Contemporary music is depressing?

Interesting video by Analog(dia)log.
Do you agree?

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In my experience the contemporary music of any given time reflects what’s going on in society.

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I agree of course with you. There’s a lot of new bands that I enjoy discovering and listening. I find them mostly on Bandcamp today.
But there are so many artists and albums with absolutely no interest for me that I struggle to find the nuggets among all the crap.
It’s the reason I don’t stream Qobuz neither Tidal, because I would spend my time to skip the titles and click on my iPad continuously.

The reviewer gave also other points to explain why contemporary music is depressing, as the today loudness war: the mastering has to be conformed to many media, as computers, phones, headphones, cd players, streaming, lp….the result is music loud and compressed.

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There has never been a more diverse and varied pop music scene. I have enjoyed every single one of the 20 new albums I’ve purchased over the last year, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s being released.

To me, saying it’s ‘no nostalgia BS’ shows exactly what it is: nostalgia BS.

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Sorry, maybe it’s a joke, but this music is absolutely non listenable for me.
A disaster.

I wasn’t expecting you to like it; it was more about the song’s message that it was much better in my day; just look at these kids now. I could include the remix, which is even more obscure. The track, however, sounds like something John Peel might have played during his radio shows.

Quietus album of the year in 2018, I think. Since most of the artists on their end-of-year lists are unknown to me, I go out of my way to explore them with an open mind.

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Half an hour of a middle-aged man grumbling at youth culture and in the end it turns out to be a promo for analogue over digital. Half an hour of my life I won’t get back. :grimacing:

Roger

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Why stop with contemporary music ?

I say everything contemporary is depressing.

I think that’s why people look back with rose tinted glasses. They forget how stressed and depressed they were at the time and only remember the good times.

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Sorry to have wasted half an hour of your precious life :joy::joy::joy::chicken:

No way will I watch a half hour long video to discover some irrelevant individual’s views, but in answer to the question, I find 99+% of contemporary music that I have heard to be rubbish, non-tuneful and with repetitive, with at best ridiculous and all too often unpleasant lyrics. That could be seen to be depressing, but I have grown used to it over my lifetime. The difference with today’s contemporary music, compared to several decades ago, is that it has all been done before, and virtually if not all the tuneful combinations of notes already used, with someone always eager to sue for plagiarism at any repeated sequence of three notes or more, with the result that artists now have to find ever more discordant combinations to call it a tune. Very occasionally of course gems appear, but very few and far between.

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Contemporary music is awful.

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Nostalgia of the 60’s irony? Or a way to show that a lot of contemporary music is played by computers and machines?

I recommend you another video, that you will probably hardly enjoy:

@Innocent_Bystander will see it entirely too, I am sure of that.

:joy:

Neither.

It’s a lighthearted dig at people who are constantly complaining.

The image is of Marvin the paranoid android, from Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

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Although I don’t totally disagree with what he’s saying I’ve developed a short attention span probably from watching too many YouTubers ramble and repeat themselves. Same thing with click bait articles on Google that want you to read on forever before cutting to the chase revealing some useless tid-bit of information.
Anyhow…If people think compressed, autotuned, streamed, etc music is depressing now just wait until AI takes over. As Elon Musk just stated: it’s getting weird, really fast
Personally I have tried Spotify, Tidal, etc and have preferred commercial free radio with a real person curating, playing and commenting. Call me old fashioned but it just feels more ‘‘right’’ to me.

Difficult for me to understand without subtitles. Sorry to miss your point then.

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Marvin found everything depressing.

An AI version of Eeyore (Winnie The Pooh), the perpetually depressed donkey, if you will. Always look on the dark side of life!

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Definitely, nostalgia isn’t as good as it used to be.

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In 1625, William Adams, a chronicler of Bristol, wrote the following about his motivation for writing.

to stop the mowthes of foolish people that will talke what a merry world it was in former ages, when (poore soules) they know what they say.’

1625 was the year of the plague, which resulted in food shortages and the implementation of fasting on a Wednesday. However, to stop the merry nostalgia of old, Adams was on hand to point out that 2000 plus people died (out of a Bristol population of 10,000) in the plague outbreaks in 1573 and 1603. In addition, corn and grain shortages occurred in 1585 and 1595. So yes, nostalgia isn’t as good as it used to be.

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Since the GPT and the other BS-generators cannot create (or learn) there will be some copyright hurdles, GPT works by mashing-up ready-mades found on the net etc. and cannot produce anything original. OpenAI is currently doing the “fair use” defense for what they feed GPT, this will soon be tested in court.

On the other hand the courts in the US have so far declared you cannot copyright (or patent I think) what GPT outputs since it is not made by a human. For the streaming services this will mean happy days - not having to pay royalties.

What I’ve heard from the music industry is “we can’t stop this” and plans to “do a Spotify” and offer easy-to-use-services where anyone can make say Adele-tracks as long as they pay Adele some fee.

Most of the services I’ve heard where algorithms actually compose the music is very easy to detect, sounds amazingly flat and boring. But there is too much money for it not to happen.

I think we will soon see declarations on albums when real humans actually made all music.

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