Casual Conversation

Music is so much better than it used to be, it's fucking incredible.
I volunteer at a non-profit youth center. We host a lot of concerts, so basically I have a part time job as a booker.
The quality of the bands who are willing to play for $200 a night (which covers the cost of getting there and back, but not even a bed for the night) is insane!
Half the bands that play there for next to nothing are just as good as any that made it big 20 years ago.
And they're all on Spotify, so you can listen to any band you like as much as you like.

Trending music may suck, just ignore it.

Everybody always says modern pop music is terrible, your suffering from recency bias. Take a look at top 40s from 20 years ago. You'll probably see a bunch of songs you forgot about because they didn't stand the test of time. Old music isn't better, you just only still hear the good stuff.

Feeling the urge to chase kids off your lawn yet, them young whippersnappers?

Sounds like you get your recommendations via Short Media Content and or Music TV? Perhaps consider using other means like last.fm? Or looking up genres you like and see what other artists are new to it, check them out?

You know, my grandfather said something quite similar back in the days...
So did his grandfather and every generation before them.

It's probably because your particular demographic is not what they are targeting with today's music.

The real money is in the young kids who use their allowance and part-time job earnings to purchase albums and to buy individual songs and to buy merch for bands.

If your particular aesthetics are stuck with what was popular in the 90s and early 2000s, chances are you have kids and responsibilities and you don't have the time or financial bandwidth to obsess over the latest trend in music.

Also, as we grow older we tend to grow more segregated and apart from our peers so we have less things to talk about and less things to relate to with music.

Those factors combine basically mean that you are aging out of pop music.

And that's okay, I recommend that you start looking more into independent labels and small bands with little following, you are more likely to find music that caters to your tastes if you put the work in, but Mass music is no longer catering to you and your preferences so it's up to you whether you want to live in a world without new music or not.

most of the popular stuff was bad back then too, you just got introduced to it when you were young so you've got rose tinted glasses for it now.

I dunno I don't listen to mainstream music, Gojira, Lorna shore and LoG are good and they are relatively new bands, so music definitely isn't going to shit, it's just that given a good song there is a high probability it didn't come out this year since good music has existed for many years. (Hopefully that makes sense)

Rick Beato

Modern popular music is just different now. I don't know that I'd say it's "better" or "worse", it's just different music being marketed to a younger generation. Judging from your list of acceptable pop acts that seems to end sometimes in the early 90s, I'd say you're probably going to be disappointed a lot of the time because there just aren't that many 20 something age musicians who want to dedicate their careers to recreating their parents music lol

Totally agree. I'm relatively young-ish still (I'd like to think 😅) but haven't listened to much new music at all in the past 10 years, and especially now...I find myself constantly going back from the 90s to maybe the 2010s, with some older classics sprinkled in as well.

Message From Mercury is a band from a guy I game jammed with. They're incredible. Ariana Grande and Social House made a banger together. We're dripping in incredibly shit and its never been more accessible. I think you're digging yourself a cloud yelling hole.

It's because they don't bother finding artists and cultivating original talent now. That's risky. It's far more lucrative to find an attractive person, teach them to dance, and have them perform a bunch of songs that were written using a proven algorithm. A bunch of people are going to argue with me, but industry insiders have admitted this on more than one occasion. I've read articles and interviews about it. No, I will not be providing evidence. It's out there to find if you want to look for it.