New music is meaningless

[Tarantism]

There is still really great music all over the place...and if anything there is even more variety out there then ever before, and people are blending styles both new and old all of the time.

Or, if you really are fed up with music and the "music industry", why not make your own music? There is so much personal power to be found in writing your own songs.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Tarantism

There is still really great music all over the place...and if anything there is even more variety out there then ever before, and people are blending styles both new and old all of the time.

I agree.

One need only look at the release schedules of the first dozen or so CD publishers to realize that music is being recorded and distributed at a far greater rate than would allow any single person to listen to more than a small fraction of it – and this excludes music published purely over the internet. Hence, when I hear statements/complaints of the form “all new music is X”, I’m inclined to ask “oh, so you’ve heard all the new music, have you?”

What’s really being expressed by such statements, I think, is more of a reflection of how the speaker is accustom to accessing new music, than of new music or the various people and technologies by which it reaches people. If you make little effort to seek out the music one most likes, but rather passively consumes that which financially-focused people most promote, you’re likely not to much like it.

Rather than the present day state of music being unusual, I think it’s a return to how things were for most of history and before, before sound recording and telephonics, when one couldn’t hear all the new music because of the geographic impracticality of going to where it was being made. There was, it seems to me, a brief window, roughly 1920-1960, when sound recording was both accessible to many musicians and listeners, but not so accessible that more was being recorded than a dedicated listener could keep up with. Barring some sort of regress or diaspora of civilization, I don’t think humankind will experience this again.

These are wonderful times, I think, to love music.