It’s also a sign you aren’t looking. Yeah, music is going to be trash if you’re just looking at what’s popular on the radio/TikTok/charts. Spend some time on bandcamp going through what’s been posted in your preferred genres.
“what’s popular on the radio /TikTok/charts” being gutter tier hogwash is exactly what they’re talking about. Humans didn’t lose the ability to create good interesting music, and nobody legitimately thinks that. The publishing industry prevents independent artists from reaching any kind of mainstream popularity. Indie artists need money and the publishers that decide the winners/losers by controlling all the traditional distribution networks have no incentive to signal boost independents.
> Indie artists need money and the publishers that decide the winners/losers by controlling all the traditional distribution networks have no incentive to signal boost independents.
A publisher may wish to control distribution, but the cost to distribute any media (music, text, video, software) is nearly zero. The internet allows all of us to have a slush pile, to delve as deep for raw ore as we want. Some people want to go mining. Most don't and the traditional distribution networks ultimately market to such a person - and one way or another, we can't all delve through every slush pile. If you spend hours on SoundCloud or Bandcamp looking for music, you have less time to crawl for independent films or writing.
Any attempt to narrow the slush pile has the effect of marginalizing less mainstream efforts. If you read reviews or blogs to find things that seem worthy, then you are seeing what made it through someone else's slush pile. If you let the YouTube algorithm do it through recommendations, you are allowing Google to work through the slush pile.
You have TikTok completely backwards. It's giving a platform and virality to independent artists at a scale that was simply not possible before.
If your only association with TikTok music culture is "TikTok charts" then you're just falling for the same Billboard top 40s but with a new coat of paint.
Yes! One of the many joys of the internet and cheap computers is that anyone can produce music with very little upfront cost compared to before.
If you trawl around through youtube videos with 100 views, obscure bandcamps, audiophile forums, niche discord and subreddits, etc, you can find all sorts of absolutely fantastic music.
It obviously takes some work, but it's a lot of fun to discover as well!
Oh yeah, I forgot about YouTube, some of the best stuff I’ve found in recent years have been on channels that curate/promote music in particular genre. I have one for all sorts of punk genres, as well as one for doom metal and its related genres. They’re great, because they have all sorts of stuff, old and new, and help cut down on the cruft.
My only complaint about bandcamp is the mobile app. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to change the sorting when you’re looking through a genre, so it’s usually filled with albums and artists I already heard years ago, but their website is much better.
Basically all of the music I've bought in the last 5ish years I found through the channel Years of Silence. That person apparently has a very similar taste to me. Rujnuj has remained my favorite album for several years, especially since I found translations of the lyrics last year.
> It’s also a sign you aren’t looking. Yeah, music is going to be trash if you’re just looking at what’s popular on the radio/TikTok/charts. Spend some time on bandcamp going through what’s been posted in your preferred genres.
There's more recorded music than ever, and I don't care what your tastes are there are - new and interesting artists are out there to discover.
... which is also, in its own way, a new difficulty. There's so much to sift through, finding what you think is "good" is going to be difficult. This is doubly so for people who grew up listening to the radio or watching MTV, where these decisions were made for them.
The best advice I could give anybody is to find an actual radio station that plays what they consider to be good new music. This probably doesn't look like a commercial station, and you may not even have any in broadcast range of you, but there are plenty out there that stream online. I'm partial to my local NPR music station, but maybe you'd have better luck with college radio or a local low powered station instead.
DJs may be a rare breed these days, but try to find some you like and just let them do the work for you. The algorithms aren't going to cut it.
