The Official "Music Was So Much Better in the Glorious Days of Yore" Thread

[OccultHawk]

He said physical form which means a way the music could be reproduced by non-musicians by mechanical means

From wiki

Long before sound was first recorded, music was recorded—first by written music notation, then also by mechanical devices (e.g., wind-up music boxes, in which a mechanism turns a spindle, which plucks metal tines, thus reproducing a melody). Automatic music reproduction traces back as far as the 9th century, when the Banū Mūsā brothers invented the earliest known mechanical musical instrument, in this case, a hydropowered (water-powered) organ that played interchangeable cylinders. According to Charles B. Fowler, this "...cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century." The Banū Mūsā brothers also invented an automatic flute player, which appears to have been the first programmable machine

[grindy]

Originally Posted by OccultHawk

He said physical form which means a way the music could be reproduced by non-musicians by mechanical means

From wiki

That was a second, additional question.

[OccultHawk]

So what? Everyone was making fun of those piano rolls and it wasn’t stupid at all. You just connected his statements because you don’t speak white trash you bougie ****s.

[OccultHawk]

Originally Posted by elphenor

like what would happen if we went hogwild with public grants to musicians even if they spent half of it on drugs

If they made me music czar with the power to disperse one year’s military budget as music grants one decade would be worth a thousand years. I’m not even joking.

[OccultHawk]

would you guys disagree that the decline of physical media hurt indie music

There’s so much great **** on BandCamp that I don’t think so. It may have hurt indie musicians but not the listeners. And it’s always been hard to point of next to impossible to make a living playing music. Even a bad living.

[Frownland]

Originally Posted by elphenor

would you guys disagree that the decline of physical media hurt indie music

Nah it just shifted hurts.

here in Austin, for instance, local alternative music is basically funded by patronage from rich relatives (as such, it mostly sucks)

Not new.

I just cant imagine half the music I like even existing if the dysfunctional people in the bands couldn't sell records

[Frownland]

Physical media did float bands but it was still a derivative of commercialization of the music industry that labels had built, so it's exposed to the same kind of threats and competition. Touring was the new name of the game (Boy Harsher is a success story of this, they toured like crazy), but with covid I'm not sure how that's going to go. Not sure what the next key will be but it seems like networking and prerelease marketing is still getting a lot of artists off of the ground like black midi. I've seen an uptick in limited releases, raffles, and other merchandising, maybe that type of release will lead to some kind of return to physical media appreciation.

It'd be nice if there wasn't a specific thing that you had to do to make a longstanding band or whatever since recorded music favours some bands as opposed to live music and vice versa. A UBI type deal would create an artistic explosion like we've never seen before imo.

[The Batlord]

Doesn't Sweden do that? I seem to remember reading an interview with the singer from The Haunted saying it was the main reason he could earn a living doing music.

[Lucem Ferre]

If I could get enough money to live in my own little place and gorge myself on ****ty food off of music I'd be content.

[Belphegor]

People who are young adults/teenagers now believe today's music is good.

People who were teenagers/young adults in the '60s, '70s etc. believed the music from their era to be good.

Any era has good and bad music (the bad significantly outweighs the good though), it's just that since the passage of time conditions us to only remember the good stuff from the past (because the best things inevitably rise to the top with time), we start to mistakenly believe that only the old stuff is worth something. Once this generation becomes old enough, they'll hate the music of the next generation, the cycle never ends.