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Comment by leoc | Hacker News Reader

Ian MacDonald in 1994, at the ending of Revolution in the Head:

> Arguably pop music, as measured by the singles charts, peaked in early 1966, thereafter beginning a shallow decline in overall quality which was already steepening by 1970. While some will date this tail-off to a little later, only the soulless or tone-deaf will refuse to admit any decline at all. Those with ears to hear, let them hear.

After a couple more decades of continuing (though not uniform and consistent) overall decline, the broad truth of this looks more evident than ever. In much the same way that classical music probably peaked roughly around the death of Beethoven, with the shallow decline in overall quality becoming steeper some time in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century.

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We have a lot more historical distance between us and pre-20th century classical music, than we do with pop music. Just anecdotally, it seems people are biased towards the music of their youth. At any rate, I grew up in the nineties, and Nirvana is greatest rock band of all time.

But Nirvana was never a chart-topping band. Smells Like Teen Spirit peaked at #6, and never makes it on this visualization. None of their other singles came close to that.

The point is that The Beatles are better than Boyz II Men, not that Led Zeppelin is better than Nirvana.

I think it's not quite right to say that Nirvana wasn't popular, though. Being at #6 instead of #1 is a pretty minor difference in the grand scheme of all the music that gets made.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s (went to college in the early 90s, I remember well when Nirvana was new and Smells Like Teen Spirit was all over the place). I never liked 90s music that much, and prefer late-60s through early 80s music, even though it was either before I was born or I was too young at the time to know about it.

I'm sorry, in my opinion, music has just gotten a lot worse in quality over the years. And the other poster's post about ClearChannel taking over all the radio stations nationwide in the late 90s, I think, is good evidence that it's not just my biased opinion, the environment and the music industry has really changed for the worse. The industry was run in a very different manner back in the 70s and 80s, and it should be obvious that that's going to have a huge effect on the music.

I don't feel that any additional distance is really necessary to say with some confidence that, for example, 2015/6 is probably not the equal of 1966/7 when it comes to pop music in at least the English-speaking world; and I wasn't born by 1967. I can't think of any years in my youth to compare to 1966/7 either, for all that I too admire and fondly remember Nirvana.

A big data analysis has shown that music has become progressively less varied since the 1960s: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/is-pop-musi...

I don't think there is as big of a decline in classical music quality if you consider that these days the real classical music (as in, orchestral music that actually sounds good to the average listener) seem to be composed for film rather than for the opera house: John Williams' opus is incredible, for example.

The unfortunate issue is that these days modern music labeled as "classical" seems to be dominated by unlistenable or nearly unlistenable works composed under the guise of "let's break convention with harmony and so on" thus ending with pieces that might be interesting on an intellectual level but that do not move the average listener at all.

Of course the polite way of putting this is that modern classical music is "challenging", but from my perspective if it doesn't move you (and I don't mean move you towards the nearest exit of the concert hall) it's not really music.

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