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> There are still tons of great films being made, and new concepts spinning up - just in non-traditional places or ways

Are there? People parrot this over and over but rarely provide any reliable evidence.

Even if there is interesting stuff being done, if it has no impact past three people then it is by definition not "great".

By most measures I can think of, there are NOT lots of "great" things being made.

https://www.imdb.com/chart/top

This is the IMDB top 250 list, which I take as a reference for "best of all times" movies. 30 of them are from this decade. Some of them may drop off (there is a slight bias towards recent movies), so let's keep 25 of them, so 1/10, the list is over 100 years, so we are about average.

Not many in the top spots though, the best being Parasite (2019), #33, which I expect to stay high, and Dune: part 2 (2024) at #35, but I expect it to drop a bit as it is a current year movie.

Anyways, it is neither a particularly good nor a particularly bad time for movies.

Provide reliable evidence of your own, then. What objective measures are you using, other than your own personal taste? What quantifiable data can you provide to back up your claim that great films are no longer being made?

And how does your definition of greatness apparently presuppose widespread impact, but somehow presumably exclude any modern films that have demonstrably widespread impact?

Money--overall monetary takes are down across the board. It was never easy for artists to make a living, but now it's ferociously miserable.

Innovation--its documented that everything is now IP sequels and the number of original things is way down.

Impact--which artists and decades were playing at the last wedding you went to? Yeah, thought so.

I'm reminded of the punk documentary where the original punks were horrified that the people who came after and idolized them missed the whole point.

>Money--overall monetary takes are down across the board.

If this is the case across the board, it can't be an indicator of decreasing quality. It's more likely that with the internet and streaming, box office revenues simply matter less than they once did. Everyone is competing with streaming and the internet, no one wants to go to a theater anymore.

Same with music. No one cares about Billboard anymore now that everything is on Soundcloud and Spotify, and no matter how niche someone's tastes are, there's probably an entire ecosystem of content for it. I recently found out dungeon synth was a thing.

>Innovation--its documented that everything is now IP sequels and the number of original things is way down.

Where is it documented? Show me the documentation. I doubt that if you combined all movies releasing this year in theaters, and everything on every streaming service, that even half would be sequels.

>Impact--which artists and decades were playing at the last wedding you went to? Yeah, thought so.

What's your thesis here? That no modern music is ever played at weddings? That music played at weddings is an objective measure of artistic quality and cultural impact? Why even bother asking this question if you're going to answer on my behalf?

But as far as impact goes, again, it's simply impossible for any music to have the same impact in the internet age as it did pre-internet. That isn't an indicator of quality going down, it's an indicator of the scope of available media becoming so broad and diffuse that no one thing, regardless of quality, can capture the market like it did when pop culture was more centralized.

On all three, I'd like to point out that I covered these in my original post. You expect to look at box office takes, source your media from large studios, and go to weddings between boring people.

Again, the world is changing. You have not.

There’s even new top 40 pop music that’s doing well. It’s hard to say that Chappell Roan is particularly derivative of anything, as an example, and before that you had Billie Eilish breaking in, the popularization of niche genres like Jersey club music, etc.

A lot of the pop music kvetching is usually code for “new music that I like and find familiar is hard to find.”

>It’s hard to say that Chappell Roan is particularly derivative of anything

I've never heard of her, but the first search result I got is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RKqOmSkGgM

It seems very derivative to me.

And FWIW I think there's plenty of high quality and original/creative music out there nowadays. But the 'top 40' category does seem quite stale and boring (judging by the music I hear in shopping malls/bars...).

Personally I think these are probably more representative of her work:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bw5K138hoU

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9Wxl9Q9lUQ

What would you say this is derivative of, and how is this more derivative than other music? What is an example of not-derivative music by this criteria?

Nearly all music depends on some kind of prior art. You can be reductive about any genre of music; for a couple hundred years choral and classical European music was nearly all about devotion to God.

People who doubt the decline of the arts should reflect on the idea that the best composers of our generation are writing film scores and video game music if not straight up ad jingles. sure you could argue that art has always been commercial, that everyone needed a patron, and that working for the pope or whatever is not that different from working for Hollywood. but I suspect even people that make that argument today don’t really believe it.

Now take this story and extend it to anything you like. The dying publishing industry forcing authors to bring an audience with them minimizes risk for flops but with that goes away any point for the industry to exist, and any incentive for originality, etc.

Nothing was ever perfect but it also seems disingenuous to say that nothing is worse. Some may feel it doesn’t matter which is a different topic, but the decline of art and culture is certainly real

>And "all our pop music sounds like a tribute act"? Lmao. If you listen to the same top 40 pop crap, sure! There's tons of great pop acts that are way smaller - but again, if all you do is look at "most played" and listen to the radio, you're going to hear the same monoculture bullcrap

Sorry, this just isn't true. If you aren't listening to the "top 40 crap", then you aren't listening to pop, you're listening to something that isn't pop at all.

There aren't any tiny pop acts at all. Those aren't pop. The definition of "pop music" is that it's popular, hence the name. If it's some band that barely anyone knows about, they might be great (in your opinion), but they're not popular by any reasonable definition, and thus aren't "pop music".

When people complain that modern pop music is all terrible, it's a perfectly valid position. The music industry is not at all like it was 40 years ago. It doesn't mean that all recent music is bad.