Not really sure who this ‘they’ is… People have always dissed contemporary music in favor of what they grew up with, but most of it was simple lay favoritism. You like what you grew up with.

But it’s pretty obvious why most music doesn’t survive as massively popular for 50+ years. In truth, jazzers can pretend that everything from say the 30’s and 40’s was superio, but the truth is that little of what was ACTUALLY popular mass music from back then is the kind of music that jazzers remember. Most dance jazz from back then was utterly formulaic stuff, and most of the truly groundbreaking jazz was fairly esoteric stuff that few listened to, most people favoring pablum you could dance to and not ‘listen’ to.

But if you analyse each period’s music, if you listen to the top 20 from each era, there’s a sweet spot from the 60’s-80’s where songs were diverse, complex, impeccably recorded, and very different from prior generations. And I think that’s the reason they have survived the test of time. It’s amazing how many 20 something’s are completely familiar with most of the top 10 songs from 50 years ago, yet despite being a musician that grew up in the 60’s, I can say with certainty I knew next to nothing about popular music from the 1910’s and 20’s, 40-50 years earlier.

I don’t think it’s generational bias, I just think the collapse of the recording industry has removed most of the money that drove the industry to great heights of creativity, and the MTV generation started the trend towards music that LOOKS good rather than sounding good. Those two factors have resulted in a generation whose music is designed for instant consumption and instant forgetting as the next video assaults your eyes.

Corporate control and the Spotify ‘algorithm’ has ensured that music that gets ‘pushed’ to listeners is as close as possible to what they just listened to. That isn’t how you leave an indelible mark on the future. It’s how you maximize short term profit. We often discount the work of talent scouts, A&R men and talented producers, and it’s true that music executives earned a fair bit of flack in the past for predatory practices, but compared to today’s faceless music executives they look like a bunch of wild eyed dreamers!

Today’s industry is an AI driven robot powered dystopia that is designed to funnel the money to a tiny few, with no attemp to build long term sustainability. Back in the day, record companies wouldn’t expect a profit from a newly signed artist until maybe the second album. Now, if TODAY’S single doesn’t get enough streams, it’s time to move on to the next ‘artist’.

I don’t think it’s a wait and see to find out if today’s pop has legs. We can already see it doesn’t. Try to list anything from the 2010’s that is surviving the 2020’s…. In the meantime, today’s kids can reel off a dozen names of artists from the 70’s and 80’s.

Money drives an industry, and the gross of the music industry during the 70’s and 80’s has never been equaled. It’s a pyramid, you need a huge base for a tall pyramid. The collapse of the industry pretty much guarantees we will never see those heights again. The CEO of Spotify made more money than any of the artists they play. When the vast majority of an industry’s profits go to people with no creativity in the slightest, what’s the incentive to create the next ‘big’ thing? If it doesn’t sound almost identical to the current ‘big’ thing, it’s never going to get heard.

History is showing its hand. I do not think we have to wait 50 years to determine that today’s pop isn’t going to influence people 50 years from now. We can see it happening (or not happening!) today.