There is a phrase I hear a lot and have heard a lot over the last 16 years we’ve been doing this (since the early Sooloos days)… it comes in a few flavors:
- “they don’t make music like they used to”
- “new music sucks”
- “new music is all bad-pop/hip-hop/rap”
I and the rest of the Roon team has found this line of thinking lazy and closed-minded. It’s just a rut many get stuck in post-career/family/kids/etc. These words do not imply blame, they just point out the reality of the situation. Some don’t actually care about the music, and so be it… but many do, and Sooloos, then Roon, were made to fix this unfortunate situation.
Finding music that resonates with you takes effort… you must listen to music to determine if you like it. That listening takes a time commitment and will absolutely have failure cases. Avoiding expending this effort is “lazy” and will result in deepening the rut.
To classify all “new music” as “pop” or “hip-hop/rap” is what is offensive. It’s lazy because clearly time was not spent exploring new music to make a reasonable determination. It’s not openminded, because this line of thinking is based on a false premise, and believing is either ignorance or just being unopen to ideas that do not fit your mental model of the world. My guess is that ignorance is not the issue since it’s hard to believe that people actually believe that genres such as jazz and classical are no longer being made. That leaves “unopen”.
It has nothing to do with streaming, nor does it have to do with discovery techniques. It’s the labeling of “new music” as being somehow inferior to “old music”.
It’s not necessarily better, but it’s lazy and closed-minded to think that it can’t be better. Also, there are many technological and cultural advances that give “new” the advantage. If you all you listen to is Coltrane, that’s pretty boring in my opinion… there is a ton of great jazz being made today. For example, if I deemed “new music” as hip/hop/rap/crap-pop, I would have never discovered Avishai Cohen. Is he better than Coltrane? Don’t know… but he brought me more joy in the last month than Coltrane did.