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Comment by aswanson | Hacker News Reader

It's a function of age, as expected. By definition, most music in any era is unexceptional. The only songs that resonate and last in memory is the good stuff, the crap gets forgotten. Integrate the function over time and there will be a big chunk of memory dedicated to exceptional (past) music and a small cache holding the current state with mostly crap and possibly 1 or 2 good songs.

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That suggest you can find an equal number of high quality popular songs in each year. Compare say top 25 from 1935, 1945 ... to 2015 and I don’t think that holds.

Some of this is just taste, but I suspect the need to innovate coupled with endless copyright is forcing music into less generally accessible areas.

Why, jazz from 1920-30s was incredible.

It was also a relatively new thing as was radio and vinyl recording. It also allowed for a lot of experimentation.

(BTW I listen to quite a few pieces composed about 300 years ago, and find them genuinely cool and engaging. But the filtering factor since then is huge.)

> I listen to quite a few pieces composed about 300 years ago

Where did you find these pieces? How was it recorded?

Bach, Beethoven, Chopin...

People that were born in 1935 are in their 80s now and probably started listening to music in the early 50s. Any extension of the principle further back than the 50s doesn't apply to living humans and doesn't matter.

Yes, you are exactly right. This is survivorship bias [1]. I often find myself pining for the NES and SNES games of my childhood, annoyed by the massive proliferation of crap today. Then another video by AVGN [2] shows up on my YouTube subscription feed and my nostalgic bubble is so violently popped.

I think survivorship bias is such a huge part of nostalgia. We remember the best times and forget the mundane.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

[2] https://cinemassacre.com/

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