Throughout history, any era of music you care to mention, in any genre you care to mention, there have been a small number of innovators, and a lot of imitators/plagiarists.

Personally, I'd question who the innovators are nowadays, and their agenda.

They sure aren't songwriters.

 

There are a few things I know for sure without the remotest prejudice:

• There are wonderful musicians and songwriters who cannot read a note of music or explain why they do what they do.
• There are wonderful musicians and songwriters who read and understand music well and can explain everything they do and some in between.
  
• Music if labelled good by one person may not be considered that by another, regardless of what boxes it ticks on a musical, enjoyment, correctness, theoretical or popularity level.
• Music that is popular does not necessarily mean it is good in musical terms or sensible, or tunes like 'On the good ship lollipop' and 'Baby,baby,baby,baby' would never have been popular. Again, people will like what they like there are 8 billion of us in the world.
• There are musicians who can tell how good something is without saying a word and musicians who feel the need to tell everyone because everyone is different.
• People who can really play and really write have no need to sweep the floor with testosterone, they are too busy doing it and can do it with a computer or without one and the musical likes, tastes, style or genres make no difference. If there was a Global electromagnetic pulse and everything electronic died, people immediately who are musical becomes crystal clear, because it is inside them and everything else is a tool to express what is inside them.
• Is Rick Beato a pain in the ass? - He can be but he does know things, nobody lives that long and does not learn something...and last..
• If a person wants respect, give respect, because it does not matter how good anyone is, there will always be someone better.

 

Last edited: Apr 21, 2026 at 7:48 PM

All two of them!

Well, yeah, I mean.. ABBA did enable Max Martin. Whether that's a good thing is .. very debatable

(And honestly a more fun discussion!)

I agree, but neither you nor me have the authority to judge because we grew up and still live in our own, very tiny musical bubbles that won't let us see the bigger picture no matter what.

And when one hasn't been exposed/hasn't experienced/hasn't learned music from the bird's eye view (1500 years, 1500 genres, 100k songs), then one is just stuck with imprinted involuntary tastes.

I don't. All I'm saying is that I don't have authority to judge qualitatively (nor do you).

Don't you think that the music you referenced earlier is also measurably a decline from the musical depth, sophistication and diversity of earlier times ..? A dramatic, ..catastrophic decline? Or does the Hendrix-chord make up for all of that decline ..? Is disco's four on the floor really the peak of rhythmic sophistication?

I used to read Chris Dalla Riva's blogs on music and data. Maybe you'd be interested in his findings and charts.

https://flowingdata.com/tag/chris-dalla-riva/
https://substack.com/@chrisdallariva/posts

I don't know how to filter his substack, so it's a bit of a long scroll between his data science posts.

What is significant? A 5% decline in key changes relative to what was the norm in 1976, 1932, 1779 or <my year>? Why year X as the anchor? Please explain. I don't understand. What about absolute change? Are those more significant than relative changes? What are the bounds on the Y axis? And why is anything outside of those bounds irrelevant?

Where's the data (you have not shown any!) and your explanation of that data? No data + no explanation = opinion.

That's a great way of putting it. I'd argue that all of 1920-2030 can be summed up as "shades of beige". Don't feel like backing it up with data though, haw haw.

Bach gang repreZnt.

Relative to what? The artists you name-dropped? Again, how is it that it's exactly those artists who've had a combined 30-40 years of musical relevance in the 2nd half of the 20th century and no one and nothing outside of that tiny time frame?? Do you genuinely believe that music peaked during those 30-40 years and that per-chance your formative years and artist preferences fall into that tiny window?!

You must be winning the lottery every week!

Always been.

Bringing back key-changes to 3% of billboard 100s won't change that. Big money won, musicians will go the way of the weavers post 1820. Music will always be around of course - and if I had to guess: mostly as background AI vibe semi-noise (ie. further reduced in depth/sophistication to facilitate maximum palatability and engagement (like deliveries/fast food)) going forward.

 

The examples (Jobim, ABBA, Rodgers) weren’t meant to be exhaustive, just illustrative! The point isn’t to build a tiny "hall of fame", but to point to long-term structural influence, especially in melodic and harmonic language that keeps getting reused and reshaped over time. If anything, adding more examples would only make that pattern clearer.

Linking ABBA to Max Martin doesn’t really undermine the argument... if anything, it sharpens it. The question isn’t whether influence exists, but what happens to structural diversity along the way. What I’m looking at is how melodic variability, harmonic movement, and phrase-level development behave in the current mainstream. The lineage is there, sure... the question is what it does to the palette.

I’m not trying to make a claim about all music across history. This is a much narrower scope: mainstream Western charting music in the recording era, where we actually have comparable datasets. Within that space, analyzing things like melody, harmony, and phrase structure isn’t speculation, it’s pretty standard practice.

I don’t think this comes down to personal authority. It’s more about how clearly the criteria are defined. If we’re talking about pitch range, interval distribution, harmonic function, and how phrases evolve, then the argument can be evaluated on its own terms. It’s less about who’s saying it and more about whether the framework holds up.

That’s a fair point, but it shifts the frame a bit. I’m not claiming the 60s–90s are some absolute peak across all of music history. The comparison is within modern recorded popular music, where the systems are comparable. Once you move into earlier traditions, you’re dealing with different compositional rules, which is a different analysis altogether. Along those lines, computational work on large chart-based datasets (including research by Chris Dalla Riva) points in a similar direction. You do see convergence in certain features, especially around melodic repetition and reduced variability. It’s not that everything evolves the same way, but some structural parameters do tend to narrow over time.

"Significant" here just means measurable changes in defined features relative to a consistent baseline. For example: less melodic variability (narrower pitch range, fewer interval types), more static harmonic movement, and less differentiation across phrases. That lines up with findings from studies like The Evolution of Popular Music: USA 1960–2010 (Mauch et al., 2015), which show periods where musical features converge within Billboard datasets. You can debate the baseline, sure... but the directional trends tend to show up regardless.

This isn’t just a gut feeling, it comes from analyses of chart-based datasets (Billboard and similar), where people actually measure things like melodic contour, repetition, harmonic transitions, and phrase structure. For example, Trajectories and Revolutions in Popular Melody Based on U.S. Charts (1950–2023) points to declining melodic complexity and increased repetition. The Evolution of Popular Music: USA 1960–2010 (Mauch et al., 2015) shows periods of convergence in large Billboard datasets, and Changes in Lyrical and Hit Diversity (1956–2016) finds narrowing distributions in some dimensions over time. I’m not saying "everything got worse". The narrower claim is that some features (especially melodic variability and phrase-level movement) have tightened in the charts. If you see it differently, the best way forward is to engage those findings directly or bring counter-analyses using comparable data and metrics (that’s where the discussion gets concrete!).

If you zoom out far enough, almost anything starts to look uniform. But at a finer level (looking at melodic behavior, harmonic movement, and how phrases are structured), differences between periods do show up. So it’s less "everything is beige" and more "some shades are closer together than they used to be!"

The timeframe isn’t arbitrary, it’s tied to when we have consistent, large-scale chart data (like Billboard). That’s what makes longitudinal comparison possible using the same metrics. Again, it’s not about that period being "better", just that it gives us a stable dataset to observe structural trends.

Then it sounds like the disagreement isn’t about whether something changed, but about how to interpret it. My take is simply that reductions in melodic variability, harmonic movement, and phrase-level development are structurally meaningful (in the sense that they affect how distinct, varied, and internally dynamic charting music tends to be) rather than simply a matter of taste.

There’s no question that industry constraints (algorithms, economics, production pipelines) shape what ends up in the charts. But even within those constraints, you can still measure how much variation remains in melody, harmony, and structure. When that variation starts to narrow, it’s worth describing, whether it’s reversible or simply where things are settling.

 

There are just some songs so beautiful that you can listen to them for years to come.

You sense that there's more to a song than just instruments and notes; it's an idea, a piece of soul—something connects the listener to the music. Some call it magic, some divine, and for others, it's all just pure mathematics.

 

The problem for all of us, as music lovers, is simple.

We need more QUALITY music, NOT more music.

What really is the point of swamping the musical world with garbage?

I'd quite happily go back to much simpler pre-algorithm days, when a friend or someone in the know would switch you on to quality tunes or bands, or singers & musicians. Music had value then.

As for the Beato video, yes, most music these days seems to be built using loops. That can be done intelligently, or lazily.

I'm no fan of Noel Gallagher or Oasis (very derivative), however he often hit's the mark in interviews.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fnsMkdSHq8s?feature=share

 

You are talking like everyone is suddenly only chasing algorithms, that everyone lives to be in Spotify Top 100, that it's somehow impossible to find something else on there and that most people listening to Spotify do that because of 5% of music there. If anything, plenty people lost all incentives to compete for the same pie, don't have the actual need to chase same labels and can actually make music without worrying about any of that, finding audience, releasing it publicly and actually standing out in sea of sameness. Your friend actually now can stumble upon more of those bands and musicians, which was nearly impossible before, they didn't had outlet for their music, just demo and hopes to be picked and presented to mass audience.

Now when most people with AI subscription can churn out all these algorithmic nonsense, making that kind of stuff seems pointless, now more then ever folks who truly have love for the music do it for the love of the music, knowing to well it's not going to pay their bills from selling, knowing to well they stand no chance competing in the same realm and it boils down to giving up or doing music for the love of doing it.

Even locally I see plenty of folks that made this step, buried all the dreams of making it big and focused on music they truly love, audience that truly love their music and they are doing pretty well, people still go to gigs, still dig good music, but those people are also already in realization that quality music isn't on Billboard charts and it's not most mainstream pop.

Even for EDM, amount of people that still attend parties, packed festivals that don't need to appeal to mass audience to survive, music that is tailored to dance floor, not optimized for charts or made to be consumed by masses, just enjoyed by true lovers. Not everyone's goal is to be on Tommorowland, Ultra or whatever, plenty of people decided all they need is 50 people in the crowd who genuinely love what they are listening, dancing and immersed in experience.

Personally I'm even more committed to making better music, reaching even less people and investing even more in my craft, more time, more money and not settling to anything less then something I can be proud of standing next to AI generated music, I need this for myself and I notice more and more people are reaching this mindset around me, like fuck it, now I'm really going to do something I truly love, fuck people, fuck AI and fuck money.

 

No, I said that back in the day, a lot of times you'd find great new music from savvy friends, who might even lend you their copy, or make you a mixtape. It was a time when music had value, because you actually had to pay money for a physical product.

It also prompted way more discussion!

Nowadays, finding music you like is tainted by algorithm bias, and speaking for myself, turned me into an A and R man .... if I don't like the first 5 seconds of a track, I skip on to the next thing...

... too much choice, too much fluff obscuring the gems.

 

Where I come from, people simply didn't have enough cash to spend (from the mid-70s to the mid-80s), and you were dependent on friends recording a tape (copy) for you. There were also radio programs that presented different or new music, music for young people, Grenzwellen by Ekkie Stieg, or BBC London, which you would record with a cassette recorder. People might have had 20-40 cassettes and maybe 20-30 records; those with more money probably had 50 to 100 records.

Life was generally slower, more intense, and more peaceful than today. There were also mail-order services where you could order records directly. Sometime after the invention of the internet, YouTube, Spotify, and others, everyone started uploading, and it became incredibly chaotic. However, you could still find bands on Wikipedia.

Overall, humanity, with its 8.3 billion players, was very active, and thanks to the internet, people also gained access to foreign bands that weren't so well-known. Cracker/hacker teams were also very active, uploading music illegally but for free.

 

Collin and Realidade Melódica, you both raised points that actually complement each other: on one side, the very real concern about losing depth in a flood of content, on the other, the new chance for independent artists to reach audiences that used to be out of reach.

The way forward might be to lean more on human curation. Instead of leaving everything to algorithms, platforms could invest in editorial playlists run by people who highlight works with artistic or social relevance. Curators could even add context or short notes that enrich the listening experience,but it's important to point out that this needs to be subsidized:

It also makes sense to bring in composers and music educators to keep the conversation alive, through online magazines, podcasts, or independent channels. That way, listeners get access to music chosen for its quality, not just because it’s the most clicked.

Another piece of the puzzle is building communities and niches that support independent collectives and labels. This gives visibility to music outside the mainstream and opens space for creativity and different values.

Very important: Cultural incentives matter too: governments and institutions could fund projects committed to diversity and quality, without falling into the trap of censorship.

In short, the goal isn’t to wipe out what’s bad, but to shine more light on what’s good (works that don’t blindly follow the blunt blade of market logic; that bring in local references, traditions, and/or new fusions, expanding our collective repertoire; that show clear care for lyrics, arrangement, and production, regardless of genre or budget). The idea is to create an environment where audiences have the tools to recognize and value what really matters. It’s not about eliminating what’s bad, but about strengthening what’s good until it becomes more visible. This creates an opportunity for the general public to develop a habitus different from the current vogue. This needs to be stimulated, because if we leave it as is, things get stuck in views like: "—respect my individual right to alienate myself by consuming crap and, not only that, influence others to do the same!"

Some countries already have public policies that support diverse musical production. In others, everything is left to the private sector, which limits how far these initiatives can go. Good ideas aren’t the problem... what’s missing is the political and economic will to make them happen. Meanwhile, algorithms keep chasing whatever gets the most clicks, often shallow content, and reinforce the cycle of "crap sells". The challenge isn’t just technical: it’s political and social! We need to create conditions for music of value to have space and visibility, without bowing to the insane logic of the market or the obtuse tyranny of algorithms that pretend to know your soul better than you do, but in reality only connect you to whatever generates engagement, dragging us into a Hunger Games‑style dystopia, except this time for people without ears.

 

Last edited: Apr 22, 2026 at 3:03 PM

I remember an A+R guy who was interviewed by Keyboard magazine in 89 or 90 saying this same kind of thing. He said if something didn't happen in 30 seconds or less, he'd eject the DAT tape (in his car stereo). Now that is still just about all I will listen to, before I at least start jumping whatever media player to further in a track. Those sections then get the "5 second treatment" for a few spots and it's gone.

It isn't really a new thing, but our attention spans for media have gotten shortened. Changes in technology are definitely the reason, whether that is digital audio, the internet, the 24/7 news cycle, people doom scrolling on Facebook and X.

i actually find it interesting that people know so much about this person's Youtube videos; because it means they watch an awful lot of Youtube.
I've probably only watched 5 or 10 videos max from this guy, and it was because they were linked elsewhere.

 

I think you are all jealous and totally out of date ..
If the kids want to listen to music from PLUTO and men from space get to no 1 on earth then so be it

I suggest all you miserable people who are obviously 75 /80 years of age.
Go see if you can get a ride on a Time machine to Hold back the years ..


HAVE A NICE DAY GREAT GREAT GRAND DADS ..

 

Hello @Brian Holness; here we go again with the generation gap; it's just part of the package!
When you run out of arguments or things get too complicated, you resort to insults and rude, stupid remarks.

 

Last edited: Apr 22, 2026 at 8:58 PM

When I was young, coming through the ranks and learning the ropes, my best resource were the pros that were a generation or 2 or 3 older.

Really helpful, interesting, knowledgeable + funny guys mostly, who'd been there, seen it, done it, had advice for everything and a solution for every scenario. They thrived on nurturing raw new talent and passing on their skills. They could reliably spot what was good or bad, and break it down as to why.

That's called education! Education is a great thing. It really helps when you're new. It isn't age related.

I like quality and well crafted music, regardless of genre.

If that makes me a discerning old ba$tard, then I consider that their glorious legacy

 

Last edited: Apr 22, 2026 at 8:59 PM

I was searching for the Persian scale a few weeks ago when I came across this...t=9.28s (Camel in Aviators)

First I thought it was real musicians playing, but it was all AI...

https://www.youtube.com/@JazzHive/videos

Apparently, he makes a new video (CD!!!) every couple of days...thoughts?

 

Last edited: Apr 22, 2026 at 10:02 PM

Since you are talking about Persian music, nothing can replace the true experience of listening to the real thing being performed by insiders. There are microtonal scales and absolutely unique inflections, tied to the maqam and the dastgāh, which involve recurring intervals and specific ornamentations. That’s why I believe any attempt made by AI ends up being, in a way, a reduction. As a form of hybridization, it has its value, but it is still a simplification.

It is interesting to note how the generated solutions are, for the most part, quite predictable. The main merit of this type of tool lies in the complete production of a track (although the melodic part still lacks the expressiveness that a producer, composer, or performer would normally execute in a DAW). Beyond that, it almost sounds like a experimental muzak.

From what I understood, the creator’s approach is to generate content that serves as a reference: people can listen to get ideas, learn about a certain genre, or explore possible hybridizations. If you pay for an AI service, this becomes even easier. It’s a way of riding the algorithmic wave, but I don’t see it as extremely harmful.

Perhaps it would be more interesting to see a musician actually improvising these melodic lines. Think of it this way: you could ask the AI to generate the version you published, but also request another one with only the accompaniment, already pre-established in measures and duration. From there, a performer could record their interpretation over the generated accompaniment. That would bring much more variety, value, and even curiosity, creating a basis for comparison, as well. If I were presenting this material, I would probably do it that way!

 

So here we are again...

As a musician and someone who studied Ethnomusicology I always find this sort of discussion fascinating so permit me to make a few general points.

I used to watch Rick's videos and still think he's a good interviewer, but I also think he lets his personal taste (perhaps deliberately) affect his judgements.

So, at it's heart the discussion comes down to criteria. Rick seems to like a certain type of harmonic complexity and that's fine, but is it an applicable criteria to other musics - what of a West African drum ensemble? Or a piece for Erhu or Shakuhachi? I realise that Rick is only looking at Western Pop Music but I point to these other styles because it's important to realise the sometimes hidden criteria that lurks beneath judgements.

In my own case, when growing up I tended to think that "dance music" was "cheap", "inferior", "repetitive", "boring", etc. but then I met someone who loved dancing and so I got to understand and experience "groove" and so came to realise that I'd been looking at the music the wrong way - yes, it can be repetitive but that's the point, because I was seeing it from an "insider's perspective".

Also, I think Rick is sometimes a bit disingenuous and likes to create a bit of "angertainment" to get the views up - as someone said recently "if no-one's angry, no-one's watching".

Cheers!

 

He hasn't done a single video in full explaining the concepts I mentioned above in detail. Sorry. I've studied music for many many years (conservatory, Berklee and many more) and He always talks about the same superficial obvious concepts in his so-called analysis videos. Beato's channel is just content (sometimes very good content) to promote his channel and sell his books (which, btw, does not cover music in depth).

As for the decline in music, I agree to some extent. The decline is there. But quality art is still here. My point is with Beato's moral music superiority. I mean, how deep, complex and harmonically rich "Smoke on the water" is. (one of Beato's favorite songs).

 

That’s a fair set of points, especially about criteria. I agree that different musical traditions operate with different structural priorities (applying harmonic complexity as a universal yardstick would miss the point in many contexts). My claim is narrower: I’m looking at mainstream Western charting music within its own semantic frame, where melody, harmony, and phrase structure have historically been central. So the comparison is within the same context, not across unrelated traditions.

On repetition: I agree it can be functional (groove-based music). The issue isn’t repetition per se, but how multiple features move together. When melodic variability, harmonic movement, and phrase-level development all narrow at once, that changes the range of distinctions available within that space!

From a cognitive angle, this matters. Listeners track patterns using mechanisms similar to language processing (predictive processing, chunking, and expectation vs. violation). In linguistic terms, you can think of it as a reduction in the effective "vocabulary" and "syntax" available: fewer distinct contours, fewer transitions, more reuse of the same building blocks. That doesn’t make the music "bad", but it does make it more predictable and less contrastive on average, which is a structural change, not just a taste judgment.

So I’m not arguing that one aesthetic is superior, or that repetition shouldn’t exist... I’m saying that within this specific domain, several independent features show convergence toward narrower distributions, and that has perceptual consequences worth describing.

As for Rick, I don’t think the argument depends on him. At most, his videos point to questions that have been examined more systematically in dataset-based studies.

Always good to have an ethnomusicological perspective in the conversation... it keeps the criteria honest!

 

Last edited: Apr 23, 2026 at 5:49 AM