To my mind, two things have changed over the decades:
1. The music industry corporations have got bigger through consolidation, more removed from the actual music, and better at identifying what sells lots of product (which leads to the changes tracked in this Gizmodo article. Which means mainstream music has, like pretty much every other mainstream product, got blander over time.
2. The cost of producing and distributing music has fallen through the floor. Recording, pressing, distributing and selling music all used to be very expensive processes. Now, you can make a song and sell it to somebody on the other side of the planet without leaving your home for next to nothing. There has never been a shortage of talented people who want to make music, and now the barriers that stopped them have gone away so now there is more great music being made than ever before.
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zvi
(no subject)
Date: 2016-01-21 06:34 pm (UTC)1. The music industry corporations have got bigger through consolidation, more removed from the actual music, and better at identifying what sells lots of product (which leads to the changes tracked in this Gizmodo article. Which means mainstream music has, like pretty much every other mainstream product, got blander over time.
2. The cost of producing and distributing music has fallen through the floor. Recording, pressing, distributing and selling music all used to be very expensive processes. Now, you can make a song and sell it to somebody on the other side of the planet without leaving your home for next to nothing. There has never been a shortage of talented people who want to make music, and now the barriers that stopped them have gone away so now there is more great music being made than ever before.