If you don’t think that
has any connection with how good music is, then we agree about that.
TikTok is limited to what…60 second videos? Are you telling me music is now limited to 60 seconds (up from 15 seconds)?
Or is it that your kids see a snippet on TikTok then go somewhere else like Spotify to listen to the whole song?
No, generally my kid then goes to watch mash-ups of the song on Youtube, if they’re interested enough. My kid doesn’t have Spotify or any other paid music service account other than Youtube as part of a Google account. None of her friends do, either, it seems. But on Youtube, they’re not mainly watching the kind of official videos BB tracks.
Billboard tracks sales and paid services. And that’s not where the kids I know are watching stuff now. Or where a lot of musical innovation is happening.
I would suggest that trying to tell people they’re surrounded by wrongbadmusic is innately foolish and subjective to trying to pin it on a metric is disingenuous.
Billboard mattered in the days of radio because it directly affected what you could listen to. Stations have an opportunity cost for playing Song A over Song B. These days, Billboard isn’t the gatekeeper that it used to be since you don’t have to listen to the radio. Worrying about what’s on the Billboard charts is like worrying about the dwindling CD selection at Walmart.
Sure, it can pick out what’s the most popular music. So what? Again, it doesn’t gatekeep music like it used to. A bajillion kids liking the latest song doesn’t mean I’m stuck listening to that song when I turn on the radio 'cause I’m not turning the radio on. I’d guess that I could go through my Liked songs on Spotify and less than 10% of them have charted. Big deal.
Billboard is a metric. I ask again, what else would you have me use to track music trends?
If I didn’t use Billboard you would probably just accuse me of having no data and running on feels.
I also provided other data above.
And to be clear, I have never said song-X bad, song-Y good and empirically so. I was talking about trends and comparing the music scene of the 70s to the music scene of the 20s. The music gestalt if you like.
What are you trying to track? And why? What are you trying to prove?
But you are. You’re complaining about “not having the whole smorgasbord” while dining at the most corporate of fast food restaurants.
The OP is suggesting music was better in the 70s than it is today.
So, it makes sense to see what the popular music of the 70s was and compare it to the popular music of today. How else would you start to make a comparison? How can we make such a list? Billboard.
Once we have the two lists of songs we can see what is similar and what is different. I noted several things that were different and noted that, added all up, I think it shows the musical landscape is narrowing and that is not good for music overall.
We don’t have reason to believe that a narrowing musical landscape has any connection to overall musical quality.
That will give you a list of Billboard hits you can subjectively compare. It won’t actually tell you about the full range of available music. If someone is saying “Billboard charting songs in 2020 has less lyrical complexity than Billboard charting songs of 1978” then, sure, I guess. That won’t tell you if “music” in the 70s was better than “music” today. Might be a good argument for expanding your horizons though.
The people who did the complexity comparisons used faaaar more than Billboard. In one I think they sampled over 400,000 songs from the 1950s till a few years ago.
I am using Billboard here because it is easy for me and makes sense when talking about this. It’s a data point. One of the few we have got.
Hell, if you LIKE Top 100 music today, you could make a strong case that SCIENCE! shows that music today is far superior to music in the 70s since we’ve learned how to eliminate the chaff, stop faffing around with pointlessly bloated lyric compositions and put out more effective tunes. I mean, it makes more sense that you’d get better at producing stuff over time then worse at it, right?
Shoot, we don’t have reason to believe the landscape is narrowing.
The problem is, a more narrow field means fewer “good” songs (whatever that means to you).
If the field is wide you have more options. Can be exposed to more new things. You might find you like some.
It’s like having 100 beef dishes on offer vs 1000 dishes of all sorts…beef, chicken, pork, fish, seafood, vegetable, etc. Every one of those 100 beef dishes might be really good and you like them a lot but the 1000 dishes is better. You have your 100 beef dishes plus so much more to sample. You might expand your horizons a bit and find you like some of the other things.
We do. Earlier posts made that case.
Spotify has over 70 million tracks. They say they have 2.6mil podcasts and then you have comedy routines and whatnot but let’s say there’s 50 million songs. Why are we worrying about how good/bad/whatever the music charting on Billboard is again?
I’m curious…what singers/bands from 2005 do you think will be the equivalent of the Stones or Beatles or Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin or Janice Joplin or Jimi Hendrix in 2055? Artists who will be held in near universal high regard as important singers/songwriters that changed music for the better and inspired whole generations of new musicians?
Nope, earlier posts pointed out that there’s more music being made available today than ever before.
If one can’t get beyond the hot 100, that’s their problem.
Fear of not being able to appreciate some pork and chicken dishes with your beef is highly overrated.
You may not like them, but I think these two have a shot (and remember popular != influential ).
Lightning Bolt (with plenty of skills on their instruments)
King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard (just about a band full of virtuosos).
Well which is it, am I right or am I wrong? 
Heh. Not to sound cliche but you’re just the exception that proves the rule.