This question originally appeared on Quora.
By Benjamin Moshe, Product Manager for IMDb
Kind of a strange question. Decline in the quality of popular music since 1650? 1970? 1995? Whatever the time period you're thinking of, the answer is likely the same: there has been no meaningful decline in the overall quality of popular music. Rather, there has been a steady evolution in production and distribution technology that has changed the way we consume music.
A couple of examples from the last 15 years. The two major developments in the popular music world over that time period are:
- The fall of the mass-distributed "physical" music product (i.e. record, tape, CD), and the rise of the internet as the dominant distribution network for recorded music.
- The disambiguation of the musical artist and the musical personality.
Relative to #2: this is not a new phenomenon; producers have been writing music for performers for as long as there's been "pop." We've just taken it to its logical conclusion. The Monkees were a joke band, but they had to play their own instruments on stage. Ricky Martin may not have been a musical genius, but he was ostensibly still singing on his albums. But with the advent and rise to prominence of Autotune, the name on the record now has more or less nothing to do with the artist responsible for the content. A KeSha album (not necessarily the best example) is really a Dr. Luke album with guest talking (pitch-shifted into "singing") by KeSha. This has increased the perception of the "musicians" we see on MTV as "talentless hacks." They are indeed talentless hacks, but the music is no better or worse; it's just created by someone else, and the someone elses are as great as they've ever been.
Summary: more good music is easier to reach than ever, but "pop" has converged towards the mean and the true musicians may be less visible.
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