music

It's just you, we make sure the radio only plays the shitty stuff when you are listening, as a joke

I'm fifty and even I think this post reads like "old man yells at clouds".

Find a YouTube channel dedicated to commercials from any era and you'll find plenty of music that'll make you wish for death's cold embrace.

the business freaks that decide what is mainstream pop literally run prospective songs through an algorithm that makes sure they are similar to past songs that made a lot of money

I exclusively listen to police dispatch and recordings of 911 calls

Looks like your mistake was listening to the radio to find new music

the mainstream is kind of disappearing anyway as culture has become stratified into a million small subcultures. sure there are still some big artists like Taylor Swift or Megan Thee Stallion or whatever but I have to wonder if they're the last of a dying breed. you can go through life without caring about any of these famous people, which was much more difficult before the internet. most people don't listen to the radio anymore, they get their music from Spotify, TikTok and Youtube algorithm geared towards their specific taste

like, ask 5 random teenagers what music they're into and you'll probably get 5 completely different answers

Yeah no, mainstream music has always sucked in those "fuck the system" songs have always been alternative music that gets some playtime exclusively on alt channels, til about 15 years after it's no longer relevant.

It still gets produced, but it's never been on mainstream radio.

I regret to inform you that mainstream music always sucks more or less the same amount and that you are getting old. It gives me no pleasure to relay this

idk I only listen to Palestinian songs now

popular music always sucked, old music is on average better because no one makes effort to preserve or remember the shitty songs

this was one of the top songs of the 70s

All the pop songs of my youth were like: "Baby I know I did you wrong. Can we make reenacting our traumas together again work, baby?"
music swells with notes of struggle and triumph, string section weeps with hope that the horrifying relationship dynamic will be restored

Mainstream music really shit the bed in the late 90’s when Clear Channel took over most radio stations. That isn’t the only thing that went wrong, but I feel like that was a defining period when things got noticeably worse.

Tonights Gonna be a Good Night came out in 2009 and its much closer to being nostalgia music than being current pop music

On the plus side, I feel as though independent music is more interesting than its ever been. Every genre under the sun is being created at a DIY and I find that beautiful. You can find DIY pop, DIY noise, DIY punk, DIY hip hop, DIY folk, DIY country, and everything else. It rules. Songtrader might ruin this moment with the destruction of bandcamp, but I hope people keep making the art. I hope I find a new place to discover it.

I haven't really listened to the radio since Bomb the Music Industry and Defiance Ohio started putting their music online for donations, so I'm a little out of touch on mainstream. Some really good stuff does make it out of the mainstream, but I have no idea how common it is, because it mostly gets filtered through other people for me lol.

pop music is bad by definition

Death to America

I exclusively listen to weird shit I bought on Bandcamp so I wouldn't know

You're listening to pop. Pop is intentionally formulaic and is going out of its way to get out of your way.

enshittification of the entire culture under capitalism is real.

capitalism ruins everything, and now even music is just recycled bullshit filtered by greedy executives. Nothing is popular because it is good, its popular because there are ads about it.

Mainstream music nowadays is driven by three things:

1. Avoidance of risk by radio and record companies. Unlike what libertarians tell us, these firms avoid doing what is possible to bring them a loss. Thus, a lot of their income is from selling music by old bands (but not their new material! The old stuff. For example Memento Mori by Depeche Mode is a good album they released this year, but you won't hear songs played from it because people won't know it and might not like it.) and stuff that is already proven to be popular like the Ed Sheerans or Imagine Dragons of the world.

2. Tik Tok, Netflix and other popular media. You suddenly hear a ear-wormy French song? Odds are there's millions of videos of people dancing to it or explaining war crimes in Gaza to the sound of it on TikTok. You hear a song that has charted at place 149 on the charts in 1990 and hasn't been played since the first number of the year was 2? Odds are, it's blowing up because it's an insert song somewhere.

3. Genre specialization. Do you like the Harry Styles song that's been playing every day for the last year? No? Do you like say death metal?

In which case, you likely switch to listening to music on playlists on Spotify or whatever. You listen to one song, to another, to a third one and suddenly the vast majority of the songs that are recommended to you are death metal and nothing else. Spotify earns the money, because you keep listening to death metal and probably like it - but you won't hear any industrial rock, rap, jazz, classical music, singer-songwriter slop (or good examples of the genre), etc.

Respectively, there's also little exchange between fans of these genres and word-of-mouth exchanges. In spite of the hilarious reddit post, a fan of Olivia Rodrigo won't listen to the Swans for example.

Thus, what's mainstream music is unlikely to change much from what current tastes of the demographic that has been deemed as that is, and those people who have these specific listens-only-to-[Genre] tastes or simply dislike modern mainstream music are gonna be kept excluded.

Radio is probably only gonna keep diminishing in importance and streaming become even more leading than today. As Spotify etc. might fall, it's also likely that we will see specialization among the platforms. Streaming Service A (let's say Dub Reggae) simply won't have Metal on it. For that, you'll have to use Streaming Service B.

At work we got a radio, tuned to a pop station, they played a crappy generic sounding cover version of "blue" by "eifel65", which made me so angry i switched to a rock station, which played a crappy generic sounding cover version of billie jean.

i only listen to the "60,70,80s" station and my beautifully curated playlist so im all good. tv commercial songs are unbearable though.

The funny thing about mainstream music is i hate it when it comes out and then 10 years down the line it becomes my comfort nostalgia music. Explain that one athiests

Always has been

Little of Column A, Little of Column B. Clear channel did brick radio as a whole, definitely making many stations turn into looping MP3 playlists. If you got a college radio station in your town you can still hear some wacky shit. My local college station does genre time blocks, so I've sometimes heard reggae and death metal within the span of a day. At the same time, capitalism has always required some amount of smoothing of the edges. A lot of the rebellious music we enjoyed ten or twenty years ago was usually a more toned-down version of the stuff it's influenced by. Vaguely defiant music still shows up from time to time, but it goes back to Channel Clear just being able to pull from the same three Nirvana or Rage Against songs that they've grown comfortable with. That said, shit like NPR will still let the occasional folk punk singer on for a bit. Thankfully Bandcamp, Youtube, and Soundcloud, despite their glaring flaws have ensured that the little guy and a whole lot of variety is still there. You may just need to do some hunting.

Boomerification. Pop music always sucked, just listening to it 20 years later brings nostalgia now. Same as it ever was

From where I sit, seems like there's not much of a "mainstream" anymore. You got your occasional Taylor Swifts, but thanks to the internet it seems like kids these days have easy access to tons and tons of music of all genres. I've seen bands from genres that used to be niche as fuck suddenly get huge. A hardcore band from my hometown that used to be mildly popular locally recently released an album that whole still hardcore, and a bit more poppy and fused with other genres, and it randomly did gangbusters and now they're selling out stadiums. I saw them in an abandoned auto parts store back in 2017.

I use my CD player in my car to play music I've either bought from musicians I like or shit I've burned onto blank disks, so for damn near the entirety of my life that I've had a driver license I haven't listened to anything mainstream for years.

It's been so long since I've listened to mainstream pop music, that when I went out to karaoke to celebrate my friend's coming baby, I actually enjoyed listening to it since it was novel to me.

Like the only thing that's actually annoyed me a bit musically, lately, is the fucking Alexander Hamilton musical still making rounds.

I'm fairly positive I'm so out of touch with mainstream society, even to literal boomers, that people who talk to me tell me outright to my face that I'm the most eccentric person they've ever met their entire lives and I'm sitting here like

Mainstream music used to have tons of "Fuck the system" songs

Yeeeeah, not really. You’re viewing the past through rose colored glasses. Twenty or so years ago, the most popular music was boy bands, Britney Spears, 50 Cent, Usher etc. Stuff like Limp Bizkit also existed as a cynical faux-rebellious ploy to get the ones who weren’t into pop to buy records from major labels, but they weren’t really saying anything other than FUCK YOU MOM I DON’T WANNA DO CHORES.

Sometimes there was music like Rage Against the Machine, System of a Down or Rise Against that did become mainstream, but they were extremely rare, and SOAD and arguably RA too are anyway.

If your idea of rebellious fuck the system music is limited to rock, then yeah you’re going to hear less of it on mainstream radio because rock has declined in popularity. I guarantee you those songs are not as “fuck the system” as you remember. Even the most explicitly political music like system of a down and green days American idiot kept their critiques extremely non-specific.

everything fucking sucks now lol

Now?

If I hear another song that sounds like 'Tonights Gonna be a Good Night."

If I hear the words "bar" and "car" in rhyming lines I get pissed, every time.

Yeah yeah some of it is me getting old maybe, but considering that there's at least a few songs every few years that really stand out that I actually like even as an aging millennial, I do think that I may be missing out on possible new good music when the only way I typically hear it is in a 5-second explosion during some TikTok thing my wife thinks I'll actually like this one time

EDIT: We share a lot of interests in common but TikTok consistently isn't it for me. I'll take a look but reserve the right to

I’ve been vibing on some Malian rock and rojavan music lately and loving it. Found it on YouTube and use YouTube downloader to convert it to mp3s.

My partner has been rocking lots of raggaeton, Mexican banda and norteno and corrido, and baile funk. Unfortunately they are getting in to Taylor swift lately and it is awful.

Music always sounds better when you can’t understand the lyrics. Hence the universal appeal of techno.

Good luck.

I blame the corporatization of creativity. If only the rich can participate in it, then of course it will suck.

Can't have poors out there not being cogs in machines.

music has always been mostly bad but now it is extra mostly bad

In one place I worked there was a 80s radio station with the shittiest cheapest to license music. It was torture but it put shake like DJ Snake at the time into perspective as I got more and more of my music from bandcamp.

I'm generally sanguine about popular music that is brainless, the shit that drives me up the wall is pretentious shit like modern Arctic Monkeys. "There better be a mirrorball" and "Body paint" will make me irrationally mad. Give me one million Pink Pantheresses before that, they at least tend to have a nice hook.

Rock as a genre is basically dead since the indie landfill era.

I just consume hardly any mainstream media and turn my brain off when commercials come on. Also @[email protected] made me a junglist/dnb enjoyer like two years ago and I've never looked back (Currently listening to Warehouse Simulation 1.6 btw).