tom__panton

The creative industry indelibly changed well over a decade ago, but doesn't resemble what millennials and older were trained on so they are blind to it

I agree with a lot of this although have a slightly different take. Allocation of funds in music became hyper efficient in the data age of revealed preferences. To @hollyherndon old and still undefeated point, pay-per-listen eviscerates the economy of challenging music. You used to have to pay $10 to access an idea. Inefficiency was good for culture as it afforded time for embers of new things to mature into something. Add to that the greater efficiency of cities meaning no space to hang out and try stuff etc I also think it is underestimated just how difficult it was to be an active participant in music or art subcultures pre-social media, and as such they selected for high agency weirdos who were committed to building alternative realities. Combine that with the fact scenes were very local and rarely enjoyed any visibility outside of those locations, they developed deep mutations and lore. As much as people profess to revere the subcultures of the 20th century, I don't think people really appreciate just how new and confounding they were to common sensibilities at the time, and just how odd and committed the people driving them were. Efforts to create parallels with someone now staggering a kick on ableton, or adding distortion to a 50 year old established trope, really condescend the severity of the fall from grace. Identifying as an artist now is a status symbol rites of passage for the upper middle class. Anyone can buy the starter pack. There is no risk or resistance associated with it. This is fine, but I wouldn't conflate that with the kinds of characters who pursued highly aberrant and difficult life paths to build all the forms and ideas people ever so slightly modify or reference now. There is still plenty of "good music", but music as a site of where those extreme mutations in form, perspective and habit happen is largely over, and as such it feels stale. The gatekeeper model of media assumed the role of forcing in front of people what they didn't know they needed yet in a brutal competition for novelty (as OP stated) and worthiness for very few slots of people's attention. Even by the 2010s any embers of a new mutation that spawned online was quickly smuggled into a pop stars practice and diluted before it could mature into a alternative way of life as older mutations did. As someone who saw this first hand I still bristle at how pop records from that time are considered the gold standard people long for - when they were arguably a significant contributor to the slide. More vital and abstract subcultures mutated adjacent to tech that have all the same qualities as mid-late 20th century music: high barrier to participation, scramble normie sensibilities, high barely-parsable weirdo quotient, and adjacency to growth industries that can inefficiently sustain experimentation (see crypto, oddball AI researchers, indie gaming) A lot more to say on this but I enjoyed this essay and followed