TheBig3

This feels like where you're going wrong. I can't help but feel genre was pushed and emphasized when AR guys gate-kept. New Wave, for example, is a marketing device used to help sell stuff.

Everything is decentralized now, and there's less people trying to gin up a movement to sell stuff. Now things just move to fast to pin things down. It's Future Shock in music. We're all catching up with the new paradigm.

Most stuff that tries to be "new" sucks. It's the people just taking a little bit from Artist A and a little from Artist B that still move things forward (imo).

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Guybrush

This person does not exist is crazy awesome! Some time ago, I was wondering if it might be possible using those pics for NPCs in my home made tabletop RPG. I haven't yet seen any licensing info, though.

Generated music has of course been around a long time, but the advances in AI nowadays are pretty awesome. However, AIs are still very much extensions of us/their creators at the moment.

Another fun site with a lot of generated content can be found here: https://botnik.org/creations/

The Harry Potter AI generated fan fiction is great.

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SlyStone63

The 1950s-1980s were the golden era of music, music started to decline in the 90s and hasn't recovered since.

simsman333

I guess people's responses to this would be very subjective. In my opinion, music is still developing/evolving. I'd say it is happening in a different way rather than at a different rate.

TheBig3

You might try Dawn of Midi which is human musicians attempting to create computerized music. I haven't heard them in years but it was absolutely a unique listen if nothing else.

As a general response to the original question, I think I'd say music sounds like it's dying because it's getting fewer barriers. Throwing out the rules works when music is highly structured and (social) movements are clearly defined but if there are none, throwing out the rules just starts to sound like noise.

All the old tropes don't have anything to push back against. No artist wants to sound like another, everyone wants to be experimental, push boundaries, do blah blah blah. That's great if there are boundries.

You could imagine a world in which movements actually allow people to find more tastes because it's easier to zone in on what people want to hear. The indie-rock stuff that came out from 2001-2015 (which is my favorite period of music) because if you had one foot in the movement, you could put your other foot wherever you wanted.

Today it's much harder to say "If you like X you'll love Y" with any reasonable certainty. That said I've lived in timers where the music industries Copy/Paste formula was insufferable. But hey, when things get too big the little guys do better.

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jadis

I love how specific this is. "No, not 2000, music didn't get good until the planes hit the towers."

TheBig3

Yep. That's it.

Also because Is this it and White Blood Cells came out in 2001.

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TheBig3

You guess? That's not saying much. Aren't you the one who thinks China is Communist?

Edit: I guess I should also mention that, while I don't go back and listen to Is this it because I don't think it's the Strokes best album, at the time it was released, the rock world was awash in some objectively bad music, and Is this it sounded like to a lot of us like a breath of fresh air.

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TheBig3

Maybe we're not so different, you and I.

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Marie Monday

nah Is This It is pretty great. It's derivative and sleek and doesn't meet your edginess quotum, but it's so catchy and it all just fits together so well, it has a kind of well executed simplicity that just works.

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