I'm currently reading a book on technology, and one thing they were discussing was the migration of music from physical form to digital form. Anyway, I was surprised when they mentioned a study which said music had actually gotten better in recent years. Anyway, their footnotes had a link to the study they cited, so I was really curious and looked it up. It's definitely not how I would judge the quality of music (which is extremely subjective, needless to day), but I found it interesting nonetheless.
The full copy of the study is $5 to download. Didn't want to bother doing that, but they have a synopsis of it here, which is good-enough to get the gist of what they're saying:
Copyright Protection and the Quality of Recorded Music Since Napster
Quote:
Waldfogel's first index of music quality is based on critics' retrospective lists of the best music (for example, "best of the decade"). It encompasses 88 different rankings from the United States, England, Canada, and Ireland, and covers more than 16,000 musical works from 1960 to 2007. Statistically combining information from these sources results in an overall quality index that rises between 1960 and 1970, declines through the 1980s, rises again in the mid-1990s, declines in the latter half of the 1990s, and is stable for the period after 2000. Waldfogel concludes that although the index was falling prior to the appearance of Napster, it is stable after 2000 and thus shows no evidence of a decline in quality.
His second and third indexes are derived from data on radio airplay and sales of music. Music is aired on radio less, and sells less, as it gets older; but if a vintage is better, it will receive more sales or airplay after accounting for such depreciation. Using data on the frequency with which songs originally released as early as 1960 were aired on the radio from 2004 to 2008, Waldfogel constructs an airplay-based vintage quality index suggesting that music quality rose from 1960 to 1970, fell until at least 1985, and rose substantially after 1999. The analogous sales-based index is derived from Recording Industry Association of America Gold (sales greater than 500,000 copies) and Platinum (sales greater than one million copies) certifications. The sales-based index echoes the result of other indexes: it rises from 1960 to 1970, falls to the 1980s, and then rises sharply after 1999.
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Kinda interesting, and it does seem to reflect my own tastes, even if it's not how I would judge the quality of music myself.