That's true. Terrible songs (like Sylk-E Fyne's "Romeo and Juliet") are completely forgotten very soon while the really good songs are never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you.

90s style and bad lyrics aside I think old hip hop etc like Romeo and Juliet you mentioned or a lot of Akon, dr. Dre stuff etc had a lot more melody and was much nicer to the ears than most of what we have today, even from good (subjective) artists.

People are really still doing this? I can't stand the fact that back in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table.

It was done to make a point in a clever way. I think you should appreciate the level of skill it takes to RickRoll Hacker News and not get voted off immediately.

If you have to point out how clever something is, it was not, in fact, clever.

No. You're thinking of jokes.

Clever.

It's an interesting experience listening to '90s hits now that they are oldies. I certainly enjoy them a lot more now than then, and looking inside my soul I can guess at three reasons:

1. Pure nostalgia.

2. The selection effect.

3. I've grown more tolerant. I now happily (though not ecstatically) bop along to songs which I hated back in their heyday. Ice, ice, baby...

Probably (3) is actually partly nostalgia as well. But it is also that I am not as caught up in the petty jealousies and genre-fan-feuds that I had been as a lad.

4. You haven't heard the song 3 times a day for the past month.

This is a big one for me. When someone listens to recent pop on the car radio I want to rail against how cheesy and annoying it is. Then I'll be the one driving and flipping stations and I'll land on some 70s or 80s pop tune and happily sing along.

I realize that it's no less cheesy or annoying but it's familiar enough yet I've not heard it in a couple of years. I can get down with a lot of music but hearing the same damn mediocre song every week, it goes from "eh, whatever" to "dear god why is this still around??"

The BBC regularly repeats old episodes of Top of the Pops, a music chart programme that was broadcast between 1964 and 2006. It's quite close to a random sample of weekly Top 40 listings - about half the episodes in the archive are unsuitable for repeat broadcast, because they were presented by notorious sex offenders.

There was a lot of crap in the charts, but I think the overall level of quality was higher. I think the reason for that higher quality was essentially negative - the routes to an audience were much narrower, so artists were practically required to get into the charts to sustain a professional career. A far broader range of artists were playing the major label game, because they didn't have many alternatives.

"Pop" is a much narrower term in 2018 than it was in 1978, because musicians don't need chart hits or radio airplay. Digital recording and distribution have created a much more fragmented music market, because artists can connect directly with audiences rather than relying on a very narrow funnel of publicity and distribution. Good music is somewhat more difficult to find today, but I think there's more of it and more definitions of "good".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_of_the_Pops

(proxy required outside the UK):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b00704hg

maybe also because in the past you had to be a real musician to actually play something (no hardware to help you). So many were trained in making music (instead of self made) ? Not that being trained equals quality, but somehow, maybe it helps... (IANAMusician :) )

Pop music of the past had plenty of people lip-syncing their concerts, house bands that played all the instruments, and so forth.

It is not obvious that you had to be a trained musician to succeed. Many who succeeded were, but many who succeeded are not.

I think another reason is that pop music has been reduced to a formula to some extent, and that's exactly what TV shows like the X-factor are looking to capitalise on.

Almost everyone thinks the greatest music ever made was made in their late teens and early 20s, and it has always been that way. I think I'm somewhat unusual in that I spent a lot of time DJing in my 20s, so I developed habits around constantly searching out new music, but even so -- I'm in my early 40s now and I still reach back to dance music and rock music from the late 90s quite often to listen to. I've just resigned myself to the fact that late 90s trance music will make me happy in ways that no new music ever will.

As to the topic of the post --

In music production, you can think of the 'stage' available to the listener as a box. Pitch goes up and down, stereo pan goes left to right, and volume goes front to back. When you're producing, you can't have two sounds in the same space without them merging together in the listener's ear. In the early days of stereo music production, producers generally tried to place the sounds as if you were standing in the room, watching the band perform, and were fairly conservative with giving everything space, so that sounds wouldn't clash. As people got more sophisticated with production (think Dark Side of the Moon), producers started experimenting more with the listeners since of space -- surrounding them and enveloping them with sound -- but still generally trying to capture the sound of physical musical instruments. Even when they used synths, they tended to try and make them sound like "real instruments".

Once digital music production started becoming more widespread and sophisticated, producers started abandoning the pretense that they were faithfully recording the live performance of instruments and focused purely on sound as sound, and the new tools allowed them to perfectly place all the sounds next to each other on 'the sound stage' and take up all the available space. Which, if you're filling up all the space 'up front', as it were, necessarily means that the song is going to sound louder, if that's what people want to do.

Now, there are plenty of genres of even dance music who play with dynamics more -- think Deep House, for example -- even there, they're going to make the bass as loud as they can, because they still want to make speakers boom for the dancers -- and they can push them as loud as they can be, very precisely because ableton or whatever makes it simple to do.

Producers often use reverb for front to back space as well.

I with agree that its got more precise, typically when producing a kick for techno I make sure that the power is exactly around the point where the sub is going to be able to play it back with the most impact.

Also with tools like Neutron we can make sure there is no overlap between channels.

I am probably a similarly age to you, but I hardly ever listen to anything more than 5 years old apart from as a learning exercise or if there are people in the same room as me.

>It also echoes my (baseless) assumption that the main reason that we have this idea that music a few decades ago or more was somehow "better" is that anything that wasn't at least above average is completely forgotten by now i.e. survivorship bias.

Where does the idea that music output is equally good in all ages comes from?

The fine art world, and the literary world know very well from historical experience of centuries that there are periods of huge masterpieces and lots of great creators, and periods of drought. Heck, the classical music world knows that too.

Why would this not hold in the pop music world?

Music is another activity that is historically influenced by period, trends, culture, etc, and all of these have their ups and downs.

I think it's fair to consider that our current view on classical music could be due to survivorship bias as well. Consider all of the composers who were lost to time because their peers or musical historians did not consider their music noteworthy.

Whenever I see discussion on classical music, it's a fun mental game for me to imagine it's a forum for metal instead, and these (assumingly) well-to-do academics are all metalheads who have a strangely archaic way of describing the specific merits of songs.

>I think it's fair to consider that our current view on classical music could be due to survivorship bias as well. Consider all of the composers who were lost to time because their peers or musical historians did not consider their music noteworthy.

I don't think that's much of a concern in practice. We celebrate lots of works that people didn't find particularly noteworthy at the time but were appreciated at a later age (Bach, for example, was out of fashion and nearly forgotten for a century or more after his death, Satie was not especially appreciated at his time, there are lots of other examples). In other fields too, e.g. consider Van Gogh.

Most of the works of obscure composers are known to fans of classical music (and musicologists), they are still occasionally played, but are still considered ho-hum.

I'd say good works tend to rise to the top, even if they're not popular at their time.