What Happened To Music? The Steady Reduction in Music Quality Over The Past Forty Years — An Opinion on Industry Decline

(Charlotte, North Carolina) — Music, a fundamental pillar of societies across the globe, is an ancient concept as old as the first human to walk the earth. From jazz to pop to rock to EDM, everyone has an opinion, and everyone has a favorite. While that's all well and good, another pattern within the industry is the quality decline in music produced over the past several decades. We went from greats like The Beatles, Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Elton John, and The Grateful Dead, to monotone, robotic, repetitive, and annoying tracks like Tell Ur Girlfriend by Lay Banks, Bigfoot by Nicki Minaj, and Tootsie Slide by Drake. My favorite example of this phenomenon is Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen, a repetitive pop tune released in late 2011 to stir up Millennial white girls and "Alternative Pop" radio stations. Another grand example of this is Shake It Off by Taylor Swift, a familiar yet repetitive track about ignoring hate, which may be what got us to where we are today.

I mean, just think about it. In the '90s, we had girl groups like The Spice Girls releasing smash hits like "Who Do You Think You Are" and "Spice Up Your Life", and sure, while some of them were repetitive and sometimes annoying, they at least had a good tune and catchy lyrics met with iconic dances we could all vibe with. Now you have 31-year-old rappers taking hits at 19-year-old girls on stages over a yearly award that will probably be won by someone else next year, world-renowned hip hop artists making fun of others for getting shot in the foot, and a grand woman like Taylor Swift with an exceptional artistic talent releasing a boring, dreadful 31-song album with only 7 good tracks. Artists seem to have lost their spark, with most acting-like dead-end corporate employees who are only in it for the money.

It's 1987. You're sitting in Nancy Glenmore's living room, trying not to breathe in the cigarette smoke because you read somewhere that it causes cancer. Her Victrola is playing Michael Jackson's new album "Bad", and then she stands up from her husband's La-Z-Boy to change the vinyl to Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven On Earth", accidentally bumping into the TV and changing the channel to The Weather Channel. These memories are the ones that sit with us for years and years and years, the ones that engrain the lyrics to timeless classics like Smooth Criminal into our brains, the ones that make us miss our mom's Dutch butter cookie tin that was full of sewing supplies.

...And then there's now. You're walking through a crowded school hallway, a group of four girls are performing a TikTok dance in the hallway, and around six or seven "Ice cream hair" boys are discussing sexually assaulting women and making vehemently racist jokes on their way to class, in which they will be served detention for yelling "GYAT" at their teacher. The entire time, all that can play through your head is that repetitive, annoying song you saw nineteen thousand times during your routine evening doom scrolling session. Whether it be the Toxic Gossip Train, Tell Ur Girlfriend, Made U Look, or any other boring autotune ChatGPT track, it stays in your head for three weeks and leaves just as soon as you thought it was the best song you'd ever heard in your life. Following this event, about five or six months later, you'll open your Spotify to listen to your time capsule playlist and find that you had a very, very corny music taste half-a-year prior. (I know that's right, I just done told y'all bout y'allselves.)

We need to do away with people like Lay Banks, Azealia Banks, Kendrick Lamar, Meghan Trainor, and whatever the hell Panic! At The Disco became post-2016. That's not real music. You can hate on me all you want, but it's not. It has no nostalgic value, it's boring, it's lame, it's prime for target commercials, and society would be better off without it. If Kendrick Lamar started ten years before he did, the greats would have rapped CIRCLES around that poor man. If him and Drake had gotten involved in the kind of beef they're having right now twenty years ago, one of them would have been shot by now. Some prime examples of good 21st-century artists would be Lana Del Rey, Adele, Amy Winehouse, Beyoncé, and Ricky Montgomery. These are all good, genuine people that contribute to their craft and put out good art into the world that people can genuinely appreciate and love over a period of decades rather than forgettable garbage that gets tossed out and left in the dumpster of history after four weeks. America needs to go back to giving good people attention and ignoring people who acted out because of their celebrity status. That way, we could go back to the industry being an honest, genuine craft filled with people who have real talents instead of a bass beat and autotune AI lyrics.

If you're getting offended by this article, I'm talking about you. You're probably one of the people whose playlist consists of TEXAS HOLD 'EM, Paint The Town Red, Golden Hour, and Boy's a Liar Pt. 2. You probably refuse to recognize the fact that you're living in a time period parallel to that of which is destroying the music industry, slowly but surely. I mean, at least there's some good stuff left. Olivia Rodrigo is probably one of the greatest artists of this generation, Sabrina Carpenters Emails I Can't Send was one of the best albums I've ever listened to, and Shania Twain is still releasing bangers. The only people who are genuinely contributing to the music industry right now are either people who have been in it for over 25 years or people who are being mentored or inspired by people who have been in it for over thirty. Another example of some good modern-day artists are the ones that only release every 5 or 6 years. Take Lorde, for example. Pure Heroine and Melodrama were a whole four years apart, and then Solar Power five years after that. Quality over quantity.

The world seems to have lost sight of the value of genuinely good music. While some of the slop produced today may be relatively enjoyable on some level, it's still garbage. Since 1999, music has slowly gone from good to bad to worse. I could understand releasing one or two bad tracks, but releasing entire 30-track albums with only five tracks people will listen to? Insane. As society slowly begins to shun deprecation and wave in a new era of acceptance for anyone and everyone, people just don't care about the quality of the content they put out into the world. That, very obviously, needs to change, but it won't until we stop giving these mediocre musicians attention. They're only in it for the money. They do not care about you, they do not "love their fans", they love their paychecks. Start paying mind to the people who actually do put good content into the world.