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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

I have no trouble listening to pop music from the 80s, 90s and early 00s. I don't know if that's old age and nostalgia or if music was just better then. I think in many cases, music was just better in prior decades, pop music in particular.

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I also think that's partly survivor bias. You listen to the best hits of those decades, tricking you into thinking that all music from those decades was like that. In reality, there was a lot of junk in those times too but we don't listen to it anymore. The same will happen with the 10s and the current 20s in twenty years.

With the virus, most of my exposure to foreign languages is due to YouTube these days. While the words for "heart" and "eyes" and various possessive pronouns are often among the first things I pick up on from the clips themselves, if I am curious enough to bother machine translating comments I often learn how to say "the kid's music is noise" just after "anyone listening in 2020?"

(For me, the best examples are all the 2000's videos with comments saying "remember when we had real music?")

And in the 80s, 90s and early 00s people were complaining that music was just better in prior decades.

Yeah but you know I think because we listen to less and less music on the radio and more on streaming, I think it's harder for break out hits to happen today. New music has to compete on equal footing with old music that is more accessible than it has ever been and also has to compete with podcasts and other forms of audio entertainment that are available in much higher quantities today.

The Beatles were the biggest pop act in history. They'd never crack the top-40 today.

You mean with their music and image from the 1960's? Of course not. Just like they wouldn't have dominated the charts in the 60's if the music and image had been in the style that had been fashionable and edgy in 1910.

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