You and I must listen to very different types of music. 
There are a lot of bands releasing albums, so I’ll give you that. But I also see a lot of singles or small groups of songs (typically maybe 3 or 4 at a time), definitely nowhere near a full “album” of music. More like what we used to call an EP. It’s more common with independent bands or small label bands, but that’s also where you find a lot of innovation and creativity.
Oh yeah, no doubt, there are a lot of EP’s on Bandcamp, but I’m counting those as albums.
I came across the following article today: Rock music just had one of its best streaming years despite being ‘dead’
First, the article shows that streaming keeps growing overall. Americans streamed 1.4 trillion songs in 2025, a 4.6% increase year over year. Only 43% of streams came from songs released between 2021–2025. That means 57% of listening went to older music.
However, the article points to two major exceptions: Taylor Swift (The Life of a Showgirl) and Morgan Wallen (I’m the Problem). Both passed 5 million album-equivalent units, which is enormous in the streaming era. So, while catalog dominates, big new releases still break through in a massive way.
Rock music is the surprise. Rock saw a 6.4% increase, making it the fastest-growing genre in the data cited. Despite the narrative that “rock is dead,” the numbers show it had one of its strongest streaming years.
Jaime Marconette, VP of Music Insights at Luminate, explains that rock grew its share of the streaming pie the most. Rock streaming leans heavily on catalog, but it also had the second-highest total of new current streams among genres. So, rock’s growth is real, driven by both nostalgia and new releases.
Anyone interested in 70s-style rock should certainly check out the Canadian band Sloan. This is from an album they put out last year:
Back in the day, you never heard of these groups unless they hit it big or were local to you (and you listened to local acts). If you lived in St. Louis, there were hundreds (or more) acts putting out a handful of songs all across the country/world that you would never hear of. You could live in New York and have no idea about some group putting out a small EP in Milwaukee. The introduction most people had to “a band” was their studio album once they’d already managed to reach the point of putting one out. Today, you can hear every fledgling band’s music well before they hit that point. Does this mean that bands aren’t putting out albums or does it mean that you’re able to witness thousands of acts go through the process of potentially creating an album if it’s viable?
Rick Beato introduced me to Sienna Spiro. He reviewed the Spotify hits this week.
I really like this song.
Rick mentioned the current Spotify hits as aren’t heavily autotuned.
That’s encouraging. Maybe younger listeners are finally ready to hear more natural voices?
I’m sure there is still some pitch correction. The industry won’t give up their production tricks completely.
I’m just glad it’s not as ridiculously over-produced. There are still vocalists with great voices. They can’t control what producers do with their recordings.
I still didn’t like most of the Spotify current hits. It’s the approach of the material. I don’t find the verses that interesting.
Besides the usual “that’s what we grew up with” the move to digital opened things that simply weren’t possible before. But IMHO just because these new digital tools exist doesn’t mean they should always be used to their fullest, and a lot of modern production seems to use that “because we can” mindset. Now that approach seems to have become the norm, and even goes into how music is performed.
A big example is compression. Older recordings tended to have real dynamic range (quiet and loud sections in a song). Modern tracks are often much more compressed, keeping levels always high and steady. That fed into a “loudness war,” where everything was maximum volume all the time. Though that faded, its remnants remain.
How we play music has also changed. Back in the day, many people had really good home stereo systems with large speakers that did justice to the music and one can hear the nuances. Music was produced with that in mind. As we moved into digital and streaming, quality initially dropped - and even brought us back to mono for a bit, and more importantly, people started to use to smaller far less capable speakers (phones, earbuds, bluetooth speakers). Even if fidelity was present, it often couldn’t be heard - and many times stripped away during lossy compression. While streaming quality has improved since its original days, the average listener is still using basically crap speakers, and some can even play digital tricks to help out the sound moving the mixing partly into the device.
To your last point, more earbuds are coming out with a v-shaped sound profile: bass and treble boosted, and mid-range kept where is. That works okay for me.
I generally prefer the sound of my turntable setup, but in terms of breadth of music available compared to the old days, I’m glad digital is here, and will trade some fidelity for that.
I think it’s a matter of how music is presented. Back then radio station culled through the music that was available and presented it to us on basically the only way to hear it - radio.
Remember, too, a lot of those ‘musicians’ were part of the Wrecking Crew playing on one hit wonder songs. I would argue that musicianship is much better today, in general.
There is plenty of good music today - there is just so much more of it that to find stuff you like takes a bit of work.
One of the genres I like, (real) outlaw country, wouldn’t even be played on the radio. Thank goodness for streaming apps.
I don’t like much of the stuff on the radio - tastes have changed - but I’m sure in 40 years if the play the top “oldies” people will decry their current music.
What qualifies as real? Genuinely curious.
Stuff that’s a little rougher around the edges that wouldn’t make it on the radio. I like Willie, et al but also:
Drive-By Truckers -
Corb Lund
Scott Biram
Cody Jinks
Hank 3
Robbie Fulks
Here’s sampling…
First Last One
The Nail
Ragged But Alright
Must Be the Whiskey
Still Drunk, Still Crazy, Still Blue
Fuck Up
Last Call For The Blues
Raisin’ Hell and Slingin’ Gravel
I think that’s part of the problem. Back then there were fewer options for listening to music, but more options for different genres of music withing what was considered “pop” music or readily accessible alternative options. These days, Top 40 is more or less homogenous within pop channels but there is much wider diversity and fragmentation across a wider number of listening channels.
So the result is in the 70s and 80s, you are more likely to find good music within your particular genre of interest, shared with a much broader audience, whereas today you can probably find music of at least equal quality, but within a narrow niche. So you lose out on that shared musical experience.
Ah, I see you’re a Bloodshot Records fan! I was glad when they got rescued financially.
I recognize a lot of these and have listened to some of them but will give them individual listens. (I also like Lydia Loveless and Bobby Bare Jr, but they might not quite fit in)
My listening tastes are varied enough that I have a lot of leeway for expansion.
Another one of my favorites by the Drive-By Truckers is Gravity’s Gone:
"So I’ll meet you at the bottom if there really is one
They always told me when you hit it you’ll know it
But I’ve been falling so long, it’s like gravity’s gone and I’m just floatin’"
and
“Those little demons ain’t the reasons for the bruises on your soul you’ve been neglecting
You’ll never lose your mind as long as your heart always reminds you where you left it”
Great songwriting.
Well, the 80s brought the Black Plastic Crap era where there was a race to the bottom to sell cheaply manufactured and barely workable garbage even under formerly reputable names. I have a late 80s Technics system in a closet here that’s basically unlistenable to anyone with any sort of standards.
Yes I agree. It was a move to portability, and what would define Gen X media. It was the start of digital. But 80’s music was still pretty solid, running on the fumes of producing for quality, even if it was more and more consumed by a Soundesign portable tape player running slightly slow due to low batteries and static filled headphones that would drop out one channel occasionally. The bar was still high back then, but yes a lot of the incentive to stay there was fading.
Heh heh heh, I listen to most of my music on a pair of Yamaha reference monitors hooked up to my mixing board, both for pleasure and for “work”. My first mix is for those, then for a set of headphones. After that, I hit a couple of car stereos to make sure it “works” there, and another listen happens on my phone speakers. After all of that, I’ll probably listen to it on the system upstairs in the living room with a subwoofer a couple of times, but that’s mostly to make sure that something I hadn’t noticed isn’t going to unintentionally rumble away into next week with that kind of setup.
Short version: you mix it so it sounds good on crap. The Yamaha monitors are made to let you know how bad your mix sounds on a really flat set of speakers. If it sounds good on “bad” speakers, it’s almost assuredly going to sound great on a “good” set of speakers. As far as I know, this has been the case (and the basics of the method) since at least the 70s. Nobody’s mixing for a particularly spectacular setup with the moon rock needle and everything, almost everyone has been chasing the lowest common denominator since shortly after I was born. I think they’re mostly right in this case.
Phi Spector famously took every one of those famous “wall of sound”songs in the early 1960s on a test drive on a car radio (while moving with the windows down) before sending them to be pressed. He knew those were the conditions under which most of his records were heard for the first time.
Ozzie Nelson did the same thing with Ricky Nelson’s recordings. In fact, the story was that Ozzie had them deliberately mixed for AM car radios, and wasn’t concerned with how they’d sound at home.
The music director at the AM rock radio station I worked at in the 70’s listened to every song on car speakers before putting it on the air.