The male artists who are really famous spend all of their time on marketing too. Look at Marshmello. He has an iconic outfit and he spent years clout chasing and trying to associate with every other famous pop artist. A lot of how you get really big is by being friends with other famous people. Having Justin Bieber tweet about you is how a lot of people break. This is just the music economy we live in. Somebody could write Stairway to Heaven tomorrow and no one would care. It would just be at the bottom of the crab bucket. No one would notice unless they got into a beef with Drake or somehow dated Taylor Swift it would just be irrelevant. Without social media clout you are irrelevant.

Taylor Swift's producer recently came out and said that there has never been a closer relationship between the fans and the artist, and that the fans are God. There's no go between. This is absolutely true but the fans themselves are complete idiots. Without the music industry taste making and curating and telling people what they ought to like it's just, who's your favorite musician *points to chick on Instagram with enormous boobs*. It's like letting a kid pick out all the candy they want to eat. They're gonna stuff themselves with junk food. We live in a culture of excess. There's no one with any talent anymore nor fans with patience. There's nothing but image. Nothing exists but image and marketing. All the art and creativity in the world is run by the same people who shoot fashion models. It has to look like an ad and come with cultural cachet or it's not relevant and neither you nor anyone you know has the time to sift through the bin of irrelevant rejected artists to find a gem that's actually worthwhile and support a small artist to the point where they're capable of making something that would have passed for art in the 70s.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5541709&forum_id=2#47752775)

It seems like music now is genuinely less melody, less range, less creative and catchy hooks like there were in the 80s and 90s.

look at the 90s. every pop song had good hooks. not that i liked all of them, but i can apprecaite that someone would find a song, even an annoying song like 'baby one more time' or fastball's 'the way', even these songs had good hooks, good melody, catchy melody.

it seems like that is all gone.

i think there was even a study that the melody now in music is far less ranging than before.

a band like dave matthews band. you may not like them at all, but they got famous because people like their pretty unique melodies and traded their tapes and only after they got a decent following they were signed to a label. they were inevitable because of their music, not because of marketing.

this leads me to believe that the bands that were popular then were not just what record execs wanted to market, and what is popular now is not just what execs want to market. something else has changed in what people think sounds good.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5541709&forum_id=2#47752795)

General cultural decay and dysfunction as Babylonian conditions take hold

Much more no doubt

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5541709&forum_id=2#47752809)

OP: listening to "lil uzi vert", wondering what happened to his shit pure shit music

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5541709&forum_id=2#47752810)

The FORMAT of pop music now is the 10-20 second clip played in TikTok or Instagram videos. Extreme emphasis on catchiness, sexiness and attitude, and something ready-to-dance.

I can get discouraged about this, but it's probably no different than some big band fan losing his shit that pop music suddenly became about 3 min songs for radio to play around commercials, instead of some 16 minute piece.

"What is this shit? Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus and its over?! And the chorus is Ooh baby let's rock, ooh baby lets rock all night??"

You can still probably find very well-done songs like those from the 60s-00s, but the POP FORMAT now is ~15 seconds.

When some video goes viral, a million kids use the same snippet to make their own videos, their own takes, their own blank bumps, their own ironic twists, etc... and that is what constitutes a HIT.

IG and TT facilitate this by allowing you to select the most-used audio backgrounds, just like FM radio used to facilitate hit pop music.

A music production company that wants success just needs to get some little snippet that is amenable to a viral dance.

Radio is dead. Albums are dead as fuck. Pop music moves on.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5541709&forum_id=2#47754301)

There will be misfits who build a personality around listening to Long Players from the Beatles or something.

But 90% of youths today just get their music from viral videos -- and tbf to them, it seems like a pretty rich and interactive culture. I spent hours passively watching MTV as a kid, and they are actually creating riffs and memes out of the videos, making new ones, "liking" variations and funny versions, mocking versions, twisted versions, making their own, etc etc.

its a whole new way of engaging popular music, and I dont see any mainstream return to buying a 50 minute album and cherishing it

The music itself is really just a jingle, on which they build some memetic video content

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5541709&forum_id=2#47754351)

wordcels used to, like, buy the Atlantic or The New Republic or some scholarly journals and just consoom content from big names. Maybe they wrote long letters to the editor, or wrote rebuttals, or tried to get published themselves.

Now wordcels just read twitter or fora and blast out 12 word poasts that may get 20k likes, and within a minute the OP responds, and so do a hundred other dorks.

Albums are TLDR and everyone is in the arena, aiming at viral shitpoast

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5541709&forum_id=2#47754388)

I could list examples but I hate that I even know who these people are.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5541709&forum_id=2#47754408)

I see Of Quality in this music sometimes

I think the lyrics trend towards the abyss and the general musical stylings to be degenerate

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5541709&forum_id=2#47769949)