When did music start to suck?

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I agree with most other people here - music has gone downhill in quality since about the year 2000.

What music is even popular anymore, it's a bit like what happened to clothes fashion. 60s to 90s had their own styles and during 00s it sort of stops? What the difference between clothes from 2005 and now? Everything is a soup.

I'm not really a fan of new music at all, and find it annoying. In fact, I don't like new movies much either. Some aren't bad. Most are too violent, full of profanity, sex, bad acting, CGI, and so on. Really just for the hell of it.

But music? Christ, it's horrible. Sounds like a rhino breaking wind. Always has that same fake beat, people singing in an awful way like they're in agony, and again, just music videos promoting this trash with sex and swearing for the hell of it.

Now okay, I guess even 80's videos were sometimes like that too, or just flat out stupid looking. But others matched the song well. People seem to like the song more if they find the video is impressive. But once they relaxed the rules on sex and so on, people just started to act like morons. And again, the pop music now is just not good to listen to.

I've clicked through a bunch of pages of this long-lived thread, and think that most of the issues with mainstream music voiced here is fallout from the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which deregulated a lot of media markets and allowed for monopolies to take place in radio and local-news broadcasts especially.

For music, that meant regional sounds/tastes got stomped out in favor of hits that were generic enough to appeal to anyone, anywhere in the country. Something like grunge would not be able to grow naturally in a local scene today and slowly expand to the larger market in the same way that it did in the mid-to-late 80s for the Pacific-Northwest. In recent years, people desperate for different music have instead been drawn to international scenes, like Korean and Japanese artists, whereas in the past the US was big enough to have different music scenes (and even sub-scenes) per region / major market.

And for local news that '96 law meant that local-news has been scooped up by largely conservative companies like Sinclair which drown out local stories to focus on agenda items they care about at a national scale.

For a bit of hope at the end of this depressing post though... the internet has been a great place for indie artists to grow! Bandcamp has been the way I've found some of my fav bands in the past decade and I hope they keep doing awesome work (even though they were bought out by Epic Games).

Hard for me to tell. While to put it mildly I prefer older styles to today's I am 65 years old and am supposed to feel that way.

OTOH in every comment section of youtube videos of old songs, you have many zoomers saying today's music sucks they wished they grew up when we did. While it makes me feel privileged to remember these songs when they were new, I also find it sad and unnatural.

You can find more interesting music if you look beyond what's popular, but even there it's hard to find stuff that's really new or different with regard to popular genres. It seemed like every decade from the 1920s through the 1990s had distinct sounds. From then on everything sounds similar more-or-less to my ear. There's the "trap" genre of hip-hop that took over something around 2010, but not really my thing.

I'm so thankful for youtube. I can look up all kinds of indie artists and movie/video game soundtracks I never would have discovered before.

Personally, I'd say mainstream music started to decline from 2008 - 2009 and became the absolute garbage that it is today by the year 2010. This is when stupid autotune and electronic noises became popular and started dominating "music".

Music never began to suck.
Being too lazy to explore and find good new music isn't the fault of the music that's being released.

I don't think it's bad, it's just that too many of the hits come from Dr. Luke and Max Martin and as a result there's very little variety. So, right now is either a great time for music or absolutely horrible depending upon whether or not you like it.

It's also worth noting that it's rarely been just about the music itself. Unless you're listening to music without anything else going on for the first time, it's as much about what's going on when you hear the song and how it connects personally as anything else. I'm always going to be a sucker for Closing time by Semisonic because I heard it as I was on the van ride home on my last day of my summer job. It doesn't necessarily say anything about the song itself, but it's always going to tap into those emotions.

It also doesn't help that most of the music being produced is over compressed and too loud, removing the kind of nuance that allows the ears to get a rest mid track. And, sadly, it's been infecting even the older work that hadn't already been over compressed.

during the post grunge era

"New Scientist" recently reported on a pschology experiment to do with musical tastes. It found that people's taste in mainstream music typically "ossifies" in their early 20s - after that point, they just don't like anything new. If their taste in music does branch out in later life, it's into more obscure genres.