Never bought into the art is subjective thing. Like everything else in this world, be it factory or hand made, physical objects or music from vibrating air molecules, it all can be assigned an objective quality rating from 0 to 100 based on every criteria known throughout history and evolution, for what comprises high, low and everything in between quality.
There is subjectivity only in that there will always be at least one or more persons among a population of 8.3 billion, that will think even the worst pieces of shit in existence, deemed by every single criteria know to man along with 99.999999% of everyone else, is really good.
So yeah, just because one likes something everyone else considers awful, doesn't mean it's 'subjectively' good. It just means you have real shit taste, heh.

 

Last edited: Apr 19, 2026 at 6:47 PM

Our alphabet consists of 26 letters, and our entire language is made up of just these 26 letters.
Our entire musical system consists of 7 tones and 5 semitones.
We've come a long way, and everyone has the opportunity to perceive music in all its forms and colors and to compose it themselves.

Never before has it been as easy as it is today, thanks to the internet, software, samples, and books, to make good to very good music. The entire world, with all its countries and cultures, has long since become interconnected.

It's more a matter of your brain: what musical knowledge can you store, absorb, or understand? In other words, what musical knowledge do you actually want and are you capable of, and how can you translate that musicality into a final product, such as a song?

 

Dude, my comment has nothing to do with the longing for some "perfect complexity." In fact, the very idea is abstract and irrelevant to artists like Nile Rodgers, Tom Jobim, Tears for Fears or ABBA, all of whom managed to bring harmonic, melodic and structural depth to the mainstream without losing commercial appeal. What has changed is that today’s dominant aesthetics are shaped far more by advertising logic than by musical invention. The principles are clear:

-Emphasizing a single central idea (and hammering it ad nauseam);
-Information hierarchy (hooking the ear in the first few seconds and repeating the profitable formula to fix it in place);
-Reducing richness and variety in the auditory channel to avoid “listening fatigue”;
-Information control (maximizing the so‑called useful message and minimizing decorative elements or anything considered distraction).

This has nothing to do with complexity being perfect or imperfect. What I am pointing out is that mainstream music once embraced structural sophistication, in harmony, melody, and motivic development, while remaining accessible and commercially successful. Today, however, advertising logic has pushed the mainstream toward "softer" formulas, reducing the diversity and inventiveness that were once present.

A careful reading of your response leads me to think that you are trying to neutralize the debate by saying there is no fixed parameter: you propose that there is no beginning or end, that everything is relative, that any pursuit of a "ideal degree of complexity" is irrelevant outside its own generation. In short, you defend a view that relativizes everything, making it impossible to speak of loss or gain (cultural relativism taken to the extreme!).

So, for you, it is as if there were a clash between critical realism (my position, defending that there are data, facts and evidence showing a decrease in diversity/inventiveness) and cultural relativism. Look, that's not quite right, Iagree with your argument about cultural relativism: complexity and simplicity do alternate across generations. However, even if the "ideal degree of complexity" ends up being an arbitrary construct, what can be measured objectively is variety, or the lack thereof, even statistically! That’s the point! When mainstream music is restricted to a handful of formulas without diversity or inventiveness, the loss is not just about "subjective taste"... it is the notorious cut‑down effect, a reduction in the diversity of options once available to the collective ear. Understand: diversity/inventiveness, which would add sophistication to the mainstream, are being denied to the general public!

As for niches and avant‑garde movements, as I said earlier, they may continue to explore complexity, but their reach is far more limited compared to the mainstream. And since the mainstream shapes the collective perception of what is considered "the spirit of the time", homogenization has real consequences. Your whole explanation about relativism does not erase the fact that today the public is exposed to less diversity and inventiveness than before. This is an objective and measurable reduction of diversity, regardless of whether one prefers simplicity or complexity... which is not even the central point of my entire argument!

 

Last edited: Apr 20, 2026 at 12:16 AM

I don't think it's talked about enough how "charting" has changed in the modern streaming era. Charting doesn't really measure what people enjoy listening to the most anymore, the music with the most streams is mostly the stuff that's listened to passively, ie vibes music. We all have the ability to essentially listen to music during every waking moment and task now. When you look at other metrics, a different pattern emerges though. There are quite a few instances around the world where people vote for their favourite tracks of the year, like Australia's TripleJ Hottest 100 for instance, the quality of the tracks on that list is way higher compared to the 100 most streamed tracks of the year.

 

More then half of the streams are bot's too, so someone who have organic streams can't even get in Top 50, let alone Top 10, this is like OnlyFans thing, where they fake their income to appear more popular then they are, get more attention, this goes in that same way, you kinda feel FOMO for not checking what's trending and what's trending is carefully inflated with bot's and your curiosity. Spotify as a metric is a joke, they pretty much only had issue in the past if more then 90% of your streams are bot's, even if it's 50% now which I doubt, it's enough to push any organic one out of the charts with bot's alone.

 

I love his interviews. I wish he would focus solely on that.

 

I highly recommend you people watch this video:

In short: In the past, sophistication was the result of hard work and the joy of the process: eccentric engineers building equipment that looked like the creations of mad scientists, real musicians looking at each other in the studio and playing together like normal people, with performances full of contributions (let’s use a suspension on this chord here, because of this, maybe that), nuances, breaths out of time, notes played off-beat, and that delicious imperfection that gave music breath and life. Nowadays? The industry has turned into a digital sausage factory: maximum speed, algorithms in charge, everyone chasing the sterile "less is always more"! The result? A sea of identical, predictable productions that sound as if they were all made on the same day, by the same person (or group of people), using the same template. There’s no longer room for mistakes, for "let’s try this chord here," for the happy accident that turned a recording into something magical. Today, an accident is considered a bug, and the producer discards it before it’s even born.

On top of that, harmony, melody, theme, development… all those things that used to be built with soul, coffee, and heated discussions among people are now replaced by a fast-food musical aesthetic: MIDI chord progression libraries, advertising-market logic, efficiency, ready in 15 minutes, optimized for all social networks. The goal is no longer to captivate or surprise, but to generate quick engagement, sell playlists, and rack up followers as fast as possible… before the algorithm changes its mind!

In the end, the audience is being blatantly robbed: they traded a vivid musical experience, full of interesting nuances, charming imperfections, and genuine emotions, for a pasteurized mashed potato purée (tasteless, textureless, and with a two-week expiration date!). All in the name of "efficiency" and the much-desired visibility on social media. Because, well… why make art when you can make content?

 

Last edited: Apr 20, 2026 at 4:37 AM

I would totally agree except for one area that for me is irrefutable.

ANY piece of music is creative or it is not and shows imagination and a desire to develop on a theme or not. The style or genre is irrelevant when discussing theme development and creativity.
A tune is musical volume and musical intensity dynamic and goes somewhere like telling a story or it is like a hamster on a wheel, the same thing over and over and over again ad nauseum. This is true for any music time period.