been dead for a long time now.
Great points. Seems to be the state of media in general these days. Everything is fractured. There are alternative audiences out there, and they are reachable with new media and social media. For example, my little pop punk or "Ramonescore" bubble has a very active scene and shows, tons of vinyl, and podcasts to hear about new stuff. The #s are small, but it remains vibrant.
yes without a doubt. i got into a local punk/DIY scene around 2000 and was big into that for a solid 10-15 years. tons of bands, shows, albums, releases, etc. i barely paid attentiont to modern pop or rock or whatever they call it. i didn't listen to the radio unless it was college. some of my friends got jobs DJing and i performed live on radio a few times. all of this was with guitars/bass/drums, standard rock setup. alternate music can entirely replace mainstream music, and in many ways, it's a far better replacement.
yet outside of the White Stripes and the Strokes there really has been nobody in the mainstream holding the torch for a long time. ultimately it comes down to that, if you are letting mainstream define what is music. just because mainstream media doesn't know of good music doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
for me, it never went away, there have always been interesting guitar based musicians, there still are. the MGMT and Andrew WK albums that came out last year were incredible, with lots of great Pink Floyd and Queen style classic rock between both those new albums. but still with a fresh approach.
I have nothing against smaller bands/lesser known scenes. It's just weird to me to see that the genre has no presence in pop culture in the late 2010s and beyond.
automation, largely. the rock bands of the 60s 70s and 80s all played their instruments. nowadays you can just make songs out of loops. that's what "modern rock" acts like Imagine Dragons do. it is a fundamentally anti-performance way to construct music, yet it is economically cheaper, so the industry favors it. why have a band run through a song for hours and hours getting better and better until they get the right performance when you can just program it all to be a perfect sterile robotic sequence in 30 minutes? you save time and money. yes, the performance is greatly simplified and reduced to a digital sequence, but it will still sell because it serves a primary function. that's the beauty of placement. it doesn't need to be
good music.
there are many reasons why modern music is horrible, from favoritism to nepotism to production techniques (everything is over compressed these days, eliminating natural dynamics) to marketing, etc. one of the Grammy CEO's stepped down recently, saying there was massive favoritism in the industry. plus, the convenience has made artists lazy, or at the very least, making music has become too easy to do. music can be made by one person entirely on a laptop, without anyone else involved. this is great and freeing but it also results in a far less musical production than a song that is rehearsed and learned by a group of musicians that all perform it together. actual music still exists. it's just that the
"music industry" hasn't cared about music for decades (just look at the Universal fires).
IMO Nirvana actually did kill the music industry like Kurt Cobain wanted. but that's a story for another time.
www.billboard.com
