Is the rate of change of music slowing down? Are new innovations and the emergence of new genres happening less frequently? Or do I just perceive the evolution of music differently? After all, time passes faster and faster the older you get.
Let's pick a couple of representative years. When I think about how much the landscape of music changed between 1984 and 1994, it's astonishing. Techno changed insurmountably during that time. Hip hop matured greatly. Commercial rock was dominated by glossy reverb-laden synth music with a backbeat, whereas ten years later it was all about grunge and indie genres bubbling into the mainstream.
How much did music change between 2008 and 2018? I'm talking once again about the sound and style of music, not the business side that is always rapidly evolving. My own albums of the year lists hardly suggest a sea change in tastes. Disappointingly perhaps, I still listen to mostly the same genres now that I did ten years ago, although those genres themselves certainly have evolved.
Have my own tastes stagnated, thereby warping my outside view? That must be part of it. However, with streaming and downloading being easier and cheaper than ever, there are fewer barriers to discovering and generally getting lost in older music. If it's "new" to you, isn't that enough to satisfy your need for hearing something you've never heard before. And obviously the ratio of catalogued music to newly released music will only continue to grow.
The collapse and merger of the major record companies has led to more homogeneity in the charts, and far fewer long term investment artists getting their shot at reaching a wider audience. Artists don't hang around on major labels anymore for ten years unless they have a massive hit record, so either you're in the millionaires club with 100M+ hits on youtube whenever you drop a single, or you're a niche artist.
On one hand, we live in an era dominated by superproducers who dictate the stylistic norms of the pop charts moreso than at any time since the 1960's. Creatively, they are more of a force in pop music than the artists they ostensibly work for. They import sounds from the underground and mold them into major pop hits, giving us combinations like Katy Perry + trap and Drake + bounce that would have been nearly unthinkable not long before they actually recorded them. But on the other hand, with so few major pop artists, and therefore relatively few leading producers, once somebody has a breakthrough hit it gets copied a million times over and rapidly falls out of fashion again.
I'm actually willing to bet I'm wrong about this. I'm probably too immersed in catching up with my own back catalog these days.
