The State of Music Today

Why is pop music so bad these days?

What on earth is going on with pop music these days? I remember when i was growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, pop music was amazing and it was what got me into music in the first place. There were so many good songs and the pop charts were filled with a never ending conveyer belt of original, creative tunes in a variety of styles.

Fast forward to today and it is, and I am sad to say it is a sorry state of affairs. Every week i skim through the UK top 40 charts to see what i can find, and almost always end up scratching my head and wondering where has all the good music gone.

Nearly everything sounds the same as each other and nothing stands out. Gone are the creative, catchy melodies. Gone is the really good sounding music that accompanies the vocals. Everything just sounds a bit bland and boring.

In the past 6 months I have found 3 or 4 good songs in the UK pop charts that i like. The rest is worth forgetting about. When i watch Top of The Pops from the early 90’s, every week i lose count how many really good songs there are in the top 40. It’s not unusual for me to like every song in the top 10 with a lot of these usually being classics. Nowadays i’d be lucky to find one good song in the entire top 40!

In the late 80’s and 90’s in particular, slow songs sounded amazing. They had amazing sounding vocalists but the songs also had great sounding music and beats to go with it. These days the slow songs make me want to fall asleep they are so boring. The songs don’t have any good sounding music and quite often don’t even have any drum sounds. What is that all about? It’s like the producers can’t be assed to create good music anymore and everyone just use the same bog standard presets in their synthesizers and so everything just sounds the same.

In the 80’s and 90’s, dance music in the charts sounded amazing. There was so much variety to the tunes and all so creative with their sounds and melodies. They also had really good, lively basslines and drum sounds. These days, like with the slow songs, everything sounds the same, with no creativity. This is made worse by the fact that they don’t even sound good.

In the 80’s and 90’s there was countless classic rock songs in the charts, with great guitar pieces in them. Today you can barely find any rock songs at all in the charts and when you do they are very average sounding, although the recent Maneskin Eurovision winner was an exception and sounded really good.

In the 80’s and 90’s there was lots of great rap music. The drums and the bass was really good and there was often some really good music to accompany it. You even had dance music with rapping in it, eg. Technotronic’s classic Get Up (Before The Night Is Over), Culture Beat’s Mr Vain, or Snap’s Rhythm is a Dancer to name a few. These days it sounds awful. A lot of the time there are no drums, just some annoying clicking sounds. There is usually virtually no music to accompany today’s rap music but is just someone rapping over some clicking sounds with the odd sound effect here and there. Really is this what it has come to? They certainly don’t make them like Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise anymore.

All of this is so bizarre considering the fact that we live in an age when we have never had it so good with regards to the tools we have at our disposal to make music. We are now so spoilt with the choices we have and also the fact that the cost of making music is so cheap now compared to in the 80’s and 90’s where the cost of a synthesizer would cost the same price as half your mortgage on a house.

Another bizarre thing is that there is still lots of brilliant new music out there. It just isn’t in the pop charts anymore. There are still good tunes in all sorts of genres from modern rock, synth infused rock, house, trance, techno, blues, synthwave plus others.

So what is going on? I think the internet and social media has a lot to answer for. I think the way the pop charts is compiled is flawed. A lot of the way music is listened to now is through streaming through platforms like Spotify. A lot of youngsters first hear a new track on social media sites and these tracks are accompanied by videos. The more ‘likes’ a track gets, the more likely it is to get onto the popular streaming playlists.

The problem with this is that a lot of youngsters may stream a music video and ‘like’ a track not because of the music but may like the video. So you have people helping tracks get to popular playlists by things which have nothing to do with the actual music. Once they are on popular playlists, they get streamed even more and then get far higher up in charts than songs which are much better but just don’t have as many streams.

Another issue is that these days there is less control over what music is released. In the past you had all the big music labels who controlled what music the artists released. The labels acted as a kind of quality control and wouldn’t allow mediocre things to be released. Now anyone can release a track and all it takes is to have a video which goes viral and it is in the charts.

The pop charts should not take streaming into consideration but music sales only. Although music sales are not as high as in the past, people do still buy music and this would at least mean that the charts would be about the music and not about how good someone’s music video is.