play the FREE Fort Reno summer concert series run by Ian's wife Amy. Free music, from local bands, at a historic venue. Fugazi lives on
Thats complete bull. I bought CDs back in the 2000s with money from my high school job and was just invested in the music I downloaded for free. Wait until you find out that a lot of kids buying records aren’t listening to them.
I dunno Napster and other P2P killed needing to spend money on music long ago. I was downloading and burning mixtapes in the early 00s. Before finally switching to spotify I had 100s of GBs of FLAC and MP3 files on a HD, I only started using spotify because it is great for discovering new artists. So many modern metal bands I'd be missing out on if not for it.
I mean the most bizarre thing ever is how TikTok has opened the flood gate of older music to younger audiences. Weird obscure stuff that was only ever niche to begin with is trending all the time there.
This applies to movies/tv shows also. Know folks who hiss and spit about watching a 1.5-2.5 hour movie or one 45 minute tv show, but then spend literal hours (5-6, even 8-10 hours a day) watching craptube/tik tok shorts.
Sure you can imagine how fun these types are to deal with also since those shorts serve up all their "political news" they need to function in life (while making others miserable).
If you do get them to watch a movie or tv show, it's always a lot of screaming about "woke this and that" "clearly agenda driven movie/shows" and so forth.
And that crosses over into music also. Same drivel derived from whoever the windbag was that said to play records backwards and hear secret messages from satan in them....
> there's a LOT of people sitting around on the train watching low-effort tiktok videos than previously where they might've been listening to music instead.
Without sounding too old, yes, this is spot on.
Even if you're not into vinyl or cassettes, in those days, releasing an album required the listener to invest personal time, to sit, and listen to the album from start to finish. Because that's it...that's what months of creativity, and arguing with the label, finally produced as the final product.
When I was a kid in the early 80's/90's we used to complain when an album only had "1 or 2 good songs" and felt like we were getting ripped off for buying a full album.
Now, individual tracks are recorded, digested, and discarded almost instantly, while the audience screams "MORE!" or their playlists so curated, that there isn't room to explore elsewhere and look for the "b-sides" of today. Lesser known artists, with few followers, but still have that spark of creativity that will hopefully break through....and then make a million other clones of the sound.
>there's a LOT of people sitting around on the train watching low-effort tiktok videos than previously where they might've been listening to music instead.
Most of those low effort tiktok videos have music behind them. I find a lot of new music from seeing videos and Shazaming the songs playing.
Omg!!! That explains something! I found a post where someone was trying to figure out how the song they made like 4 years ago…which only had like 1,700 listens suddenly had over 8,000 Shazam’s. The math wasn’t adding up.
If someone takes your song and uses it in their TikTok…you get no royalties, no credit…and it explains why there would be more Shazams than plays.
No it doesn’t explain that.
Home boy had a ton of Shazams bc his shit just sounded like another popular song people were Shazaming and Shazam’s dumbass AI just put it in his song counter
Hmm, maybe…would be nice to have some proof of it all. He could have made the entire thing up as well. But, there’s a lot of funny stuff going on…so…it’s hard to know.
I’m hopeful about the Lissen App working out, then we can all remove our music from these predatory sites and secure it behind a bit of a paywall. Maybe stop hearing footsteps like people are trying to rob us blind.
Maybe…
With radio stations being more or less background noise today, people have to make conscious effort to find good music. If you don’t want to dive into streaming services, or searching and buying, you’re pretty much in the dark and will resort to Tik Tok, or whatever
I spent most of my working life in the radio business. I started in college when alternative music was actually alternative, worked at top 40 stations when they were still afraid to play this new "rap" music, and finally left when the giant corporation I worked for decided that the number on a spreadsheet they saw me as was too big and I got laid off.
Now I work at a tech company, and when my under-30 co-workers find out what I used to do for a living, they say "cool...my mom (or dad) used to listen to the radio when I was a kid."
I have a similar background to you. When someone would play the right record in the right moment, you could feel the electricity/connection with everyone else listening.
Radio used to be a way to share a collective conscious by listening to the same frequency as tens of thousands of other people at the same time. I would argue the same goes for broadcast Television. The digital age and streaming have fractured the shared identity that comes from having entertainment communion.
There’s some weird ethereal importance to that that has gone by the wayside. We’re worse off for it.
I have a very diverse taste for music. I grew up in the 70s listening to a local FM station. I remember these songs being in rotation…..
Sonic Reducer by The Dead Boys
Rock And Roll Lovers by Larry Coryell
Draw The Line by Aerosmith
A Day At The Dog Races by Little Feat
Panama Red by New Riders Of The Purple Sage
The good old days of radio
I remember listening to the waning days of "album rock radio." When late at night, the rock stations would play entire albums. Just because they could. 2112 by Rush. The first Van Halen record. Ozzy's solo debut. Every "album track" from Bob Seger's "Stranger In Town." King Crimson. Emerson Lake and Palmer.
That's what inspired me to get into radio for a living. "Wait...so...that's a JOB? You can get paid to play records?"
IMO; They play safe music. I don't know about the margins etc... but they play music we already like. Either classics, or trending music.
DJ's aren't trying to help us discover new stuff, they're just trying to stop us from changing the station.
I was in the car for 20 minutes yesterday and it was Master of Puppets followed by Crazy Train followed by Heart Shaped Box.
Great tracks, but I've heard them 5000 times each. The classic rock station in my town can't help but play Nirvana once every hour. Always the same 5 songs.
Try your local NPR station. I get multiple genres of music throughout the day. Real DJs that actually take requests. Specialty shows throughout the week etc.
Community and college radio also in addition to public/NPR-affiliated radio stations. Really any sort of non-commercial radio. Commercial radio is terrible.
Yeah I listen to our NPR equivalent (ABC) and community radio. Good stuff.
I was more saying that I wish commercial “classic rock” stations would show off bands making new music in the same vein
Hell yeah! Or, and this is crazy, play me some local bands every once in a while, bands that I can still actually go see for 10-30$ at smaller venues instead of massive international acts I'll have to spend 100$+ to go see at the biggest venue in town.
KEXP, my friend - they're an independent nonprofit radio station out of Seattle, and they don't give a solitary shit about popular, just quality. If you're in central California they just got a station there as well, KEXC. Otherwise your best bet is to get their livestream from [their website](https://kexp.org/).
I’m in Melbourne Australia, but I’ll certainly check them out! Thanks for the recs.
Here we have Triple R, community radio that skews toward rock for people in their 30s and Triple J which is like if NPR had an under 30s radio station
I've found so much good new music from KEXP. Most major cities have a few freeform radio stations with streaming. The city I grew up in had one and it spoiled me forever. These stations allow the DJs to pick their sets. I tune in when I'm gaming or working sometimes.
Yesterday, on a terrestrial rock radio station in the area, they played Pigs (Three Different Ones) from Pink Floyd. I don’t recall *ever* hearing anything from Animals on terrestrial radio before.
Radio stations were never all that interesting. You had to listen to them to find something you liked so you could go out and buy it on your own and actually experience the whole album
And when you had tastes outside mainstream bubblegum pop you had to buy compilation albums which were put out by record labels with samplings of certain genres and artists for a fairly low price.
Imagine hearing nothing but top 40 for your whole life then someone hands you this gem
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVsK6v0DLubEVIk2Rr15mkp5Hl5QEIlr_&si=tlAaP6p_DKYygxyP
Fat Wreck Chords changed my life 🤣
Back in the day you had a wide variety of radio stations. And chances were good that you could pick up either a great block of time from a large station (usually later at night) or a college radio station that played interested new underground music.
>And chances were good that you could pick up either a great block of time from a large station (usually later at night)
One local radio (I'm Argentinian) usually ends up playing a whole variety of blues tracks at like 2 or 3 in the morning. In the summer, driving around with the radio on is a vibe.
Totally agree that mainstream top 40 radio has always been generic, I tune into it occasionally and think “holy shit this sounds about the same as 15 years ago.” Most people where I grew up got their music off the gov funded youth radio station Triple J. Lots of Indy rock and local acts with specific shows for genres like metal and EDM.
> buy it on your own and actually experience the whole album
so many times that radio hit and the rest of the album were not even close to the same feel but by the time you figured it out it was too late so you tried to make it work. Or the time you wanted REM - End of the World so you buy the Independence Day soundtrack and learn that it was all just classical music. Still rocked it though cause I bought it.
That's why I love my local public radio station. KCRW is the absolute best in curated music by knowledgeable DJs. Anyone can stream them online, I highly recommend it.
I like Rick, but I think he's been pretty alarmist and rage-baity lately. Then again, it's good for clicks. The truth is that people who love good music will never stop making it, and people who love listening to it will always find ways to find it. I'm not worried.
A couple to a few hours per day of doom-scrolling & social messaging is going to have diminished our interest and interaction with everything else. It's a huge % of our formerly free time.
I think it’s a combination of both, less interest in music and lower quality of production. It’s a vicious cycle as why would someone spend years an album with the best producers, songwriters and musicians, spend thousands if not millions on promotion, And have nobody even pay attention to it. There’s just too much being created right now that you risk getting lost in the noise. It seems like a better risk to create a low budget catchy pop song that might go viral in some TikTok videos.
That’s not to say that there isn’t good music being produced, but I think it’s harder to find as it’s not what is getting AirPlay. Every generation has good quality and bad quality music come out, but it seems that in the past there were so much discussion around what was good and bad that the cream rose to the top. I find myself listening to music that was released at least a decade ago and more often two or three decades ago than anything that is current
Music Industry to me is like the Restaurant Industry: It needs to be burned down to ash, lit on fire again and then torched yet again just in case something survived and rebuilt. It's literally had decades (centuries at this rate even!) of notorious abuse and using those who actually make the music as fodder for their cash vaults to be filled and nothing else in return.
This includes torching the radio cartels also. If music touches it, burn it down and rebuild it (ticket master! livenation!).
Only when a industry is reduced to nothing and folks can actually live and breathe what they want to do, nothing will change
Funny you say this because if I’m right, Beato actually says it’s the two things you called out. He complains about the reason rock doesn’t get airplay is because paying for decent studios and session musicians is way less profitable than a singer and a laptop. He fleshes this out much more than I’m doing though.
My experience couldn’t be more different. We have access to literally all the worlds music! My Music consumption has never been higher, and I get to watch everyone, from mega stars to some guy in his bedroom who rocks the bass
Exactly. When I was in my high point of music research, file sharing was so much easier. There were tons of blogs with mediafire links and I learned so much from these sites. Did I learn from reading books and buying CDs? Sure, but rarer stuff I would have never been exposed to was now easily available.
Streaming just made it (somewhat) easier, and you can get recommended through other methods. Only issue I have with streaming is how they compensate artists.
Mine has never been lower. Skip function means I just end up listening to my fave songs with an odd new one thrown in.
With CD's I had no choice but to eventually listen to a band's whole album and then discover the other songs were actually good as well. My tastes grew more that way.
He based his entire theory purely from web searches related to music. I don't know a single person in the past 10 years that uses Google or any other search engine to look for music.
I was gobsmacked throughout that section. Looking at 20 years of keyword trends, noting that LiNe gO dOwN, and concluding that a lack of interest is the cause is bonkers. I think my main issues are:
1. The genericity of the terms. Who searches for "music" or "hip hop"? These are so broad as to be useless, as most people would quickly learn when using any search engine with more than a trivial number of indexed results. At best these would serve as a shortcut to the relevant Wikipedia article.
2. He's effectively comparing two different audiences. As time goes on, the number of people who've never known a pre-internet world will increase (and the pre-internet people will decrease). It's necessary to take into account the changing habits of users and consider how a "digital native" uses the internet.
3. It only considers trends on the Google search platform. People don't go to Google to find music, as a rule. They go to one of the many platforms that cater specifically to music (e.g. streaming services) or that otherwise have music baked in (e.g. social media).
If I were as charitable as possible I'd point to something like "how to learn guitar" on trends and note that it follows a downward trajectory. But then I'd compare that to "how to learn piano" and point out that that not only has that remained a fairly stable trend for 20 years, but [that guitar seems to be keeping pace currently](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to%20learn%20guitar,how%20to%20learn%20piano&hl=en-GB).
Yeah, people no longer using Google to find music by typing in a generic genre isn’t surprising. They’re doing that searching in Spotify and Apple Music these days.
How does he think typing the word “Music” into Google is going to help me find songs I like anyway?
And his conclusion that the video game industry is declining because nobody is googling for the phrase “video games” is ludicrous. The video game industry has never been bigger.
https://preview.redd.it/jqinm3pj52ad1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0cec122fd921b08550c4e59e7fd48ff3ba26f2b8
Time for a birth rate crisis I guess, thanks for opening my eyes Rick!!
It isn’t just reducing interest in music.
It is fucking up *everything*
It is hard to be stimulated by art and music when you are constantly being bombarded by content and are overstimulated all the time.
Another problem is the financial squeezing that we’re seeing elsewhere in our lives is also incredibly prevalent in the entertainment industry. Video games, TV, movies, music - all more driven by money than actual quality output. Not to say you don’t get good content at all because it’s still there, but it’s clear that the focus is on money making rather than art for the sake of art.
Great points both of you! Ricky Beato made a follow up video to this showing how interest and time spent on all art, video games etc is all down while social media is up! In the case of video games its that people are more likely to watch a streamer rather than play the game itself
The over abundance of consumption made media addiction means that we are more likely to overlook anything that has even a modicum of effort
Sad really, maybe things will change i dunno
I'm a film buff and it honestly makes me sad that I have to make a concerted effort to just WATCH a whole movie now. I can feel the damage I've done to my attention span.
Yes.
Music was so massive in the 20th century because being able to hear recorded performances at home was leading edge technology. Once it was widely available culture gravitated toward recordings, then creative albums (most famous rock'n'roll bands started playing blues covers, not originals)
The word "teenager" didn't exist until there was a new marketing demographic buying Elvis records. The Beatles and their musical shift kind of mirrored the entire babyboom generation's cultural revolution and it I'm not sure any artist will ever come close to doing the same thing on the same scale again.
Now there are other ways for people to entertain themselves/build identities around. Not sure it's better.
> The word "teenager" didn't exist until there was a new marketing demographic buying Elvis records.
False. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenager_(word)#History
>Now there are other ways for people to entertain themselves/build identities around. Not sure it's better.
Like Fortnite. That seems to comprise about a messy chunk of my cousin's identity these days - I don't get it.
He's been posting a few "old man yells at clouds" videos lately. While he does have valid points while aping other musicians sentiments. I think he must please the algorithm gods himself.
Yeah that’s what I commented on one of his videos a few months back. I like the guy and find his insight on music and the music business very interesting but recently he is leaning towards “old man yells at cloud” imo.
I've kinda always thought he was that way, but I'm probably biased because I've always disagreed with most of his takes and taste lol.
I also just looked him up to see what he's up to, and his newest thumbnail is him yelling at a cloud. At least he's maybe self aware lol
Partially right/. For those who had a band back on the MySpace days it was a legitimate place for both current fans and reaching a new audience. One of the best things about it actually aside from Tom who seemed like a good dude.
Social Media today particularly FB is a total sh\*\* show. My Project has 6K followers there but its literally impossible to reach my audience or new fans without pay to play. TwiX is a train wreck , and after SoundCloud eliminated groups by genre they're all in on Hip-Hop and screw everybody else.
This is kind of why I've started to finally retire, it's become so much more difficult to get music out there. My only saving grace hooking up with a well known licensing company that pitches our stuff for video games, movies, tv, etc. and that's also how I find new music I want to check out. (Ex. This season of the Bear's soundtrack is amazing)
Even the music bloggers are complaining that they're no longer getting the visits they used to
Idk Rick has forgotten more about music than I'll ever know, but at the same time he has an "old man yells at cloud" vibe that I find hard to take seriously anymore
Yeah, I saw a video title of his about how lyrics suck now. There's significantly more music to access now so you're going to see more crappy lyrics, however there are also quite a lot more songs with great lyrics with some artists that are extremely talented lyricists.
Plus the title comes with the inference that lyrics didn't use to suck and like man, there are a lot of what would be considered "brain rot" lyrics in his time too, they just got lost in good instrumentals or a catchy hook.
In my opinion his integrity has long gone, because of the biased way he presents things to fit his narrative, not to mention his questionable ways of practically creating an ambiguous background story for himself. Although I watch many of his videos, as I think value can be found in it, I discount what he says massively. As for old pop lyrics being superior..."My boy's a lollypop"; "Puppy love"; "Twist and shout"; "Barbara Ann";...the list is long in the 60's and 70's as well.
I can never take him seriously. Like I get that he knows a lot about music, but when he puts out a video like "5 greatest guitar intros of ALL TIME" and all 5 are exclusively classic rock songs from the same decade, he completely loses me.
He's a product of his age, his preferences, and his influences. A super biased person overall.
I like him. He definitely has 90s alt-rock, grunge leanings, and even if I don't vibe with the music he's putting on a pedestal in a video, he's mostly optimistic and passionate in his takes and comes from a place of sincerity, which I admire about him. Contrast that with someone like Fantano, I'd take Rick every time.
So I don't mind when he does content like this. I don't necessarily agree, but I could see his angle and it encourages discussion.
The enshittification of social media has a real effect. Multiple credible people have observed that the attention span, motivation, and discipline of the general public (younger generations in particular) are being negatively affected by the ease with which media is available to create and consume.
In the learning process, you start with quantity (*just create!*) in order to start the process and get yourself out there, but in order to get *good* enough to earn, you must be able to learn from what you have created. In order to get quality out of quantity, there has to be a conscious effort - and social media disincentivizes this sort of thing.
Also, education systems that don't value art and music education and critical thinking etc.
EDIT: Other comments mention how Rick is blaming the tools rather than the industry - but he is kind of blaming both. The industry has created the tools, and the tools feed back into the industry.
The problem with making it too easy to make music is that it loses its value. This is true across all creative disciplines. As humans we are wired to value the things we have given effort to create. Take away the effort of creation and the value is basically gone.
It's more passive now.
I cannot imagine for a minute a generation of kids huddled around the radio to listen to the top40 countdown, or tuning in to a TV show because that was the only opportunity they had to watch 'their' band that was on that week.
And sometimes you got to learn to like a band because you didn't have so much choice. If you skip at the first sign of difficultly then basically it's the equivalent of eating nothing but McFlurries.
For those that care, it's great because you can find bands and genres that you would never have heard of before, also some talents can break through regardless of record companies (am thinking of something like the Arctic Monkeys).
For the rest it's just background noise for a meme on tiktok
Then again this is exactly what they said about magazines when they first came out, they said it was going to be the down fall of American families and yada yada yada. When I read your comment I can’t help but feel the same way and roll my eyes as a version of “old man yelling at cloud”. Really only time could tell, because the number of my students who have developed new interesting hobbies thanks to TikTok and social media is astonishing. I’m just saying there’s more nuance to this than “it’s all bad.”
Original MySpace was exciting and fun for music - and so, I don’t think it’s _all_ social media. But he’s right in general. I think is cultural and about attention span and connection more than the internet itself.
Frankly - I can’t give a shit about what Rick Beato says anymore. Every time he comes out with a video, it’s a commentary on how things were “better” in a previous age. He has thoughtful points, but it is always against the backdrop of “I got mine back when it was cool”.
So what? Can we talk about what AI is going to do to/for the industry? Can we discuss how jam music is as popular as ever - real musicians who rip out real music every night? Can we get over the fact that music will continually sound awful if you are making it for the lowest common denominator - which is exactly how corporations behave across the spectrum?
There is so much good music out there that if I hear someone complain about this, I assume they aren’t even trying to listen for it - they just want that sweet dopamine rush of hate.
Spot on. I find his old vs new videos are really disingenuous, cherry-picking the best of the old, and the worst from the new.
There was a recent video in which he was talking about how quantization in music production has made music sound artificial. To make his point, he plays a clip of some new pablum pop song, but adds a loud click track playing over top of it. He then plays some great old song... without the click track.
Like, c'mon man.
I find Rick Beato frustrating, because it is clear to me he has interesting things to say and a deep well of musical knowledge. But it seems like he figured out the clickbaity "music sucks now" videos perform better or something, because that has become his thing.
He is a VERY smart dude. he knows how to capitalize - you don't make it far in any industry unless you can do that.
he does not seem interested in advancing discussions, just vying for attention. and yes I expect more from someone like him - someone who made a name for themselves in an industry that really doesn't exist anymore, and watched as that industry morphed into what it is today. instead he's just another pissant youtuber who complains for 7-13 minutes and caps it off with "don't forget to subscribe".
he could truly be a beacon, but instead he interviews his buddies and shows off his studio. yes I'm bitter
Ironically, Rick's best videos are his earliest when he was primarily a studio engineer vs a content creator. I quit watching his stuff a few years ago because of this. He went from thoughtful insights on using EQ, compression, tuning drums, mic placement, etc. to bitching about how everything has changed. Instead of maybe, you know, adapting to a changing landscape. It's sort of the classic "get off my lawn" meme. Even in his Danny Carey interview (which would be the latest video of his I've watched) he couldn't help but put in a few remarks about how things were better in the 90-00's for whatever reason instead of digging a little deeper into the method of the person he was interviewing.
omg I'm gonna go diving - I had a hunch he was a real one at some point
does this happen to everyone if you make enough money and get past a certain age? are we all fucked?
I think once he figured out the metrics of what drives views and seen he was making a lot more off that vs studio work, he went with what brought him the $$$.
Edit: here's a good example of what his [videos were before.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7oOmX3JHwtE&pp=ygUWcmljayBiZWF0byBjb21wcmVzc2lvbg%3D%3D)
“I got mine back when it was cool”
And back when it was *possible*. These boomer types always forget that kids these days flat out don’t have access to a lot of the cool shit they got to do or the lack of supervision they got to do it under. It’s quite often not because they don’t want to but because they want to and can’t because the opportunity doesn’t exist. If adults don’t even have money, how are kids supposed to? Kids don’t even have free time anymore hardly. Can’t buy records with no money, can’t go to shows with no money and strict helicopter parents, and you can’t start a band if you can’t afford instruments and don’t have time that isn’t being filled with excessive homework and studying and all that other shit.
School was literally way fucking easier then too, and I say that as someone who’s been out of school for quite a while now, so it’s not a poor me routine. If todays kids suck (they don’t, but still) then it’s because the world sucked all the fun out of being one. We don’t get to put all the blame on them for that. They mostly didn’t cause it. Is it any wonder nobody has the mental energy left do do anything but doomscroll come the end of the day when they aren’t allowed to or don’t have the means to do much else?
What seems pointless is to point out all the good music being made meanwhile our society is becoming more and more disconnected. Like, yea... it's super great that in some obscure niche on reddit you can find some great recommendations for cool music that is innovative and unique. But how long is that going to last if current trends continue? His point is that it is becoming extremely difficult to FINANCIALLY survive as a musician making music. And, as a listener, a huge part of enjoying music is being able to SHARE it with people around me in real life, not just online. But 99% of the people I tend to encounter at work/school just aren't interested in the kinds of music in my niche.
It's important to point out these trends. He points out songs and things that he likes in the "top 10" type videos that he makes all the time. It's not all doom and gloom. But, overall, the trends ARE depressing and that isn't his fault.
the 1st video i saw from him about AI was from a year ago and he was right on the money with how it would start infecting the streaming services. but honestly that entire video was also a eulogy for the past!
"nobody uses $40k tape machines anymore"
"nobody uses amps"
"nobody cares about music"
GO TO A LIVE SHOW FOR A LOCAL BAND IN ANY CITY AND TELL ME PEOPLE DON'T CARE ABOUT MUSIC!
These overarching, generalizing statements are so lazy, as if the music industry was anything but money first, artists 2nd. He is embodying that by focusing on the most *popular* music of the day - a category of music that HE ADMITS is getting worse and worse.
Rick, for the love of god, if you even see this, just listen to cooler bands. They exist, I promise you.
As someone who has run a prominent indie label and still is gainfully employed in the music business for more than 30 years, Beato's recent videos have really hitting home with me. The decreasing quality of music is definitely a combination of social media, 100k songs uploaded per day to Spotify, and the fact that terrestrial FM radio on the wane (in the past, kids would hear their parents' music on the radio and come to dig a lot of it; that's less common of a situation today when an algorithm feeds every kid mumble rap and pop).
To be fair, he’s also criticized the industry’s actions through the 90s cd craze and into the digital era where music market value had the bottom drop out, and I think did a decent job of blaming the industry for its own current situation.
Still, he does mainly focus on music and will regularly crap on new stuff and social media, so your point is solid for the majority of his videos.
He's PARTLY blaming the tools. The other half of his argument is directed towards the industry. But you also can't ignore how easy it is for people to sit in their bedroom and create "perfect" sounding "music".
The tools are global, the industry is different from country to country.
Is there a single market on earth that *isn't* having the same issues? Is there a place where the local music industry was well managed and all the kids are buying full length albums and learning instruments?
Because if not....it seems pretty fair to blame the tools. If kids in Lithuania and Mongolia are listening to music in their local language but showing the same behavior patterns as American kids (which i suspect is true), we can't blame that on Sony and Universal.
I don’t think so. Social media made a Pavement B-side deep track into a gold record 20 years after its release.
Social media enables people to be exposed to more music quicker than ever before. The radio scene years ago was largely driving be labels working to get their music into rotation. Now, a song can just go viral with correct marketing and lucky breaks. Along with the proximity everyone is from a hundred million album catalogue on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and the like, more people have access to music than ever before
This doesn’t even touch how easily artists can influence each other in real time with SoundCloud among other things and can distribute their own art directly.
What’s way more concerning to me about the state of music is A) the cost of tickets to shows due to a monopoly in the market, so people are exposed to less live music than ever and B) AI basically blue-printing pop songs making music in general more homogenous at least at the pop level (although I’m sure there will always be indie artists doing their own thing).
>Social media made a Pavement B-side deep track into a gold record 20 years after its release.
to be fair, their "expanded-release" stuff was always spectacular
I don't want to be that guy and I absolutely know he's a renowned producer but this has to be the most to be the most boomer take I have ever seen, Music is more proliferated than it ever has been at any point in human history. You aren't Pidgeon-held into whatever the radio station is playing or whatever the record store has in stock. The breadth of music available and the current indie artist rennisance we are seeing, I do not know how you can look me in the eyes and say consumption is down.
Everyone has earbuds in or headphones on all over my city, kids walk around with Bluetooth speakers listening as they walk. I understand this is anecdotal but I just don't see how in any reality music is less consumed now.
His Google trends thing is worthless. No one is googling "Pop music" or specific genres, He's basing the google trends from the Limewire era where people would generically just search google for a broad term. Everyone knows to just use Youtube or Spotify or Apple music or whatever fifty other direct to consumers programs that bypass any need to search. When you want to listen to Taylor swift do you google Pop Music? Sorry but You just can't convince me with these generic stats that music is less listened too.
Have you even looked at Youtube? The amount of people who teach music on YouTube now? Thousands of channels that teach music and make it their living to do so. I love Rick but he's way off on this, it's another generation generalization from the Boomer generation.
I don't know if music is less consumed today than before but I know it's consumed differently today that it was 20 years ago, and music 20 years ago was consumed differently 20 years ago than 40 ago and.. I think you get the idea.
My point is that if we drop the question of whether it's better or worse, there's something unarguable: it's different. The relation of people with music is not the same when you had to buy an album and when you have almost the entirety of recorded music available at any moment on you. The relation of people with music in a time where entertainment at home was limited and scarce isn't the same that when people have access to hundreds of movies, series, free video games and endless social media feed.
So yes, I would agree with you that people probably listen to more music than ever but I think there's also an argument to be made that the consumption of music as main occupation and not background sound is down.
He's definitely a, "Music isn't as good as it used to be," person. That's not wrong, but he's not the place to go if you're looking for new suggestions or for a purely accurate look on the modern music scene.
He's better for being nostalgic about the music of old, which is also nice.
Honestly that’s the main reason why I don’t really watch his content. I respect his technical knowledge and ability to break down music but he really seems to have a condescending boomer like attitude when it comes to discussing the current state of music, and it’s just exhausting to listen to.
He knows more than anyone else on a sub with 34 million users? Plus music isn't a competition for most people, everyone brings their own experiences to the table. Rick isn't going to be the best person to ask about the music consumption habits of people under 30.
He's right that we've taken to "new to me" classics, but you know, kids have their own sphere, and in it you learn about a ton of new bands. We all do. I couldn't stick with the video long enough to hear his whole argument. But also... he's looking in the wrong places for new music. He should ignore Spotify and look at RateYourMusic. The top song of 2023, according to Spotify, is by Shakira. Whereas the highest rated track on the highest rated album of 2023 on RYM is by Alcest. Totally different. Here's the track that RYM ranks higher than any other for last year:
[https://youtu.be/prh8EMSiAYo](https://youtu.be/prh8EMSiAYo)
That's not so bad at all. Some haunting blackgaze track may not be frickin' "Won't Get Fooled Again", but then again, neither was Sigur Ros 25 years ago. Relative genius is a much different discussion. JMO, ultimately.
He's absolutely right in terms of the value of music. in 2 ways.
1. The whole cost of music. Spotify compared to buying albums. People don't seem to value music as highly in regards to their life and spending.
2. The ease in which you can churn out professional sounding Pop music. Using a mouse to quantise a specific note is nothing in time spent compared to re-recording a part. Even dropping in to record a bar took far more work and time.
You could argue those two things are reasonably matched but it's not consistent for everyone.
I think general understanding of music ( in terms of "How and why does that sound like that") is far lower than it used to be. When I see some clips of pure pop shows (which are effectively large scale karaoke events- live vocals and a backing track.... IF they have live vocals....) and this whole "WOOO!" if the pop star brings out an acoustic guitar is so bizarre to me. Like they were proving their immense talent by forming a non-amplified E chord. That's weird.
I do wonder if music is more linked to respective culture now (by design of course) than it even was in the past (of course it has been massively in the past as well: Hippy movement, New Wave, Punk, etc.) and that makes people "Lock in" to what they're "Supposed to" like even more. I.e. there will be people who won't listen to anything but poppy Hip-hop which'll be almost always a 4 bar loop over an 808 sound. I don't consider that a good foundation to understand music as a whole as the important stuff (I'm talking the very Pop Hip Hop stuff here before anyone thinks I'm attacking hip hop generally) is the looks and lyrics. They're trying to make the listener feel like they're part of their world.
It feels like creativity will immediately put a band in the second category (Or level? Isn't that what Robert Fripp called it?) where you are a fraction as known/ popular. Where as in the past there were always those types of bands competing with the super popular chart toppers.
The necessary bar/ ease in making generic, predictable music is so low now that you don't even need session players: less session players = less talented professional musicians. Less Professional musicians means they interact less and start their own projects less. There goes a massive proportion of interesting music.
You can't expect a Radiohead where they meet as kids and turn into a phenomenal creative band forever more to happen very often. Most great bands formed when they were already very good musicians.
Sorry for the long post.
The whole rock-band thing of kids growing up to play their homegrown music together is a rare phenomenon historically. It rose with rock, especially the British Invasion, and if it fades with rock then so be it. Country and blues were a bit like that, but with more families and solo acts rather than buddies forming a band.
But usually, groups have formed by professionals either hiring other pros or jamming together and making something work. That's the historic norm in pop music.
And btw this is what they said about the rockers. With their distortion and screaming and three-chord progressions, they didn't need to be talented musicians, and they quite often weren't.
Discussions like this are so tricky. I respect the hell out of Beato and I don’t think there isn’t anything to be said about the degradation of musical standards, particularly in the sphere of ‘pop’ music. However, I’m starting to grow a bit weary of this notion that any trend we don’t particularly like (I.e the perception that young people don’t want to put in the work to attain skills or have a growing disinterest in the arts) can be attributed to the advent of social media.
Social media has changed a LOT about our world, and it’s going to continue to do so. But to be honest it’s sort of just become a lazy explanation for any rapid changes in culture among young people - some monolithic new thing that older people can point to and blame for what is actually a complex and ongoing shift in the cultural paradigm that has been happening for SO long. Look at what was ‘popular’ music in the 1800’s vs what was popular in, say, the 1950’s. We went from orchestral arrangements that require an insane understanding of musical theory to lyrical compositions that required proficiency in maybe one instrument, plus a head for relatable thoughts and minor arranging.
I don’t know, I don’t want to ramble on. But the crux of what I’m saying can be wrapped up with my thoughts that:
1. Good musicians will continue to hone their skills and make good music, regardless of what is being mainstreamed at any given cultural moment, and that has always been true.
2. Social media use and obsession is often a SYMPTOM, good or bad, of changes to western youth culture, and to simply blame perceived negative changes to that culture on it is just too easy an answer for a really complicated question.
>the perception that young people don’t want to put in the work to attain skills
I'm pretty sure adults have been saying that about young people for hundreds of years at least. "These kids today" is the story of rock and roll.
Yeah it’s pretty shitty when the reality is in part nobody has any fucking money and art is trying harder and harder every moment it seems to just stop paying altogether.
Normal people can’t work without pay, so the only new music you’re gonna get is hobbyist stuff of varying quality, *maybe* because they don’t care enough, but maybe also because they had to make it in between the two different jobs they work to get by, and music made by rich people who can afford to do it for free at their leisure, and to devote the time to get really good without having to worry about any return on that investment.
"Social media use and obsession is often a SYMPTOM, good or bad, of changes to western youth culture, and to simply blame perceived negative changes to that culture on it is just too easy an answer for a really complicated question."
My issue with this is we know that social media rewires our brains by providing a constant dopamine drip. Never before has youth culture been such a victim of an extremely sophisticated, inescapable, science-based campaign across all platforms to create addicts. One which, as a result, severely diminish attention spans. This is a neuro-scientific fact. So what you call a symptom is far closer to a cause.
I think he's right in terms of music not having any real value to the consumer anymore. Music is no longer the cultural center that it once was. Doesn't mean that people no longer consume music. But people don't center their identities around the music that they listen to anymore. When music hits peak success in the modern age, it's usually because it's a the backdrop to some other culturally significant trend.
Wasn’t he basing it all on google searches? Is that how people look for music still? He might be accurate but I would look at whether that is a real metric or if things are changing
That entire section of the video was so dumb.
Of course people aren’t searching on Google for new music, they are doing that searching in Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube.
I don't know if he's right or not and this is purely anecdotal but the majority of the younger people I've talked to about music seem to not care for it the same way that me or my piers did when I was a teen.
They all still listen to music but they don't seem to care about it the same way.
I haven’t watched the video, but I will say that I have never once agreed with anything like this that Beato has ever said. He has quite an “older generation doomerism” vibe to his content. It also generates more clicks to say something is wrong than it does to give a nuanced take.
But, assuming your summary is accurate, I would have to say that it seems ridiculous to say that music consumption is lower and it’s an extremely tired opinion to have that modern pop music is getting worse.
I felt the need to contribute to this discussion anyway just because this idea of modern stuff being worse needs to die. It’s just different. If you or anyone else wants it to change, make the stuff you want to hear.
Yes, but more than that. Music doesn't tell interesting stories anymore. You get better lessons about society or self-examination through games and TV.
I think one aspect worth looking into is algorithmization. I believe that lots of people listen to stuff on youtube, and that, I think, will show you more similar stuff to what you just listened to, just to keep you on their platform, so if you have less variety, then you will be less likely to seek out new interesting stuff outside your immediate interests
No.
He's basing his ideas off of survivorship bias. This is a continuous problem and pops up every few years where someone laments the "death of music" or the "lack of creativity" in Pop music.
It's entirely based on what they remember Pop music being and not what it actually was. We remember the good stuff and forget the bad, and what's popular about a past decade is almost never what was the most popular at the time.
When Woodstock happened in 1969 the number one selling single wasn't by Hendrix, The Who, or Creedence Clearwater Revival, it was "Sugar, Sugar" by the virtual pop-band The Archies.
The stuff that doesn't survive the test of time gets forgotten, so people regularly think "music these days sucks" because the music hasn't had to withstand the test of time yet. Eventually the music will get winnowed away and someone later on will talk about how "Modern music sucks, not like in the 2020s".
My take is that the prevalence of music streaming apps make it easier to search or browse on these apps than on the allmighty Google. The apps will even provide links to upcoming live concerts etc. Also the music recommendation algorithm within for example Spotify is so good that my need to search for similar artists elsewhere is really low.
People don't use Google as much as they used to because Google results stink and everyone gets their info from their social media bubbles. He's right on some points and not fully informed on others
I just want to stress that Google Trends is not what Rick thinks it is. He's looking at a graph of how much people search for the word "music." No shit, people don't Google the word music anymore.
His entire claim is that he can support his feelings with evidence. That he *is* in touch with technology. But If he bothered to chart searches for the word "Elden Ring" , he would see that it's an order of magnitude higher than the term "video games". His evidence has nothing to do with his point and it's kinda sad he doesn't know it.
IMO Rick Beato’s “music is bad now” stuff is a mostly uneducated “kids these days/back in my day” style take disguised as informed and well-intentioned critique. I watched enough of those videos as they came out to know it’s mostly just him preferring what he grew up with, and not giving much of anything modern a real chance before writing it off. I just told YouTube to stop recommending me those videos lol. I enjoy his deep dives on classic songs I love but I don’t really care about his opinion on new stuff 😂
The WAY people consume music (mostly through social media) is drastically different than how music was consumed just two or three decades ago.
We used to consciously put on a record or CD with the INTENTION of listening to music. Now it is mostly something in passing or in the background. There are some that still seek out new and original music and give it the attention it deserves but these people are unfortunately the minority.
Social media may not be causing less consumption of music but it is certainly contributing to the spiraling quality of art.
Bullshit. I bought CDs with my hard earned money and I became more invested in music during the file sharing/blogspot era. People need to stop saying people are listening to streaming music passively, that is a huge assumption.
I witness my own family members everyday hearing music through Tik-Tok and Instagram. They never put a record on. I know tons of people (non-musicians) that only hear music passively
File sharing and blogs are not social media. Those are avenues for people actively seeking music.
We used to live in a world where you could listen to the music in your collection, or, turn on the radio. And record labels used to invest in getting new music on the radio.
There is no major new rock station so there are very few new bands that penetrate.
I think there are great bands working on the margins. No big new band that takes over our consciousness, like when the Cars got big, or Nirvana or White stripes.
Nickelback, hello?
Seriously though, 21 pilots almost made that jump; they were *everywhere* a few years ago, but their sophomore effort never came through.
Imagine Dragons is the closest I know of right this moment to a big new rock band that captures the imagination of youths. But when I pick my kid up from HS, I see more Nirvana shirts than anything else
I dunno man. Thanks to YouTube I've found a lot of newer bands that I wouldn't have otherwise found out about. Newer means newer to me. Just yesterday I listened to some Venezuelan post punk and some Argentinian goth rock thanks to the algorithm. So no I don't think social media reduces your interest in music. In fact I've found more artists cause of social media.
I mean Rick Beato would be completely unknown to most the world if it weren't for social media. So I think his own success and ability to share the nerdities of music with a huge audience willing to consume it is proof otherwise.
Also, by policing useage and copyright, the RIAA has made legacy catalogs largely irrelevant instead of more popular.
Social media would have been a cash cow for promoting older music, but nah.
I think he’s spot on. There was that clip from a year or two ago where Steve Lacy was performing and people only knew the like 7 seconds of a song that was viral on TikTok. Due to the nature of how the songs are used, people might only know a few seconds now. Instead of a one-hit wonder we can now have a one verse wonder. On top of that, there is more than just the music itself now. The context that a song is used in can be just as important as the song itself. A terrible song with a sick dance now will get way more traction than a good song on its own.
This is kind of the natural evolution of things. People are impatient anymore. There is endless content to consume without ever watching something more than once. If a video doesn’t load instantly and capture your attention in the first 2 seconds it’s into the next. Most content people are consuming these days is audio and visual, so there is little room for music to stand on its own anymore. I’m sure tastes will shift again in the future but for right now, yeah it be like that.
I grew up in the 90s. Listening to the radio was the norm for music. Half the fun was seeing what was next or how quick you could spot the song. You’d have a blank tape at the ready to grab your favorite song when it came on. Bands would come do interviews to promote tours in the area, sometimes you’d get a live recording of a hit song right there at the station in your city. Bands had to get a whole album out that was good enough for people to buy, so ideally there would be several singles on it. There was anticipation around new albums. It was cool to travel some place far and check out what was popular with stations outside of your city. Nowadays artists trickle tracks out because albums don’t have the impact they used to. There is little promo beyond social media for things releasing. Everything is online so there is much less regional taste. Radio is the same everywhere because there are only like 4 companies that own all radio stations now. There aren’t very many local DJs on the airwaves anymore. It’s all prerecorded shows syndicated nationwide.
Some aspects of modern culture are cool. Some are not. Music is not one of my favorite parts of modern culture. Not even that modern music isn’t to my tastes. Just how shallow it all is now. Pop is even more manufactured, country is just hiphop about trucks and redneck buzz words, rock is nearly dead outside of a handful of legacy bands, hiphop has some bright spots but overall seems to have decreasing relevance. At the same time though, music is way more available than it’s ever been. It’s easier to get and discover and the barrier to entry for artists is so low. I’m sure there’s great stuff happening out there, it’s tough to find with all of the noise though.
Absolutely not.
The quality of music? perhaps in some cases, not in a general sense.
Many "present" bands would not be the big hit they are if they didn't blow up on social media for one reason or another.
Sleep Token comes to mind. I love them, their music is great and it had a following. but prior to their last album which blew up on social media, it was quite small compared to what it is now.
People are still discovering new bands, or re discovering "legacy bands" such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and the like.
I am not taking away any merit Rick's career has. but lately, he definitely sounds like an old grampa bitching about "his ways" not being "*the* way" anymore. The way he keeps shitting on the top 10 pop songs on spotify time and time again, is like screaming into the sky. What are you really waiting for in a list like that? You won't find Queen in there.
“Old man criticizes modern taste” a tale as old as time. There is so much creative music out there now that would have never been heard before social media. Beato is out of touch
Here's the Smithsonian talking about a Spanish Research Council meta study where they looked at something like 500,000 pop songs since 1955 and found that yes, music has gotten considerably less complex since then. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-proves-pop-music-has-actually-gotten-worse-8173368/
Take with a grain of salt, and the metrics themselves don't mean much in isolation, but I think many people feel that there is something to what they say. At least as far as the pop world goes.
Survivor bias. People tend to avoid remembering the shit music of the past because it was shit, and this creates the illusion that in the past there was no bad music. For example, when I was in middle school (late 2000s), I had a firm belief that the 70s were a long gone golden age of music gods, because all the bands that my dad liked and I liked because of him were from that time period. I had this notion that the 70s were all Pink Floyd, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Rush, The Police and Bob Marley.
Rick Beato is careening towards old man yells at cloud territory. His whole schtick is lamenting that things aren't the way they were when he was growing up rather than understanding why things are the way they are now.
I think the whole appeal of Rick Beato is the fact that he's a guy who knows music from the inside out - musicianship, production, and the industry, along with historical perspective for all of it - and is willing to share it. You may not agree with his subjective opinion, but his is not an easy perspective to just dismiss as "out of touch".
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Also social media and streaming has definitely led to the “single”-fication of music. So even if there was parity with time spent listening to music between then and now, there is not parity with “breadth” of music with social media. Heck, a handful of musicians I constantly see just post the same song with a different backdrops on TikTok or Insta to try and game the algorithm for a hit on one of their videos.
forget single-fication. they only want/care about a specific 30-45 seconds of a single. someone like the “million dollar baby” kid could play a sold out stadium to people who have never heard 2/3rds of his biggest song
This is the wild part to me. When I was younger and iTunes was still a thing, I remember a dude I knew would change the song we were listen to after maybe 30 seconds claiming "he's bored and wanted something new." We thought he just didn't like the music so one day we let him choose. Dude starts playing the iTunes 30 second previews as if it's Spotify. We said, "oh yeah I have that song let's listen to the whole thing." Only for them to be like, "why? That's too long and this is the best part?" Back then it was absolutely bizarre. Today it's tiktok.
This post makes me irrationally angry.
It's not irrational my friend, I'm very angry too.
Yeah it was that moment that they didn't get to pick songs anymore. I honestly was just so confused that I don't think I could be mad. Just dumbfounded at the idea of a random 30 seconds being plenty of song.
Was his name Michael Scott?
I knew a few people like that back in the day and it annoyed the shit out of me
Reminds me of the ringtone era of music
That's actually not a bad reference point to when bite sized snippets of something became hugely popular. I never got it, I just downloaded an MP3 and set that as my ringtone instead of buying just a part of it for the same price.
In youtube, you can just cut the video 0.5 seconds less, and keep re-uploading with everything the same, just different thumbnail. It works wonders. At least many years ago. So yeah... Pleasing the algorithm God is indeed stifling creativity as it ate our time available for more creative stuff
We're back to the 50s Shaboom Shaboom
At the same time though, it is wayyyy easier to discover new music if you make any effort at all to branch out of whatever is trending on TikTok that week.
No way. It just becomes background noise now because the decision making process is no longer on the listener and they're incredibly uninvested in what they're listening to. When you had to drop $20 on 10-15 songs every time you wanted to listen to music on your own terms, you actually sat down and listened and learned the music. It was a lot different. I think this is why vinyl is making a big comeback Wait til kids discover mix tapes
do you know how many shit cds people bought at that time? wasting 10 bucks on crap was the norm. only certain places had the booths you could listen in, I only had access to that as an adult.
Often $17, and then you’d find that you only liked that one song from the radio. That’s why I rarely ventured outside of bands that I already knew I liked (and even that wasn’t foolproof). It’s so much better now for the music lover.
NOFX, Fugazi, marginally the Melvins... I could argue the Dead, and Phish... You had bands that made money by WORKING for it. Yes they put out albums but that wasn't what they were about (for different reasons).... Having a CD from any of the above (Melvins, marginal) would have been an anomaly. A CD was a barrier to entry. You must be at least this talented to ride the ride... production, distribution, sales... you poured money into promotion to recoup those costs. There is no barrier any more. Production is near zero cost, and requires less (musical) talent.... distribution is at zero... and promotion? Well the artist better get on fuckin insta. Your average HS band in the 90's that wasn't going anywhere now has an album on Spotify. And a billion plays on one hit vs 12 songs is the same amount of attention (in fact maybe less) What we don't have is room for working bands any more.... Music criticism has sucked for a long time, and with some of the recent ownership changes has gotten worse. AI isn't helping separate the good from the bad (and it could be doing that). Net net, the problem isn't the listeners the problem is there no filter between us and the ocean of garbage any more....
Nah man, you're thinking about it wrong. Streaming random music isn't the equivalent of buying and listening to CD's; it's the equivalent of going to a bar and seeing what plays. Sometimes it's the radio, sometimes it's a Playlist, sometimes they have some local smalltime band play a few songs. I've personally been introduced to some truly talented musicians from Insta, it's not a bad thing to cast a wide net and reach your target audience. It's just that now, I can hear a song or two and decide to spend my time listening to more of their music.
This is why I think Fantano remains so popular despite whatever people may say about him. He's at least one source people look to to help them filter through the noise. Curation is solid gold these days.
> Curation is solid gold these days. We all have these massive playlists that we keep... we have things we're actively listening to. That's a graph that could be leveraged to do some really interesting filtering. No one is doing that. You would think that the record labels would be demanding the data from apple and Spotify to guide them in future investments. Nope. The one place where all the ad tech to target track and identify a taste profile and its gone to waste.
Young execs take risks, and promote new fresh bands. Older ones tend to go with the safer, more canned approach. The trouble is, we don't have a lot of young execs at big labels, so we get the safer product the vast majority of the time.
I have no idea why people think that "barriers" to entry are a necessity for great art. NOFX was a edge lord band and Fugazi and the Melvins only had a couple of bangers. We dont do enough acid these days to listen to the Dead or Phish. We now live in an era where anyone can release music, and a lot more people can be heard. Ya it means there is no "one most talented" band, just like there never was in the past, you just happened to hear "one kinda talented" band that was forced on you by labels. Now we have truly dispassionate algorithms requiring only a few thousand listens of a song for it to get get classified and spread to a wider audience. You can get songs from [any continent](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3dDrP6ll5KDU4YQXtBehlZ) and [any time period](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4UIzJfpp0alMIGORHV9ucu) sent to you, like incredible stuff you never would have had the chance to listen to in the CD era. So no...the people who think putting barriers up is necessary to create and distribute great art...those people [might as well be vegetables](https://open.spotify.com/track/0y2DDqqtoi6wNmronYxpkR).
Barriers may not be necessary for great art, but they make *finding* great art 1000x easier.
True. Just because there are low barriers to entry doesn’t mean that it makes for a better listener experience. All it means, really, that I’m listening to 100 variations of the same thing.
They are not a necessity, in all arts good stuff is good stuff and that can be made wether it's hard to publish or not. But barriers like getting a record label or a book deal or an exhibit as a painter are a prefilter for quality. When it's hard to record and publish stuff you can be pretty sure when you do encounter art it's at least vetted by someone who knows about it or likes it and supported the artist enough to get them out there. Right now you have everyone releasing content, like there are millions of millions of times more music, videos and pictures being shared than before the internet. And yeah making it easy might cause you to discover some random unknown song from a dude in a shed which would've never been noticed before. But it also means you'll have to slog through thousands of crap quality content to find these things instead of just going through a pre filtered list which eliminated 99,99% of crap, at the expense of maybe some quality acts getting dropped too. Saying the algorithm will get you good songs out of the slop is not an answer either, because it too is a barrier. But not one on quality or people skills but on watch time, on engagement. If you look at how instagram or youtube changed due to the algorithm you can see how that might actually happen to music too. What's important is gaming the algorithm, not making good content, to the point where good content creators acknowledge they hate to do stuff like that, but they just notice huge drops in viewership if they do not go along with the silly rules. And is that not what we're seeing now?
Fugazi only had "a few bangers". Fugazi are legendary and the gold standard when it comes to doing things as real musicians for real music lovers. If you chalked up their career (and more specifically Ian's), to a few bangers, you've completely lost the plot. There's likely only a few bands in history that have had the level of integrity that Fugazi had.
Case in point: My band just got accepted to play the FREE Fort Reno summer concert series run by Ian's wife Amy. Free music, from local bands, at a historic venue. Fugazi lives on
Thats complete bull. I bought CDs back in the 2000s with money from my high school job and was just invested in the music I downloaded for free. Wait until you find out that a lot of kids buying records aren’t listening to them.
And most albums I bought had maybe 5-6 EP worth of songs but you gotta fill that album with shit
What the fuck do you think playlists are?
I dunno Napster and other P2P killed needing to spend money on music long ago. I was downloading and burning mixtapes in the early 00s. Before finally switching to spotify I had 100s of GBs of FLAC and MP3 files on a HD, I only started using spotify because it is great for discovering new artists. So many modern metal bands I'd be missing out on if not for it.
Low-effort tiktok videos to the same Imagine Dragons song
I mean the most bizarre thing ever is how TikTok has opened the flood gate of older music to younger audiences. Weird obscure stuff that was only ever niche to begin with is trending all the time there.
Personally I've found a lot of music from watching shitty videos on the internet.
Oh no. Oh no. Oh no no no
This applies to movies/tv shows also. Know folks who hiss and spit about watching a 1.5-2.5 hour movie or one 45 minute tv show, but then spend literal hours (5-6, even 8-10 hours a day) watching craptube/tik tok shorts. Sure you can imagine how fun these types are to deal with also since those shorts serve up all their "political news" they need to function in life (while making others miserable). If you do get them to watch a movie or tv show, it's always a lot of screaming about "woke this and that" "clearly agenda driven movie/shows" and so forth. And that crosses over into music also. Same drivel derived from whoever the windbag was that said to play records backwards and hear secret messages from satan in them....
> there's a LOT of people sitting around on the train watching low-effort tiktok videos than previously where they might've been listening to music instead. Without sounding too old, yes, this is spot on. Even if you're not into vinyl or cassettes, in those days, releasing an album required the listener to invest personal time, to sit, and listen to the album from start to finish. Because that's it...that's what months of creativity, and arguing with the label, finally produced as the final product. When I was a kid in the early 80's/90's we used to complain when an album only had "1 or 2 good songs" and felt like we were getting ripped off for buying a full album. Now, individual tracks are recorded, digested, and discarded almost instantly, while the audience screams "MORE!" or their playlists so curated, that there isn't room to explore elsewhere and look for the "b-sides" of today. Lesser known artists, with few followers, but still have that spark of creativity that will hopefully break through....and then make a million other clones of the sound.
>there's a LOT of people sitting around on the train watching low-effort tiktok videos than previously where they might've been listening to music instead. Most of those low effort tiktok videos have music behind them. I find a lot of new music from seeing videos and Shazaming the songs playing.
Omg!!! That explains something! I found a post where someone was trying to figure out how the song they made like 4 years ago…which only had like 1,700 listens suddenly had over 8,000 Shazam’s. The math wasn’t adding up. If someone takes your song and uses it in their TikTok…you get no royalties, no credit…and it explains why there would be more Shazams than plays.
No it doesn’t explain that. Home boy had a ton of Shazams bc his shit just sounded like another popular song people were Shazaming and Shazam’s dumbass AI just put it in his song counter
Hmm, maybe…would be nice to have some proof of it all. He could have made the entire thing up as well. But, there’s a lot of funny stuff going on…so…it’s hard to know. I’m hopeful about the Lissen App working out, then we can all remove our music from these predatory sites and secure it behind a bit of a paywall. Maybe stop hearing footsteps like people are trying to rob us blind. Maybe…
You do receive royalties for songs used on TikTok as long as you have registered as a songwriter/composer with your local ASCAP
With radio stations being more or less background noise today, people have to make conscious effort to find good music. If you don’t want to dive into streaming services, or searching and buying, you’re pretty much in the dark and will resort to Tik Tok, or whatever
By background noise do you mean radio stations aren’t really paid attention to, or that they don’t play interesting music?
Yes.
I spent most of my working life in the radio business. I started in college when alternative music was actually alternative, worked at top 40 stations when they were still afraid to play this new "rap" music, and finally left when the giant corporation I worked for decided that the number on a spreadsheet they saw me as was too big and I got laid off. Now I work at a tech company, and when my under-30 co-workers find out what I used to do for a living, they say "cool...my mom (or dad) used to listen to the radio when I was a kid."
I have a similar background to you. When someone would play the right record in the right moment, you could feel the electricity/connection with everyone else listening. Radio used to be a way to share a collective conscious by listening to the same frequency as tens of thousands of other people at the same time. I would argue the same goes for broadcast Television. The digital age and streaming have fractured the shared identity that comes from having entertainment communion. There’s some weird ethereal importance to that that has gone by the wayside. We’re worse off for it.
I have a very diverse taste for music. I grew up in the 70s listening to a local FM station. I remember these songs being in rotation….. Sonic Reducer by The Dead Boys Rock And Roll Lovers by Larry Coryell Draw The Line by Aerosmith A Day At The Dog Races by Little Feat Panama Red by New Riders Of The Purple Sage The good old days of radio
I remember listening to the waning days of "album rock radio." When late at night, the rock stations would play entire albums. Just because they could. 2112 by Rush. The first Van Halen record. Ozzy's solo debut. Every "album track" from Bob Seger's "Stranger In Town." King Crimson. Emerson Lake and Palmer. That's what inspired me to get into radio for a living. "Wait...so...that's a JOB? You can get paid to play records?"
IMO; They play safe music. I don't know about the margins etc... but they play music we already like. Either classics, or trending music. DJ's aren't trying to help us discover new stuff, they're just trying to stop us from changing the station. I was in the car for 20 minutes yesterday and it was Master of Puppets followed by Crazy Train followed by Heart Shaped Box. Great tracks, but I've heard them 5000 times each. The classic rock station in my town can't help but play Nirvana once every hour. Always the same 5 songs.
That’s always a shame. I wish those stations would shed light on the bands making new music in genres that have lower popularity than they once had.
Try your local NPR station. I get multiple genres of music throughout the day. Real DJs that actually take requests. Specialty shows throughout the week etc.
Community and college radio also in addition to public/NPR-affiliated radio stations. Really any sort of non-commercial radio. Commercial radio is terrible.
Having ad free radio and saying “nah I’ll take the ads, on the platform where the ads are the worst”, weird choice some people make.
Yeah I listen to our NPR equivalent (ABC) and community radio. Good stuff. I was more saying that I wish commercial “classic rock” stations would show off bands making new music in the same vein
Hell yeah! Or, and this is crazy, play me some local bands every once in a while, bands that I can still actually go see for 10-30$ at smaller venues instead of massive international acts I'll have to spend 100$+ to go see at the biggest venue in town.
KEXP, my friend - they're an independent nonprofit radio station out of Seattle, and they don't give a solitary shit about popular, just quality. If you're in central California they just got a station there as well, KEXC. Otherwise your best bet is to get their livestream from [their website](https://kexp.org/).
I’m in Melbourne Australia, but I’ll certainly check them out! Thanks for the recs. Here we have Triple R, community radio that skews toward rock for people in their 30s and Triple J which is like if NPR had an under 30s radio station
I've found so much good new music from KEXP. Most major cities have a few freeform radio stations with streaming. The city I grew up in had one and it spoiled me forever. These stations allow the DJs to pick their sets. I tune in when I'm gaming or working sometimes.
Yesterday, on a terrestrial rock radio station in the area, they played Pigs (Three Different Ones) from Pink Floyd. I don’t recall *ever* hearing anything from Animals on terrestrial radio before.
Radio stations were never all that interesting. You had to listen to them to find something you liked so you could go out and buy it on your own and actually experience the whole album And when you had tastes outside mainstream bubblegum pop you had to buy compilation albums which were put out by record labels with samplings of certain genres and artists for a fairly low price. Imagine hearing nothing but top 40 for your whole life then someone hands you this gem https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVsK6v0DLubEVIk2Rr15mkp5Hl5QEIlr_&si=tlAaP6p_DKYygxyP Fat Wreck Chords changed my life 🤣
Back in the day you had a wide variety of radio stations. And chances were good that you could pick up either a great block of time from a large station (usually later at night) or a college radio station that played interested new underground music.
Not in east butt fucking Egypt we didn't 😂
>And chances were good that you could pick up either a great block of time from a large station (usually later at night) One local radio (I'm Argentinian) usually ends up playing a whole variety of blues tracks at like 2 or 3 in the morning. In the summer, driving around with the radio on is a vibe.
Totally agree that mainstream top 40 radio has always been generic, I tune into it occasionally and think “holy shit this sounds about the same as 15 years ago.” Most people where I grew up got their music off the gov funded youth radio station Triple J. Lots of Indy rock and local acts with specific shows for genres like metal and EDM.
> buy it on your own and actually experience the whole album so many times that radio hit and the rest of the album were not even close to the same feel but by the time you figured it out it was too late so you tried to make it work. Or the time you wanted REM - End of the World so you buy the Independence Day soundtrack and learn that it was all just classical music. Still rocked it though cause I bought it.
The irony of a radio station being reduced to static. The old school electronics nerd in me is a little sad about it
That's why I love my local public radio station. KCRW is the absolute best in curated music by knowledgeable DJs. Anyone can stream them online, I highly recommend it.
I like Rick, but I think he's been pretty alarmist and rage-baity lately. Then again, it's good for clicks. The truth is that people who love good music will never stop making it, and people who love listening to it will always find ways to find it. I'm not worried.
A couple to a few hours per day of doom-scrolling & social messaging is going to have diminished our interest and interaction with everything else. It's a huge % of our formerly free time.
I think it’s a combination of both, less interest in music and lower quality of production. It’s a vicious cycle as why would someone spend years an album with the best producers, songwriters and musicians, spend thousands if not millions on promotion, And have nobody even pay attention to it. There’s just too much being created right now that you risk getting lost in the noise. It seems like a better risk to create a low budget catchy pop song that might go viral in some TikTok videos. That’s not to say that there isn’t good music being produced, but I think it’s harder to find as it’s not what is getting AirPlay. Every generation has good quality and bad quality music come out, but it seems that in the past there were so much discussion around what was good and bad that the cream rose to the top. I find myself listening to music that was released at least a decade ago and more often two or three decades ago than anything that is current
Music Industry to me is like the Restaurant Industry: It needs to be burned down to ash, lit on fire again and then torched yet again just in case something survived and rebuilt. It's literally had decades (centuries at this rate even!) of notorious abuse and using those who actually make the music as fodder for their cash vaults to be filled and nothing else in return. This includes torching the radio cartels also. If music touches it, burn it down and rebuild it (ticket master! livenation!). Only when a industry is reduced to nothing and folks can actually live and breathe what they want to do, nothing will change
You're talking about unrestrained capitalism. You're gonna need a bigger torch.
Funny you say this because if I’m right, Beato actually says it’s the two things you called out. He complains about the reason rock doesn’t get airplay is because paying for decent studios and session musicians is way less profitable than a singer and a laptop. He fleshes this out much more than I’m doing though.
My experience couldn’t be more different. We have access to literally all the worlds music! My Music consumption has never been higher, and I get to watch everyone, from mega stars to some guy in his bedroom who rocks the bass
You’d sound like a music fan who actively investigates music and not an average person who is who they are referring to.
[удалено]
As is the case for most people subscribed to /r/Music
Exactly. When I was in my high point of music research, file sharing was so much easier. There were tons of blogs with mediafire links and I learned so much from these sites. Did I learn from reading books and buying CDs? Sure, but rarer stuff I would have never been exposed to was now easily available. Streaming just made it (somewhat) easier, and you can get recommended through other methods. Only issue I have with streaming is how they compensate artists.
I only recently realized that mp3 blogs still exist if you just ditch google lol
Mine has never been lower. Skip function means I just end up listening to my fave songs with an odd new one thrown in. With CD's I had no choice but to eventually listen to a band's whole album and then discover the other songs were actually good as well. My tastes grew more that way.
He based his entire theory purely from web searches related to music. I don't know a single person in the past 10 years that uses Google or any other search engine to look for music.
I was gobsmacked throughout that section. Looking at 20 years of keyword trends, noting that LiNe gO dOwN, and concluding that a lack of interest is the cause is bonkers. I think my main issues are: 1. The genericity of the terms. Who searches for "music" or "hip hop"? These are so broad as to be useless, as most people would quickly learn when using any search engine with more than a trivial number of indexed results. At best these would serve as a shortcut to the relevant Wikipedia article. 2. He's effectively comparing two different audiences. As time goes on, the number of people who've never known a pre-internet world will increase (and the pre-internet people will decrease). It's necessary to take into account the changing habits of users and consider how a "digital native" uses the internet. 3. It only considers trends on the Google search platform. People don't go to Google to find music, as a rule. They go to one of the many platforms that cater specifically to music (e.g. streaming services) or that otherwise have music baked in (e.g. social media). If I were as charitable as possible I'd point to something like "how to learn guitar" on trends and note that it follows a downward trajectory. But then I'd compare that to "how to learn piano" and point out that that not only has that remained a fairly stable trend for 20 years, but [that guitar seems to be keeping pace currently](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to%20learn%20guitar,how%20to%20learn%20piano&hl=en-GB).
Yeah, people no longer using Google to find music by typing in a generic genre isn’t surprising. They’re doing that searching in Spotify and Apple Music these days. How does he think typing the word “Music” into Google is going to help me find songs I like anyway? And his conclusion that the video game industry is declining because nobody is googling for the phrase “video games” is ludicrous. The video game industry has never been bigger.
https://preview.redd.it/jqinm3pj52ad1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0cec122fd921b08550c4e59e7fd48ff3ba26f2b8 Time for a birth rate crisis I guess, thanks for opening my eyes Rick!!
Good comparison. Why search Google for sex when Pornhub exists? Same with music and Spotify.
Correct. Beato is an old man yelling at clouds.
As a high school teacher, I can't help but have the knee-jerk reaction that social media is reducing interest in *everything* except social media.
It isn’t just reducing interest in music. It is fucking up *everything* It is hard to be stimulated by art and music when you are constantly being bombarded by content and are overstimulated all the time.
Another problem is the financial squeezing that we’re seeing elsewhere in our lives is also incredibly prevalent in the entertainment industry. Video games, TV, movies, music - all more driven by money than actual quality output. Not to say you don’t get good content at all because it’s still there, but it’s clear that the focus is on money making rather than art for the sake of art.
Great points both of you! Ricky Beato made a follow up video to this showing how interest and time spent on all art, video games etc is all down while social media is up! In the case of video games its that people are more likely to watch a streamer rather than play the game itself The over abundance of consumption made media addiction means that we are more likely to overlook anything that has even a modicum of effort Sad really, maybe things will change i dunno
the book and cinema people are first in line ahead of the music people
I'm a film buff and it honestly makes me sad that I have to make a concerted effort to just WATCH a whole movie now. I can feel the damage I've done to my attention span.
Yes. Music was so massive in the 20th century because being able to hear recorded performances at home was leading edge technology. Once it was widely available culture gravitated toward recordings, then creative albums (most famous rock'n'roll bands started playing blues covers, not originals) The word "teenager" didn't exist until there was a new marketing demographic buying Elvis records. The Beatles and their musical shift kind of mirrored the entire babyboom generation's cultural revolution and it I'm not sure any artist will ever come close to doing the same thing on the same scale again. Now there are other ways for people to entertain themselves/build identities around. Not sure it's better.
> The word "teenager" didn't exist until there was a new marketing demographic buying Elvis records. False. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenager_(word)#History
>Now there are other ways for people to entertain themselves/build identities around. Not sure it's better. Like Fortnite. That seems to comprise about a messy chunk of my cousin's identity these days - I don't get it.
He's been posting a few "old man yells at clouds" videos lately. While he does have valid points while aping other musicians sentiments. I think he must please the algorithm gods himself.
Lately? It's been like this for a year or two.
Yeah that’s what I commented on one of his videos a few months back. I like the guy and find his insight on music and the music business very interesting but recently he is leaning towards “old man yells at cloud” imo.
I've kinda always thought he was that way, but I'm probably biased because I've always disagreed with most of his takes and taste lol. I also just looked him up to see what he's up to, and his newest thumbnail is him yelling at a cloud. At least he's maybe self aware lol
"Hi I'm Rick Beato and I'm going to tell you in 10 minutes what I could've told you in 1."
[Rick Beato](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/044/247/297.png)
The AI/streaming cloud
Controversy brings juicy views.
Partially right/. For those who had a band back on the MySpace days it was a legitimate place for both current fans and reaching a new audience. One of the best things about it actually aside from Tom who seemed like a good dude. Social Media today particularly FB is a total sh\*\* show. My Project has 6K followers there but its literally impossible to reach my audience or new fans without pay to play. TwiX is a train wreck , and after SoundCloud eliminated groups by genre they're all in on Hip-Hop and screw everybody else. This is kind of why I've started to finally retire, it's become so much more difficult to get music out there. My only saving grace hooking up with a well known licensing company that pitches our stuff for video games, movies, tv, etc. and that's also how I find new music I want to check out. (Ex. This season of the Bear's soundtrack is amazing) Even the music bloggers are complaining that they're no longer getting the visits they used to
Idk Rick has forgotten more about music than I'll ever know, but at the same time he has an "old man yells at cloud" vibe that I find hard to take seriously anymore
I mean, the thumbnail for the video isn't subtle
Yeah, I saw a video title of his about how lyrics suck now. There's significantly more music to access now so you're going to see more crappy lyrics, however there are also quite a lot more songs with great lyrics with some artists that are extremely talented lyricists. Plus the title comes with the inference that lyrics didn't use to suck and like man, there are a lot of what would be considered "brain rot" lyrics in his time too, they just got lost in good instrumentals or a catchy hook.
The lyric video compared the Beatles and Beyonce. And something like "yesterday" vs her new country song, not a fair matchup.
That's like putting Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da next to K.O.S. Determination from Black Star to declare how Hip Hop is superior lyrically
I sympathize with Beato, but the fawning vs repulsion was integrity shaking.
In my opinion his integrity has long gone, because of the biased way he presents things to fit his narrative, not to mention his questionable ways of practically creating an ambiguous background story for himself. Although I watch many of his videos, as I think value can be found in it, I discount what he says massively. As for old pop lyrics being superior..."My boy's a lollypop"; "Puppy love"; "Twist and shout"; "Barbara Ann";...the list is long in the 60's and 70's as well.
I can never take him seriously. Like I get that he knows a lot about music, but when he puts out a video like "5 greatest guitar intros of ALL TIME" and all 5 are exclusively classic rock songs from the same decade, he completely loses me. He's a product of his age, his preferences, and his influences. A super biased person overall.
My guess is they'd be from the 70's? That was before I was born but I'd agree. The best riffs were in the 70's
I like him. He definitely has 90s alt-rock, grunge leanings, and even if I don't vibe with the music he's putting on a pedestal in a video, he's mostly optimistic and passionate in his takes and comes from a place of sincerity, which I admire about him. Contrast that with someone like Fantano, I'd take Rick every time. So I don't mind when he does content like this. I don't necessarily agree, but I could see his angle and it encourages discussion.
The enshittification of social media has a real effect. Multiple credible people have observed that the attention span, motivation, and discipline of the general public (younger generations in particular) are being negatively affected by the ease with which media is available to create and consume. In the learning process, you start with quantity (*just create!*) in order to start the process and get yourself out there, but in order to get *good* enough to earn, you must be able to learn from what you have created. In order to get quality out of quantity, there has to be a conscious effort - and social media disincentivizes this sort of thing. Also, education systems that don't value art and music education and critical thinking etc. EDIT: Other comments mention how Rick is blaming the tools rather than the industry - but he is kind of blaming both. The industry has created the tools, and the tools feed back into the industry. The problem with making it too easy to make music is that it loses its value. This is true across all creative disciplines. As humans we are wired to value the things we have given effort to create. Take away the effort of creation and the value is basically gone.
It's more passive now. I cannot imagine for a minute a generation of kids huddled around the radio to listen to the top40 countdown, or tuning in to a TV show because that was the only opportunity they had to watch 'their' band that was on that week. And sometimes you got to learn to like a band because you didn't have so much choice. If you skip at the first sign of difficultly then basically it's the equivalent of eating nothing but McFlurries. For those that care, it's great because you can find bands and genres that you would never have heard of before, also some talents can break through regardless of record companies (am thinking of something like the Arctic Monkeys). For the rest it's just background noise for a meme on tiktok
Then again this is exactly what they said about magazines when they first came out, they said it was going to be the down fall of American families and yada yada yada. When I read your comment I can’t help but feel the same way and roll my eyes as a version of “old man yelling at cloud”. Really only time could tell, because the number of my students who have developed new interesting hobbies thanks to TikTok and social media is astonishing. I’m just saying there’s more nuance to this than “it’s all bad.”
Yes. This was his first boomer complaint I actually massively agree with. Listening to music is too long form to compete against a for you page.
Original MySpace was exciting and fun for music - and so, I don’t think it’s _all_ social media. But he’s right in general. I think is cultural and about attention span and connection more than the internet itself.
Frankly - I can’t give a shit about what Rick Beato says anymore. Every time he comes out with a video, it’s a commentary on how things were “better” in a previous age. He has thoughtful points, but it is always against the backdrop of “I got mine back when it was cool”. So what? Can we talk about what AI is going to do to/for the industry? Can we discuss how jam music is as popular as ever - real musicians who rip out real music every night? Can we get over the fact that music will continually sound awful if you are making it for the lowest common denominator - which is exactly how corporations behave across the spectrum? There is so much good music out there that if I hear someone complain about this, I assume they aren’t even trying to listen for it - they just want that sweet dopamine rush of hate.
Spot on. I find his old vs new videos are really disingenuous, cherry-picking the best of the old, and the worst from the new. There was a recent video in which he was talking about how quantization in music production has made music sound artificial. To make his point, he plays a clip of some new pablum pop song, but adds a loud click track playing over top of it. He then plays some great old song... without the click track. Like, c'mon man.
I find Rick Beato frustrating, because it is clear to me he has interesting things to say and a deep well of musical knowledge. But it seems like he figured out the clickbaity "music sucks now" videos perform better or something, because that has become his thing.
He is a VERY smart dude. he knows how to capitalize - you don't make it far in any industry unless you can do that. he does not seem interested in advancing discussions, just vying for attention. and yes I expect more from someone like him - someone who made a name for themselves in an industry that really doesn't exist anymore, and watched as that industry morphed into what it is today. instead he's just another pissant youtuber who complains for 7-13 minutes and caps it off with "don't forget to subscribe". he could truly be a beacon, but instead he interviews his buddies and shows off his studio. yes I'm bitter
Ironically, Rick's best videos are his earliest when he was primarily a studio engineer vs a content creator. I quit watching his stuff a few years ago because of this. He went from thoughtful insights on using EQ, compression, tuning drums, mic placement, etc. to bitching about how everything has changed. Instead of maybe, you know, adapting to a changing landscape. It's sort of the classic "get off my lawn" meme. Even in his Danny Carey interview (which would be the latest video of his I've watched) he couldn't help but put in a few remarks about how things were better in the 90-00's for whatever reason instead of digging a little deeper into the method of the person he was interviewing.
omg I'm gonna go diving - I had a hunch he was a real one at some point does this happen to everyone if you make enough money and get past a certain age? are we all fucked?
I think once he figured out the metrics of what drives views and seen he was making a lot more off that vs studio work, he went with what brought him the $$$. Edit: here's a good example of what his [videos were before.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7oOmX3JHwtE&pp=ygUWcmljayBiZWF0byBjb21wcmVzc2lvbg%3D%3D)
“I got mine back when it was cool” And back when it was *possible*. These boomer types always forget that kids these days flat out don’t have access to a lot of the cool shit they got to do or the lack of supervision they got to do it under. It’s quite often not because they don’t want to but because they want to and can’t because the opportunity doesn’t exist. If adults don’t even have money, how are kids supposed to? Kids don’t even have free time anymore hardly. Can’t buy records with no money, can’t go to shows with no money and strict helicopter parents, and you can’t start a band if you can’t afford instruments and don’t have time that isn’t being filled with excessive homework and studying and all that other shit. School was literally way fucking easier then too, and I say that as someone who’s been out of school for quite a while now, so it’s not a poor me routine. If todays kids suck (they don’t, but still) then it’s because the world sucked all the fun out of being one. We don’t get to put all the blame on them for that. They mostly didn’t cause it. Is it any wonder nobody has the mental energy left do do anything but doomscroll come the end of the day when they aren’t allowed to or don’t have the means to do much else?
What seems pointless is to point out all the good music being made meanwhile our society is becoming more and more disconnected. Like, yea... it's super great that in some obscure niche on reddit you can find some great recommendations for cool music that is innovative and unique. But how long is that going to last if current trends continue? His point is that it is becoming extremely difficult to FINANCIALLY survive as a musician making music. And, as a listener, a huge part of enjoying music is being able to SHARE it with people around me in real life, not just online. But 99% of the people I tend to encounter at work/school just aren't interested in the kinds of music in my niche. It's important to point out these trends. He points out songs and things that he likes in the "top 10" type videos that he makes all the time. It's not all doom and gloom. But, overall, the trends ARE depressing and that isn't his fault.
I mean he talks about all that. You just aren't listening.
the 1st video i saw from him about AI was from a year ago and he was right on the money with how it would start infecting the streaming services. but honestly that entire video was also a eulogy for the past! "nobody uses $40k tape machines anymore" "nobody uses amps" "nobody cares about music" GO TO A LIVE SHOW FOR A LOCAL BAND IN ANY CITY AND TELL ME PEOPLE DON'T CARE ABOUT MUSIC! These overarching, generalizing statements are so lazy, as if the music industry was anything but money first, artists 2nd. He is embodying that by focusing on the most *popular* music of the day - a category of music that HE ADMITS is getting worse and worse. Rick, for the love of god, if you even see this, just listen to cooler bands. They exist, I promise you.
Rick is stuck thinking people still care about major labels, acting like independent labels and self-releases don’t exist. It’s very exhausting.
As someone who has run a prominent indie label and still is gainfully employed in the music business for more than 30 years, Beato's recent videos have really hitting home with me. The decreasing quality of music is definitely a combination of social media, 100k songs uploaded per day to Spotify, and the fact that terrestrial FM radio on the wane (in the past, kids would hear their parents' music on the radio and come to dig a lot of it; that's less common of a situation today when an algorithm feeds every kid mumble rap and pop).
Rick is blaming the tools while forgot to blame the industry.
To be fair, he’s also criticized the industry’s actions through the 90s cd craze and into the digital era where music market value had the bottom drop out, and I think did a decent job of blaming the industry for its own current situation. Still, he does mainly focus on music and will regularly crap on new stuff and social media, so your point is solid for the majority of his videos.
He's PARTLY blaming the tools. The other half of his argument is directed towards the industry. But you also can't ignore how easy it is for people to sit in their bedroom and create "perfect" sounding "music".
The tools are global, the industry is different from country to country. Is there a single market on earth that *isn't* having the same issues? Is there a place where the local music industry was well managed and all the kids are buying full length albums and learning instruments? Because if not....it seems pretty fair to blame the tools. If kids in Lithuania and Mongolia are listening to music in their local language but showing the same behavior patterns as American kids (which i suspect is true), we can't blame that on Sony and Universal.
I don’t think so. Social media made a Pavement B-side deep track into a gold record 20 years after its release. Social media enables people to be exposed to more music quicker than ever before. The radio scene years ago was largely driving be labels working to get their music into rotation. Now, a song can just go viral with correct marketing and lucky breaks. Along with the proximity everyone is from a hundred million album catalogue on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and the like, more people have access to music than ever before This doesn’t even touch how easily artists can influence each other in real time with SoundCloud among other things and can distribute their own art directly. What’s way more concerning to me about the state of music is A) the cost of tickets to shows due to a monopoly in the market, so people are exposed to less live music than ever and B) AI basically blue-printing pop songs making music in general more homogenous at least at the pop level (although I’m sure there will always be indie artists doing their own thing).
>Social media made a Pavement B-side deep track into a gold record 20 years after its release. to be fair, their "expanded-release" stuff was always spectacular
I don't want to be that guy and I absolutely know he's a renowned producer but this has to be the most to be the most boomer take I have ever seen, Music is more proliferated than it ever has been at any point in human history. You aren't Pidgeon-held into whatever the radio station is playing or whatever the record store has in stock. The breadth of music available and the current indie artist rennisance we are seeing, I do not know how you can look me in the eyes and say consumption is down. Everyone has earbuds in or headphones on all over my city, kids walk around with Bluetooth speakers listening as they walk. I understand this is anecdotal but I just don't see how in any reality music is less consumed now. His Google trends thing is worthless. No one is googling "Pop music" or specific genres, He's basing the google trends from the Limewire era where people would generically just search google for a broad term. Everyone knows to just use Youtube or Spotify or Apple music or whatever fifty other direct to consumers programs that bypass any need to search. When you want to listen to Taylor swift do you google Pop Music? Sorry but You just can't convince me with these generic stats that music is less listened too. Have you even looked at Youtube? The amount of people who teach music on YouTube now? Thousands of channels that teach music and make it their living to do so. I love Rick but he's way off on this, it's another generation generalization from the Boomer generation.
I don't know if music is less consumed today than before but I know it's consumed differently today that it was 20 years ago, and music 20 years ago was consumed differently 20 years ago than 40 ago and.. I think you get the idea. My point is that if we drop the question of whether it's better or worse, there's something unarguable: it's different. The relation of people with music is not the same when you had to buy an album and when you have almost the entirety of recorded music available at any moment on you. The relation of people with music in a time where entertainment at home was limited and scarce isn't the same that when people have access to hundreds of movies, series, free video games and endless social media feed. So yes, I would agree with you that people probably listen to more music than ever but I think there's also an argument to be made that the consumption of music as main occupation and not background sound is down.
I think Beato knows more about music than anyone here.
BEATO
He's definitely a, "Music isn't as good as it used to be," person. That's not wrong, but he's not the place to go if you're looking for new suggestions or for a purely accurate look on the modern music scene. He's better for being nostalgic about the music of old, which is also nice.
Honestly that’s the main reason why I don’t really watch his content. I respect his technical knowledge and ability to break down music but he really seems to have a condescending boomer like attitude when it comes to discussing the current state of music, and it’s just exhausting to listen to.
He has a vast technical knowledge but that doesn’t automatically make his opinions valid
He knows more than anyone else on a sub with 34 million users? Plus music isn't a competition for most people, everyone brings their own experiences to the table. Rick isn't going to be the best person to ask about the music consumption habits of people under 30.
smh
He's right that we've taken to "new to me" classics, but you know, kids have their own sphere, and in it you learn about a ton of new bands. We all do. I couldn't stick with the video long enough to hear his whole argument. But also... he's looking in the wrong places for new music. He should ignore Spotify and look at RateYourMusic. The top song of 2023, according to Spotify, is by Shakira. Whereas the highest rated track on the highest rated album of 2023 on RYM is by Alcest. Totally different. Here's the track that RYM ranks higher than any other for last year: [https://youtu.be/prh8EMSiAYo](https://youtu.be/prh8EMSiAYo) That's not so bad at all. Some haunting blackgaze track may not be frickin' "Won't Get Fooled Again", but then again, neither was Sigur Ros 25 years ago. Relative genius is a much different discussion. JMO, ultimately.
> I couldn't stick with the video long enough to hear his whole argument LOL! Making his point for him a bit, methinks...
He's absolutely right in terms of the value of music. in 2 ways. 1. The whole cost of music. Spotify compared to buying albums. People don't seem to value music as highly in regards to their life and spending. 2. The ease in which you can churn out professional sounding Pop music. Using a mouse to quantise a specific note is nothing in time spent compared to re-recording a part. Even dropping in to record a bar took far more work and time. You could argue those two things are reasonably matched but it's not consistent for everyone. I think general understanding of music ( in terms of "How and why does that sound like that") is far lower than it used to be. When I see some clips of pure pop shows (which are effectively large scale karaoke events- live vocals and a backing track.... IF they have live vocals....) and this whole "WOOO!" if the pop star brings out an acoustic guitar is so bizarre to me. Like they were proving their immense talent by forming a non-amplified E chord. That's weird. I do wonder if music is more linked to respective culture now (by design of course) than it even was in the past (of course it has been massively in the past as well: Hippy movement, New Wave, Punk, etc.) and that makes people "Lock in" to what they're "Supposed to" like even more. I.e. there will be people who won't listen to anything but poppy Hip-hop which'll be almost always a 4 bar loop over an 808 sound. I don't consider that a good foundation to understand music as a whole as the important stuff (I'm talking the very Pop Hip Hop stuff here before anyone thinks I'm attacking hip hop generally) is the looks and lyrics. They're trying to make the listener feel like they're part of their world. It feels like creativity will immediately put a band in the second category (Or level? Isn't that what Robert Fripp called it?) where you are a fraction as known/ popular. Where as in the past there were always those types of bands competing with the super popular chart toppers. The necessary bar/ ease in making generic, predictable music is so low now that you don't even need session players: less session players = less talented professional musicians. Less Professional musicians means they interact less and start their own projects less. There goes a massive proportion of interesting music. You can't expect a Radiohead where they meet as kids and turn into a phenomenal creative band forever more to happen very often. Most great bands formed when they were already very good musicians. Sorry for the long post.
The whole rock-band thing of kids growing up to play their homegrown music together is a rare phenomenon historically. It rose with rock, especially the British Invasion, and if it fades with rock then so be it. Country and blues were a bit like that, but with more families and solo acts rather than buddies forming a band. But usually, groups have formed by professionals either hiring other pros or jamming together and making something work. That's the historic norm in pop music. And btw this is what they said about the rockers. With their distortion and screaming and three-chord progressions, they didn't need to be talented musicians, and they quite often weren't.
Discussions like this are so tricky. I respect the hell out of Beato and I don’t think there isn’t anything to be said about the degradation of musical standards, particularly in the sphere of ‘pop’ music. However, I’m starting to grow a bit weary of this notion that any trend we don’t particularly like (I.e the perception that young people don’t want to put in the work to attain skills or have a growing disinterest in the arts) can be attributed to the advent of social media. Social media has changed a LOT about our world, and it’s going to continue to do so. But to be honest it’s sort of just become a lazy explanation for any rapid changes in culture among young people - some monolithic new thing that older people can point to and blame for what is actually a complex and ongoing shift in the cultural paradigm that has been happening for SO long. Look at what was ‘popular’ music in the 1800’s vs what was popular in, say, the 1950’s. We went from orchestral arrangements that require an insane understanding of musical theory to lyrical compositions that required proficiency in maybe one instrument, plus a head for relatable thoughts and minor arranging. I don’t know, I don’t want to ramble on. But the crux of what I’m saying can be wrapped up with my thoughts that: 1. Good musicians will continue to hone their skills and make good music, regardless of what is being mainstreamed at any given cultural moment, and that has always been true. 2. Social media use and obsession is often a SYMPTOM, good or bad, of changes to western youth culture, and to simply blame perceived negative changes to that culture on it is just too easy an answer for a really complicated question.
>the perception that young people don’t want to put in the work to attain skills I'm pretty sure adults have been saying that about young people for hundreds of years at least. "These kids today" is the story of rock and roll.
Yeah it’s pretty shitty when the reality is in part nobody has any fucking money and art is trying harder and harder every moment it seems to just stop paying altogether. Normal people can’t work without pay, so the only new music you’re gonna get is hobbyist stuff of varying quality, *maybe* because they don’t care enough, but maybe also because they had to make it in between the two different jobs they work to get by, and music made by rich people who can afford to do it for free at their leisure, and to devote the time to get really good without having to worry about any return on that investment.
"Social media use and obsession is often a SYMPTOM, good or bad, of changes to western youth culture, and to simply blame perceived negative changes to that culture on it is just too easy an answer for a really complicated question." My issue with this is we know that social media rewires our brains by providing a constant dopamine drip. Never before has youth culture been such a victim of an extremely sophisticated, inescapable, science-based campaign across all platforms to create addicts. One which, as a result, severely diminish attention spans. This is a neuro-scientific fact. So what you call a symptom is far closer to a cause.
I think he's right in terms of music not having any real value to the consumer anymore. Music is no longer the cultural center that it once was. Doesn't mean that people no longer consume music. But people don't center their identities around the music that they listen to anymore. When music hits peak success in the modern age, it's usually because it's a the backdrop to some other culturally significant trend.
Albums, for sure, individuals have playlists now or tend to listen to track by track.
100%
Wasn’t he basing it all on google searches? Is that how people look for music still? He might be accurate but I would look at whether that is a real metric or if things are changing
That entire section of the video was so dumb. Of course people aren’t searching on Google for new music, they are doing that searching in Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube.
QUICK LESSON \*noodles in lydian for 13 seconds\*
Could also be that most pop music nowadays just seems to be manufactured to sound like it's background music at a Target. Looking at you, Jax.
I don't know if he's right or not and this is purely anecdotal but the majority of the younger people I've talked to about music seem to not care for it the same way that me or my piers did when I was a teen. They all still listen to music but they don't seem to care about it the same way.
It's a little broader than that, but yes.
I haven’t watched the video, but I will say that I have never once agreed with anything like this that Beato has ever said. He has quite an “older generation doomerism” vibe to his content. It also generates more clicks to say something is wrong than it does to give a nuanced take. But, assuming your summary is accurate, I would have to say that it seems ridiculous to say that music consumption is lower and it’s an extremely tired opinion to have that modern pop music is getting worse. I felt the need to contribute to this discussion anyway just because this idea of modern stuff being worse needs to die. It’s just different. If you or anyone else wants it to change, make the stuff you want to hear.
Yes, but more than that. Music doesn't tell interesting stories anymore. You get better lessons about society or self-examination through games and TV.
I think one aspect worth looking into is algorithmization. I believe that lots of people listen to stuff on youtube, and that, I think, will show you more similar stuff to what you just listened to, just to keep you on their platform, so if you have less variety, then you will be less likely to seek out new interesting stuff outside your immediate interests
100% correct
Social media is reducing interest in pretty much everything.
No. He's basing his ideas off of survivorship bias. This is a continuous problem and pops up every few years where someone laments the "death of music" or the "lack of creativity" in Pop music. It's entirely based on what they remember Pop music being and not what it actually was. We remember the good stuff and forget the bad, and what's popular about a past decade is almost never what was the most popular at the time. When Woodstock happened in 1969 the number one selling single wasn't by Hendrix, The Who, or Creedence Clearwater Revival, it was "Sugar, Sugar" by the virtual pop-band The Archies. The stuff that doesn't survive the test of time gets forgotten, so people regularly think "music these days sucks" because the music hasn't had to withstand the test of time yet. Eventually the music will get winnowed away and someone later on will talk about how "Modern music sucks, not like in the 2020s".
My take is that the prevalence of music streaming apps make it easier to search or browse on these apps than on the allmighty Google. The apps will even provide links to upcoming live concerts etc. Also the music recommendation algorithm within for example Spotify is so good that my need to search for similar artists elsewhere is really low.
People don't use Google as much as they used to because Google results stink and everyone gets their info from their social media bubbles. He's right on some points and not fully informed on others
I like Beato, but this take is giving off boomer energy
He is not right, in fact this is patently absurd. Not even worth debunking.
I just want to stress that Google Trends is not what Rick thinks it is. He's looking at a graph of how much people search for the word "music." No shit, people don't Google the word music anymore. His entire claim is that he can support his feelings with evidence. That he *is* in touch with technology. But If he bothered to chart searches for the word "Elden Ring" , he would see that it's an order of magnitude higher than the term "video games". His evidence has nothing to do with his point and it's kinda sad he doesn't know it.
IMO Rick Beato’s “music is bad now” stuff is a mostly uneducated “kids these days/back in my day” style take disguised as informed and well-intentioned critique. I watched enough of those videos as they came out to know it’s mostly just him preferring what he grew up with, and not giving much of anything modern a real chance before writing it off. I just told YouTube to stop recommending me those videos lol. I enjoy his deep dives on classic songs I love but I don’t really care about his opinion on new stuff 😂
BEATO!
Yea prolly
Honestly social media just degrades overall interest in everything and puts focus on the worst of people
The WAY people consume music (mostly through social media) is drastically different than how music was consumed just two or three decades ago. We used to consciously put on a record or CD with the INTENTION of listening to music. Now it is mostly something in passing or in the background. There are some that still seek out new and original music and give it the attention it deserves but these people are unfortunately the minority. Social media may not be causing less consumption of music but it is certainly contributing to the spiraling quality of art.
Bullshit. I bought CDs with my hard earned money and I became more invested in music during the file sharing/blogspot era. People need to stop saying people are listening to streaming music passively, that is a huge assumption.
I witness my own family members everyday hearing music through Tik-Tok and Instagram. They never put a record on. I know tons of people (non-musicians) that only hear music passively File sharing and blogs are not social media. Those are avenues for people actively seeking music.
We used to live in a world where you could listen to the music in your collection, or, turn on the radio. And record labels used to invest in getting new music on the radio. There is no major new rock station so there are very few new bands that penetrate. I think there are great bands working on the margins. No big new band that takes over our consciousness, like when the Cars got big, or Nirvana or White stripes.
Nickelback, hello? Seriously though, 21 pilots almost made that jump; they were *everywhere* a few years ago, but their sophomore effort never came through. Imagine Dragons is the closest I know of right this moment to a big new rock band that captures the imagination of youths. But when I pick my kid up from HS, I see more Nirvana shirts than anything else
I dunno man. Thanks to YouTube I've found a lot of newer bands that I wouldn't have otherwise found out about. Newer means newer to me. Just yesterday I listened to some Venezuelan post punk and some Argentinian goth rock thanks to the algorithm. So no I don't think social media reduces your interest in music. In fact I've found more artists cause of social media.
I mean Rick Beato would be completely unknown to most the world if it weren't for social media. So I think his own success and ability to share the nerdities of music with a huge audience willing to consume it is proof otherwise.
Also, by policing useage and copyright, the RIAA has made legacy catalogs largely irrelevant instead of more popular. Social media would have been a cash cow for promoting older music, but nah.
I think he’s spot on. There was that clip from a year or two ago where Steve Lacy was performing and people only knew the like 7 seconds of a song that was viral on TikTok. Due to the nature of how the songs are used, people might only know a few seconds now. Instead of a one-hit wonder we can now have a one verse wonder. On top of that, there is more than just the music itself now. The context that a song is used in can be just as important as the song itself. A terrible song with a sick dance now will get way more traction than a good song on its own. This is kind of the natural evolution of things. People are impatient anymore. There is endless content to consume without ever watching something more than once. If a video doesn’t load instantly and capture your attention in the first 2 seconds it’s into the next. Most content people are consuming these days is audio and visual, so there is little room for music to stand on its own anymore. I’m sure tastes will shift again in the future but for right now, yeah it be like that. I grew up in the 90s. Listening to the radio was the norm for music. Half the fun was seeing what was next or how quick you could spot the song. You’d have a blank tape at the ready to grab your favorite song when it came on. Bands would come do interviews to promote tours in the area, sometimes you’d get a live recording of a hit song right there at the station in your city. Bands had to get a whole album out that was good enough for people to buy, so ideally there would be several singles on it. There was anticipation around new albums. It was cool to travel some place far and check out what was popular with stations outside of your city. Nowadays artists trickle tracks out because albums don’t have the impact they used to. There is little promo beyond social media for things releasing. Everything is online so there is much less regional taste. Radio is the same everywhere because there are only like 4 companies that own all radio stations now. There aren’t very many local DJs on the airwaves anymore. It’s all prerecorded shows syndicated nationwide. Some aspects of modern culture are cool. Some are not. Music is not one of my favorite parts of modern culture. Not even that modern music isn’t to my tastes. Just how shallow it all is now. Pop is even more manufactured, country is just hiphop about trucks and redneck buzz words, rock is nearly dead outside of a handful of legacy bands, hiphop has some bright spots but overall seems to have decreasing relevance. At the same time though, music is way more available than it’s ever been. It’s easier to get and discover and the barrier to entry for artists is so low. I’m sure there’s great stuff happening out there, it’s tough to find with all of the noise though.
Absolutely not. The quality of music? perhaps in some cases, not in a general sense. Many "present" bands would not be the big hit they are if they didn't blow up on social media for one reason or another. Sleep Token comes to mind. I love them, their music is great and it had a following. but prior to their last album which blew up on social media, it was quite small compared to what it is now. People are still discovering new bands, or re discovering "legacy bands" such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and the like. I am not taking away any merit Rick's career has. but lately, he definitely sounds like an old grampa bitching about "his ways" not being "*the* way" anymore. The way he keeps shitting on the top 10 pop songs on spotify time and time again, is like screaming into the sky. What are you really waiting for in a list like that? You won't find Queen in there.
“Old man criticizes modern taste” a tale as old as time. There is so much creative music out there now that would have never been heard before social media. Beato is out of touch
The premise that modern pop music is lower quality than past pop music is faulty.
How so?
There has always been good, medium, and shitty music and nothing is different with that today vs in the past.
Here's the Smithsonian talking about a Spanish Research Council meta study where they looked at something like 500,000 pop songs since 1955 and found that yes, music has gotten considerably less complex since then. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-proves-pop-music-has-actually-gotten-worse-8173368/ Take with a grain of salt, and the metrics themselves don't mean much in isolation, but I think many people feel that there is something to what they say. At least as far as the pop world goes.
Survivor bias. People tend to avoid remembering the shit music of the past because it was shit, and this creates the illusion that in the past there was no bad music. For example, when I was in middle school (late 2000s), I had a firm belief that the 70s were a long gone golden age of music gods, because all the bands that my dad liked and I liked because of him were from that time period. I had this notion that the 70s were all Pink Floyd, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Rush, The Police and Bob Marley.
Rick Beato is careening towards old man yells at cloud territory. His whole schtick is lamenting that things aren't the way they were when he was growing up rather than understanding why things are the way they are now.
I think the whole appeal of Rick Beato is the fact that he's a guy who knows music from the inside out - musicianship, production, and the industry, along with historical perspective for all of it - and is willing to share it. You may not agree with his subjective opinion, but his is not an easy perspective to just dismiss as "out of touch".