Yes, damn kids are ruining my lawn!

The thing I tried to point out though is, the music of the 60’s-80’s is still revered by youngsters today. It is sampled, quoted and imitated every day by young musicians. This is a LONG way away from most young musicians of the 60’s-80’s, who were doing their level best to sound NOTHING like the jazz and big band era, which was really only 20 years before the 60’s, let alone 50 years prior, which is how far back the 70’s are to today..!

There’s plenty of modern music that floats my boat, I don’t really think I’m analogous to jazz musicians from the 40’s and 50’s who hated rock and roll and the Beatles etc.. Snarky Puppy, Jacob Collier and many others excite me at every listen, but let’s face it, they’re not even a blip on the charts. I think much of the pushback in the 60’s from the old jazzers was from their gigs drying up as rock and roll took over the dancehalls. Money talks!

But the same thing hasn’t really happened to 60’s-80’s rock, yacht rock and pop. One of the biggest trends in today’s bar/club scene is the proliferation of ‘tribute bands’, just a fancy form of cover bands. And trust me, they’re not doing tributes of modern music! It’s all Led Zeppelin, Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel, David Bowie, Queen, Journey etc. that are getting the ‘tribute’!

And that’s simply something you NEVER saw in the 70’s.

If these things are popular now with youngsters, I think it’s a tacit admission that their own generation’s pop music just doesn’t excite them as much as ours did us.

I think a generation of music made primarily in bedrooms and small studios on computers hasn’t translated into something most people want to go see live. We’ve a handful of mega-acts like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé taking huge reviews out on the road, but local venues can’t afford that, and cover bands can’t afford that kind of staging. Strip away the glitz, what’s left musically is a bit threadbare…

Maybe I’m just an old fogey, but I stand by what I said… I doubt anywhere NEAR the percentage of 60’s-80’s music still popular now will survive the next 50 years as today’s music ages..! 🎹❤️

They were saying that the 60s - 80s music wouldn't be remembered back in those days, however this has been proved completely wrong, therefore saying the latest music won't last is in reality a complete unknown, and only history will tell.
The biggest problem is technology, which is great if you use it to enhance your music, however most modern musicians use it as a crutch with very little of the musician coming through.
Consider the old days in the 70s & 80s when home organs were in their heyday, you could tell who was playing by the style they had, however these days with arranger keyboards, they don't say that is so & so playing, they just say oh that's a Yamaha, Korg etc. (Even what style is being used) so essentially Thay are just listening to the pre-recorded sounds (Styles) of the instrument.
Look at the Genos 2, it has some great effects that previously only used to be available in DAWs and synths, but apart from demos you never hear anybody using them, they instead just go for the canned styles and play along with them, and when new song specific styles come out (I think the Genos 2 added 800) the internet goes wild on arranger forums, but don't get a peep in musicians forums. (The main reason I avoid Yamah arrangers (Not Electones) is that they are the song specific style king, which just leaves me cold)
In the late 80s early 90s instruments came out that you could press a button, and it produced a riff for you that was in the style that you wanted, rather than creating one yourself, which for me is not musicianship, sampling other people's work is the same, it's not the musician that is creating it but a 100% copy of somebody Elses work. (Tribute and cover bands while playing the old songs, all sound a bit different as no 2 musicians play the same)
For the home hobby player, it is absolutely wonderful as they can sound great with little effort, (Which let's face it is what most home hobby players want) so I am certainly not knocking them, but for me it just doesn't float my boat. (I listen to them on You Tube and at organ & keyboard shows as it is great just to see someone playing and just enjoying themselves, as in the end that's what music is about)
Rant over

Bill

Not really sure who this ‘they’ is… People have always dissed contemporary music in favor of what they grew up with, but most of it was simple lay favoritism. You like what you grew up with.

But it’s pretty obvious why most music doesn’t survive as massively popular for 50+ years. In truth, jazzers can pretend that everything from say the 30’s and 40’s was superio, but the truth is that little of what was ACTUALLY popular mass music from back then is the kind of music that jazzers remember. Most dance jazz from back then was utterly formulaic stuff, and most of the truly groundbreaking jazz was fairly esoteric stuff that few listened to, most people favoring pablum you could dance to and not ‘listen’ to.

But if you analyse each period’s music, if you listen to the top 20 from each era, there’s a sweet spot from the 60’s-80’s where songs were diverse, complex, impeccably recorded, and very different from prior generations. And I think that’s the reason they have survived the test of time. It’s amazing how many 20 something’s are completely familiar with most of the top 10 songs from 50 years ago, yet despite being a musician that grew up in the 60’s, I can say with certainty I knew next to nothing about popular music from the 1910’s and 20’s, 40-50 years earlier.

I don’t think it’s generational bias, I just think the collapse of the recording industry has removed most of the money that drove the industry to great heights of creativity, and the MTV generation started the trend towards music that LOOKS good rather than sounding good. Those two factors have resulted in a generation whose music is designed for instant consumption and instant forgetting as the next video assaults your eyes.

Corporate control and the Spotify ‘algorithm’ has ensured that music that gets ‘pushed’ to listeners is as close as possible to what they just listened to. That isn’t how you leave an indelible mark on the future. It’s how you maximize short term profit. We often discount the work of talent scouts, A&R men and talented producers, and it’s true that music executives earned a fair bit of flack in the past for predatory practices, but compared to today’s faceless music executives they look like a bunch of wild eyed dreamers!

Today’s industry is an AI driven robot powered dystopia that is designed to funnel the money to a tiny few, with no attemp to build long term sustainability. Back in the day, record companies wouldn’t expect a profit from a newly signed artist until maybe the second album. Now, if TODAY’S single doesn’t get enough streams, it’s time to move on to the next ‘artist’.

I don’t think it’s a wait and see to find out if today’s pop has legs. We can already see it doesn’t. Try to list anything from the 2010’s that is surviving the 2020’s…. In the meantime, today’s kids can reel off a dozen names of artists from the 70’s and 80’s.

Money drives an industry, and the gross of the music industry during the 70’s and 80’s has never been equaled. It’s a pyramid, you need a huge base for a tall pyramid. The collapse of the industry pretty much guarantees we will never see those heights again. The CEO of Spotify made more money than any of the artists they play. When the vast majority of an industry’s profits go to people with no creativity in the slightest, what’s the incentive to create the next ‘big’ thing? If it doesn’t sound almost identical to the current ‘big’ thing, it’s never going to get heard.

History is showing its hand. I do not think we have to wait 50 years to determine that today’s pop isn’t going to influence people 50 years from now. We can see it happening (or not happening!) today.