When did music start sucking ?

January 13, 2007 at 10:30 am (Aimee Weber, music, Nicole Linden, Second Life)

I know this isn’t technically related to Second Life, but….

It was a couple of Resis who brought it to my attention- so blame this post being on this blog instead of this one on Aimee Weber and Nicole Linden for bringing it to my attention.

Some time last week, Aimee and I where passing each other videos of our fave 60s/70s/80s (did we get that far ahead ?) songs from youTube. Then a couple of days ago, Nicole passed out an URL to people when a user suspected that the streaming audio URLs weren’t getting passed from the server to the client correctly. It plays lots of 60s & 70s music, with a little less 80s music than Nicole led everyone to believe :-D.

This rekindled my enjoyment of music from this era- I haven’t had much exposure to 60s music in over 2 years, so I pretty much forgot how much I liked it. Then I realised something. When did music start sucking ?

Theories

As near as I can tell, music started sucking in the 80s, more so in the mid-late 80s, when the fame:talent ratio started becoming a little bit unbalanced. The launch of MTV in 1981 might’ve had something to do with this. Is the demise of Popular Music due to the same entity that helped spread it ? The same unbalanced fame:talent ratio applies here, with the majority of pop music being performed by talentless pseudo-bishounen being piped through Antares Auto-Tune being comparable to the entertainment:music ratio tipping towards mindless entertainment of the masses.

It could be that music has always sucked, but with the barriers to entry reduced due to the digital era’s distribution and production methods being comparably easier to learn than the analogue era’s methods, the likelihood of coming across the “suck” increases with the amount of talentless individuals gaining access to the inter-web (note that the barriers to entry to perform music in Second Life are quite high, so the fame:talent ratio is in favour of talent)

It could be that music has always sucked, but the suck gets lost in the mists of time, explaining why pretty much every brilliantly compiled 60’s 4 disc compilation album is identical, but the “variety” of music released in the “Now That’s What I Call Music!” series is pushing into the low-hundreds of CDs. Yes I’m aware those two statistics aren’t directly related, but it illustrates my opinion that the market penetration of contemporary “suck” is far greater than oldie “suck”, because you can’t make money from poor-quality oldie music.

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Kuurian Expedition Meeting with Aimme Weber

August 30, 2006 at 4:17 am (Aimee Weber, Second Life, The Kuurian Expedition)

  1. Grace McDunnough

    [19:14] So Aimee — the floor is yours .. we have no agenda per se — just glad to have a conversation

  2. Aimee Weber

    [19:14] great!

    [19:15] Ok well what i prepared to talk about here

    [19:15] was my progression from a non commercial resident to a commercial entity

    [19:15] And along the way, i wanted to talk about the areas I tried to push the SL platform along

    [19:16] To make it useful in ways that people hadn’t yet really tried

    [19:16] hope that plan sounds ok for the meeting

    3. Read the rest of this entry »

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