I am even older, a little bit, but I have 32 years olad son who was very interested in music when I fed him Pink Floyd, Smashing Pumpkins, Janis Joplin, The Doors, The Faces…And then he stopped listening. Well if you transition from Janis Joplin to Mariah Carey and other like her… it is better to stop listening.
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You can re assure your son that great music, music worth listening to, is live and well on the live circuit of small venues across the world. These great artist tour all the time. Once you find them, you never look back.
I will share an experience that happened to me after I took an older man to see the Grainne Duffy blues band… After the gig he came to me crying with joy…”I thought it was all over” he said. “I used to see the Cyril Davies All Stars, Peter Green, The Rolling Stone etc in the early 60’s London but I thought it was all over; but it’s not is? It’s not!” And then he went off to see the band for a long chat and Grainne a cuddle…
The joy I saw on my friends face was a reminder of just how powerful music can be. Now he comes to every gig we put on and just loves it.
Here is a video from that night, from a touring band who will never make mainstream popularity but if you get a chance to see them, will blow you away.
They are on Tidal too
Further to my last reply and your mention of the great Janis Joplin, don’t think the great artists aren’t listening to the back catalog as I find the best artists certainly do.
Here for an example is Elles Bailey who wrote this song as a tribute to Janis.
Performed at another great small venue ‘Tuesday night Music club’. I wish it was nearer to me… although I have seen Elles play there.
Personally I think the video is full of rubbish. He is only comparing mainstream top 100 pop music to muisc from the sixties that did not even make it to the top charts back then because it wasn’t mainstream. The majority of top 100 music of old times was as simplistic and bad as it is today but it simply has been forgotten, only the better stuff survives the passage of time. Nowadays there is a good variety of music, way more then this video would like you to believe. True, radio and MTV is terrible but that are not very good sources. There are thousands of Indie labels out there that don’t compete in the loudness war, that don’t let all the songs be written by two guys and that don’t produce everything to be flat and easily consumable. The music the guy in the video is talking about is only a very small percentage of modern music. As for the Bob Dylan and the Stones, they where not that good either, there are bands today that are equally as good and even better but every person on earth has the most notalgic feelings with music they have discovered in there teens, early twenties, that is a scientific fact. I never stopped exploring and discovering music and there is a lot more interesting music today then there was 30-40 years ago. Top 100 still is crap and allways will be crap but they all will be forgotten in 50 years, after all the guy is talking about the 60’s so put it in the right perspective. Do you really think Katy Perry will get lots of radio play in 2068? Only the good stuff survives. There will be a next generation that declares music from the 2000’s 2010’s as the best music ever made.
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No, 50% top 100 then was good now it is 100% crap, mainstream then was reasonably good now it’s crap. Sure you can find good original music these days but it is way more difficult to find. By your own criteria Stones were pretty good.
And the music the guy on the video is talking about is a very large chunk of modern music, go to Spotify from time to time. And attributing nostalgic feelings to anyone thinking that what is produced today sucks, that is not even worth answering.
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On the contrary! Today it’s definitely a lot EASIER to find the music you like than ever before in the history of (recorded or live) music!!! There’s so much new and exciting stuff out there just waiting for us to discover and enjoy it…
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Yes, but this stuff fails to make mainstream. Technology has made it easier to find if you know to look and so many people just don’t know that there is any more than the mainstream radio fodder available…
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If someone likes mainstream pop music, it’s more easily available than ever before. If someone prefers non-mainstream music, it’s ALSO easier to find than ever before. Never have there been so many great musicians out there as today. Never has it been more our fault - and our fault only - if we fail to find them or to discover new stuff we like!
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I agree. My old man (dad), who is probably the oldest of the old farts here, also agrees 
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I recently went to a festival type event to watch a few acts who were appropriate to the radio station that organised the event (BBC Radio 2). There was a mixture of old and new at the venue I attended but the oldest performer absolutely smashed it. Billy Ocean was the star act of the day for me. There were other good acts but they failed to animate the crowd in the way he did, choosing down tempo tracks off new albums rather than up tempo stuff more suited to the event. Why? Because there is huge gulf between making something for YouTube (where the young consume most of their ‘new’ music) and the craft of live performance. And I think a huge problem with so much music today is it is a studio product and cannot be performed live.
And yet, bands increasingly need to do the festival scene to actually make some money.
The easiest things to find are those you do not need to search for. Ask yourself how much of crap you have to dig through to find anything that does not sound like everything else? Try on Tidal, try on Spotify. What I think most of the post here are ignoring is that the structure of music, melodies. number of instrument used, chords, sequence of notes etc… can be easily analyzed. Watch the video. It clearly explains why everything sounds the same. Because it is prefabricated from the same very few components. Watch the video!
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The thing is, you don’t know what you don’t know… and people don’t know. I have have experience of exposing them to live music they had no idea was available to them. They just don’t think anything better is available…
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And I’m still surprised how many of them don’t want to know. Or don’t care if they get to know. Comfortably numb… 
[elitist mode off]
Yes, but I think we can all agree, it is the greatest time in history for access to music, great and not so great lol
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If you have read David Byrne’s book ‘How Music Works’ he talks about the downside of pro tools In Studios as they make artists conform to neat arrangements that fit the templates. Something that wouldn’t work with the likes of John Lee Hooker. A 12 bar blues could easily be 13.5 bars, and why not?
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In terms of quantity and accessibility, that’s absolutely true Chris! When I compare how many good music I discover nowadays, compared to, say, 10 or 20 twenty years ago, I discover more good music (so there’s also the quality, luckily ) than I’m ever able to fully absorb. What a dilemma! 
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What a load of sanctimonious crap.
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It’s just a shame the upcoming and ongoing artists are finding it so hard to make a living these days. But then, nobody said it would be easy.
We are off the see the wonderful Black Feathers tonight and I remember Sian saying that they had a choice, to buy this microphone or pay their council tax…
Tour dates, don’t miss them…
What exactly are you referring to, the video? Sanctimonious? Arguments please?