I think that the capacity and rate at which albums come out these days is driving more established artists to pump out lower quality releases just to keep their hat in the ring and not be forgotten. Apart from that and the general oversaturation of music that the internet brought us making it hard to keep up, I think that this has been a pretty great year. Had a bit of a shaky start but came into stride about halfway through imo. It won't be a standout year like 2010 or 2016, but I don't think that it'll be a clunker year like...1987 or some **** idk. There are about 30 or so releases that I'd say I love from this year and a few hundred that I like enough to listen to again, but it did take a bit of digging to find a lot of them.
It's easy to say that your listening habits or taste is the problem here, but I think that with the way music is evolving, this is a good conversation to have. What could be happening is that the internet is less of an open marketplace and more of a cultivation center for niches to become deeply entrenched and isolated. The niches are harboring the truly phenomenal works of our time as the better-known releases are what appeal to an ever-shrinking common denominator. With all of the noise, those niches are harder to tap into, so it takes more work to recognize the cream of the crop. Or maybe choosing your favourite kind of cream is the hard part. Oversaturation brought us as much brilliance as it did garbage.
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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.
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