Rick Beato on why music is getting worse

June 30, 2024 • 12:15 pm

Here we have three videos by music expert Rick Beato explaining why rock/pop music (the distinction isn’t quite clear to me) has gone badly downhill since its glory days, which just HAPPENED to coincide with my teenage years and young adult years. Yes, yes, I have heard those who tell me—and there’s some truth in it—that people always think that the best music is the music that they grew up with. But Beato, who is 13 years younger than I, didn’t grow up with the best music, and yet he still recognizes it as music from 1960-1980 or so (I’m being generous with the 1980 ending). Beato wasn’t even born when the Beatles formed, and was only eight when the Beatles broke up. And yet he clearly recognizes them as one of the apogees of rock music.

This first video  has already garnered nearly 1,800,000  views in only 4 days since its release. The YouTube notes:

In this episode, I discuss the crisis in music in two acts: Act I – Music is too Easy to Make Act II – Music is too Easy to Consume …and their cumulative negative effect.

If you’ve listened to Beato’s earlier videos, you know why he thinks music is getting worse: autotuning, drum machines, unimaginative tunes, lame lyrics, a lack of diversity and, of course, the business itself, which rakes in the dosh without the big expense of live recording in studios with real human beings. He adds, in Act II, that music is simply too easy to access, with the result that people don’t really pay attention to it.

And he doesn’t just palaver: he gives recordings to demonstrate his points.

It’s probably useless to email me telling me I’ve missed groups as good (or better than!) the Beatles. I’ve never found such claims to be even close to accurate.

I was glad in the next video to see Beato compare Taylor Swift, a phenom as popular now as the Beatles used to be, with the Fab Four, and to find Swift overrated. (Beato claims he likes her songs, even though I don’t think he really does.) And, at any rate, her songs are written by consortiums of writers.  I’ve listened to plenty of Swift because of her popularity, and I just don’t see a “there” there. But the hubbub around her is just as frenetic as it was around the Beatles. What gives?

Of course a rock song is not going to be great without a great tune, and words are secondary. But words are nevertheless important, for you must have both to have a great song. In the third video, whose title gives the upshot, Beato shows us some lyrics of modern rock and compares them to words from the days of yore (note his emphasis on the Beatles). When seen nakedly, without a tune, modern lyrics are absolutely pathetic, as Beato notes in the title. Even the overrated Beyoncé and her monster hit “Texas Hold “Em” (watch the video, which is dreadful) come in for a deserved drubbing.

Hip-hop and rap don’t move me at all, and it’s not because it’s “black people’s music”.  So was soul music, but it’s infinitely better: great tunes, complexity, and decent lyrics.  Here are four from my long list of best rock music (under the “soul category”, and available for the asking), each better than any rap or hip hop ditty ever issued. (Yes, of course I recognize that this is subjective, but see Beato’s analysis above.)

It was hard to pick four out of my very long list, but here goes:

I don’t much like the article below, from Stat Significant, as it doesn’t describe how to distinguish different categories of music, but it does give the right answer: rock was at its best from 1960-1980:

Rock burned bright for two decades, and then it was gone, sequestered out of the mainstream. Since then, this singular genre has been rebranded as “classic rock” or (worse yet) “dad rock,” while its predecessors have fragmented into subgenres such as indie, folk, and alternative.

Click to read, but remember, it’s not a great piece.

h/t: Erik

64 thoughts on “Rick Beato on why music is getting worse”

  1. Yep yeppity yep .. except I did not read that last piece –

    My latest theory-which-is-mine:

    Newer music has weak creativity.

    Compare e.g. my faves Hendrix, Led Zep, Elton John, Chuck Berry, Metallica, Neil Young, – they took old forms, redid them, but really threw in a wild or risky new sound or approach.

    I do not generally grasp any risk-taking or wild crazy sounds in newer music (I’ll have to of course seek this out) – and do not get a sense of doing something old a new way, except superficially (e.g. some recent covers of Stevie Wonder maybe).

    For the record : Jacob Collier shows astonishing creativity. (Beato plays some Collier at the beginning of one of those videos)

    Thanks for this great review!

    /SatisfyingMusicRant

    4. I listened, it’s not bad at all. but the somewhat catchy riff that runs all the way through it? – it’s a sample from Tom Scott, a saxophone player well known for being a member of the Blues Brothers. And that’s the essential problem a lot of people have. If you just isolated the man speaking his poetry it wouldn’t sound like much. The beat, the music, the part that actually makes the song interesting; that always comes from someplace else.
      My favorite hip hop song that I can think of is Cantaloop. https://youtu.be/JwBjhBL9G6U?si=Gr-EFeSUhn3gvOBW
      But this one samples Herbie Hancock – so there you go.

  4. Consider bread. Not the group, the food. At one time all bread was hand made and much was ordinary but the best was stupendous.

    Now consider popular music. At one time all songs were hand made and much was ordinary but the best was stupendous.

    Now both popular music and bread are mostly mass produced, not particularly satisfying, but cheap.

  5. Well, maybe things , technology etc, not to mention social change, are moving and changing at such a pace people are being left behind.
    I agree, however with Bryan that Jacob Collier is beyond creative -and happy to hear someone else say it. His music is in a whole other realm
    I sure agree the 60’s and 70’s songs are unmatched.

  6. There IS great new rock music out there; it’s just no longer the dominant genre.

    If you have xm, i suggest the underground garage channel.

  7. Rick Beato is awesome.
    It is incredible both the quantity and variety of work that the Beatles put out in only 7 years. Most people of a certain age can probably sing along with 50 different Beatles songs. Some of the older rock that I used to listen to an love as a youngster no longer interests me though, such as Love, The Kinks, and The Doors (Morrison was overrated).

    I’ve tuned to the hip hop stations on SXM from time to time. I can appreciate the linguistic twists and turns but the raw sexual imagery, violence, and frequent use of the N word and other language turns me off. I had a conversation a couple years ago with a younger black electrical engineering coworker who hosted a cookout and had the hip hop blaring. His twin son and daughter had just turned two, and he realized as the music was playing that it was not something he wanted them to listen to, so he changed over to a Motown and Stax mix that he had. He ended up being thanked by a couple of the other newer parents. He also said he noticed 9 and 10 year old girls rapping along to lyrics that were sexually explicit as they were twerking and writhing to the beat, and it made him very uncomfortable.

    1. Hip hop and rap are horrible, IMHO.

      Dave Barry said it was music to slaughter cattle by.

  8. I haven’t listened to “A Change is Gonna Come” in a number of years. I forgot how good it is. I am sitting in my barn/shop with the cat (was feral) that lives there now, giving him the fusses he demands. I don’t know if it was the change in my demeanour, or the song itself, but maybe ten seconds in, he was staring at the speaker, eyelids dropping.

    I find that almost all of the newer music I listen to is not pop/rock. I’m With Her (Sarah Jarosz, Sara Watkins, Aoife O”Donovan, all musicians in their own right) being a favourite since 2014 or ’15. Little of the pop or R&B over the last 30 years has interested me, and only slightly more of the rock. I will admit to enjoying some hip-hop at times when I want to turn off my brain.

    For years I thought I was handicapped in modern taste by early association (EVERYONE in my life through college was in music or music adjacent- musical theatre, classical, rock, liturgical, jesus-hippie rock, you name it.) I finally realized that, no, there is an astronomically higher proportion of chaff than there was prior to maybe 1980.

    1. The mere mention of jesus -hippie -rock reminds me of a classic line from “critic” Hank ( “King of the Hill”) Hill to his son, Bobby when he had to tell him, “Your group is not making Christianity sound better, just making music sound worse!” ( Not Verbatim).

  10. More than Napster, I blame Compact Discs and the record/distribution companies for upping the price of a CD over a vinyl product by a hefty amount, with a false promise to lower prices once they’d paid for the new CD-manufacturing equipment they’d invested in.

    It never materialized, and Napster was one of the responses to that, made possible by the internet. An early instance of people power + internet broke music as much as anything, but Big Music was the original cause, in my opinion.

    But there’s another systemic weakness in the Live part of the Music Industry…
    I went on Reddit’s /r/Music to crowd source an answer to the Q of why so many pro musicians never get their promised payments for live performances.

    The only good answer I got back was that there are so many musicians who are willing to play for free that they undermine the rest of the performers by lowering expectation of the venues who are supposed to pay them.

    It’s not just pubs either. A couple of decades ago some friends of mine did a New Years Eve gig for the City of ——– in Canada. Something fell through, (I believe it was just lack of attendance – the gigs were free admission), and the City decided not to pay the performers. The performers threatened to sue, but were placated somehow (or just threatened right back) and ended up with much smaller payments, though none of the performers were at fault.

    1. I did not know about this new development—sounds dreadful for musicians.

      But quality started to decline before Napster.

    2. Playing for free? At a certain level, it is expected for bands to PAY for the privilege to play as support for bigger acts.

      Creative, competitive jobs are, by nature, miserable careers for most participants, unless you are lucky enough to be among the first to burst into a new market. As soon as people realize there’s money and fame to be had for the top few players, there will be lots and lots of hopefuls willing to do anything to get a foot in the door.

  11. Hip Hop/Rap seems to try to make lyrics rhyme, whatever their questionable content otherwise. Some apparent regard for vocabulary. Otherwise, making poetry rhyme seems to have been out of fashion during the last 2-3 decades in the sacred groves of academia. Apparently, one less requirement to have to accomplish in order to qualify as a poet. “Free verse” and all of that, eh?

  12. Rather than music being worse, I think it’s that it is so much more voluminous. There are no (ot far fewer) gatekeepers to the industry, and we are inundated with everything, good and bad alike. The filter is far less… filtery. I can still find tons of singers I like, but it takes more effort to sift through the ones I don’t.

    1. If there’s more of it, and the average quality hasn’t declined, then at the upper tail we should have the greatest groups in history. If that’s the case, there should be a group better than the Beaatles Can you name just one?

      1. I don’t think anyone would dispute that the average quality has declined (owing to the fact that, nowadays, anyone and his dog can record something on cheap equipment and upload it to a streaming website).

        (Also, I could name 20 bands that I personally like more than the Beatles, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect anyone else to agree.)

      2. Plenty of people would argue that the Beatles aren’t the greatest band in history. Taste is subjective and my opinion about who that perfect band is subjective to me based on the mood I am in. Unless you’re a studio head or concert promoter, the very idea of selecting for greatness is pointless. You like what you like and anyone who doesn’t like it can listen to something else.

        1. Of course they would and I SAID that answers are subjecctive. However, given that and your criteria for what is good, you can then analyze songs semi-objectively. But please read the roolz about civility towards the host And no, “selecting for greateness” is NOT pointless: record producers do it all the time, looking for what most people would consider a good song. So it’s clearly not completely subjective: there are criteria.

      3. There’s little doubt that the craftmanship among musicians has improved, and there are lots of rock and metal bands that leave even the best bands from the 60s and early 70s in the dust in terms of virtuosity and complexity – Dream Theater, Polyphia, Animals As Leaders, Tesseract… (I could go on and on, and I don’t even like many of these bands)
        However, The Beatles were in a position and had the talent to pick many of the low-hanging fruits and “trademark” many of the most successful approaches. So nowadays when someone writes a song like they did, the reaction isn’t “wow, this is really nice”, it’s “sounds like a rehashed Beatles song”.
        Edit: likewise, many of the great bands that followed basically cleaned out their corners of “musical design space”, if you will, and those that weren’t thorough enough themselves inspired lots of imitators to finish the work. Can newer bands write Iron Maiden songs as good as the original? Probably, but who needs that? Was early Genesis awesome? Sure, but every angle of “sounds like early Genesis” has been done to death.
        I don’t see a way around that.

  14. Pop music is a big industry and any industry will go to lengths
    to lower the costs of production. This industry is ripe for the
    takeover of AI.

    1. I think Rick Beato briefly talks about the growth of AI in one of the videos. It is getting scary that even writers and musicians are slowly being left out of the industry.

      1. Don’t forget actors and artists. AI can replace them too. But what happens when AI takes over leadership of the industries?

  15. I compare music from the late Forties and Fifties (e.g., “Rocket 88”, “Honky Tonk Pts 1 & 2”) and the Sixties to the Eighties, to diamonds in the rough and multifaceted cut diamonds. They both made significant contributions to me living a better life, so those eras are the ones I go to when I relive my life’s best moments. I don’t give today’s music artists much of my time.

        1. Sorry, Jerry. It wasn’t intended as rude. I majored in music in college and found the piece to be very simplified. Will apologize to Patrick.

    4. Jerry asked me to apologize for the rudeness of the comment I made. I therefore beg you pardon.

  17. I’m of Jerry’s vintage, and so of course I agree with him, especially about the great soul songs. What is interesting is that both my sons-in-law were born in the 80s, and both are very good rock guitarists, one of whom has played (and still does) in semi-professional bands. Their repertoire is largely centred on the classics of the 60s to 80s, and their original material is based on the riffs of those eras (and very good original material it is too).

    Maybe it’s not just our teenage influences that make us think that the popular music of the past really was the best we’re going to get!

  18. I have found it much more enjoyable and profitable to discover great music from bands from the 60’s and 70’s that I had never heard of before. Music services, The Rock and Roll Encyclopedia, and Wikipedia have been wonderful resources to trace the musical pedigrees of various artists as they migrate to and from bands they were in, and to check out the fruits they produced. I have found some real gems (at least to my ears) this way. And people I have made recommendations to like the music as well – including their children!

    1. True for me too, but it does not seem to happen any more for me. But some great musicians just never go raydidio time when I was growing up. Hawkwind for 60’s psychedelic, Boomtown rats for punk, and even Elvis Costello for straight up rock. There were certain songs from well known artists that I’d never heard of until some years ago. You Don’t Know Me by Ray Charles, and Beggin’ from Frankie Vallie.

  19. I wonder how much of the problem affecting modern music is the abnormal persistence of older music as actual recorded performances.

    Lennon and McCartney did not have to compete on an equal footing with the performers who were popular 60 years before them the way a modern artist would today. As a music consumer I can take my pick from over a century of recorded music from all over the world and curate my personal playlist. Why would I look for a new act that sounds like the Beatles when the Beatles are still available? if what I want is a remix of what I already know, there are artists of a different sort, like Bill McClintock on youtube that provide exactly that. For the curious: https://youtu.be/3MRx4LpYbQ4

    And if a new act that sounded too much like the Beatles came along, they could be considered plagiarists. the band Greta Van Fleet have been criticized for being “led Zeppelin I”

    So younger acts have to go extremely out of left field to produce something original, and combined with the completely different distribution models we have today, the results are unpredictable.

  20. The original recording companies were owned by music enthusiasts. Then CDs were developed and the opportunity to convert their massive analogue libraries into digital format and resell them as CDs. The small recording companies couldn’t afford to do this and so they were bought out by giant international investment companies for many $$$.

    No longer was music the main focus of the recording business – from then on it was about selling product. There is still much good (=creative) music produced today, but it is mostly made by independent artists. Meanwhile several generations of children have been raised on a diet of harmonically barren nursery rhymes.

    1. I agree, as usual, with much of what Beato says. But there is a danger in thinking that everything old is good and everything new is bad. I’m thinking about technology here. CDs were never the problem. It is actually much easier to manufacture a CD than to press a vinyl record. That’s an argument usually brought up by people who irrationally prefer vinyl. Yes, the big covers can be nice, but some people argue that the SOUND is actually better than CD. That is a scientific claim which has been tested and found to be not true. People might PREFER vinly, like some prefer black-and-white pictures, but one can’t argue that black-and-white is a better representation of reality.

      If you like the pops and noise, fine, but if the goal is to capture the sound of the band, CDs are superior. Claims that CDs somehow don’t capture all the sound (cue Neil Young here—great musician, but lacking comprehension about technology) are just bogus. Take a vinyl record, convert it in real time to CD format, and have an A/B switch. No person in the world can tell the difference. Yes, the experiment has been done.

      Let’s face it, from hugely expensive hifi cables to violins costing millions (double-blind tests have shown that they are not superior to good modern violins costing a fraction), there is a lot of woo among otherwise intelligent music enthusiasts. We can and should agree that thre 60s and 70s were, in some sense, the best time for rock, but we shouldn’t go full-on nostalgic where it is counterproductive.

  21. A group not as good as the Beatles but not half bad either, and you will probably appreciate that the lyrics of this track are pretty spot on too: The Sound of Muzak by Porcupine Tree – released in 2002
    https://youtu.be/ThXGrdgw9sk

  22. My parents thought that pop and rock were the death of music, they only listened to classical and opera. They were appalled by my love of rock. But I had the same opinion of rap and hiphop. We don’t get to choose what we like and don’t like, we only discover it.

    My contribution is Tedeschi Trucks, and I can’t imagine anyone not being emotionally moved by this one. Derek Trucks is a phenomenal guitarist, both slide and regular, as good as anyone else alive or dead. But intellectually I understand that it will mean nothing to many. There is no objective best music for everyone.

  23. Of course it’s all a matter of taste in some sense, and no group will ever have the prominent role in culture the Beatles had. I think that there are several records up there with the Beatles, though not as popular. The Beatles still have an edge over most due to their originality and creativity and even popularity and cultural impact, though I can understand people who value only the music itself. Most of the other groups I like, though, while producing very good music, are usually doing so within a relatively small space (so was Bach, who was also the opposite of an innovator, regarded as a dinosaur in his time—that’s not necessarily a bad thing). But forgetting the non-musical trappings, is there any groups which produced music just as good and just as innovative and just as diverse as the Beatles? I would argue that Jethro Tull fits that bill, especially 1969–1982 or so. In particular, their 1972 album Thick as a Brick is my favourite album of all time by anybody.

  24. There was the golden age of free form radio in the 60’s and 70’s that allow freedom to experiment and do excellent music. Then AM radio became an industry with play lists and conservative formats. The creativity took a hit. payola didn’t help. Everything became formulaic. Same old stuff over and over. The rot spread to other formats. I have a theory a lot of the best rock of old came from people who also listened to classical. Melody and counterpoint can make for good music.

  25. “And, at any rate, her songs are written by consortiums of writers”.

    This is not true: bluntly, Beato may be a “music expert”, but when it comes to Swift, he either doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or is deliberately distorting. A lot of Taylor Swift’s songs are co-written, but usually only with one co-writer; only a handful have more than one co-writer. And a good number of her songs are written by herself alone, including many of her most famous and popular songs (“Love Story”, “Long Live”, “Dear John”, “Lover”, “My Tears Ricochet”, etc. etc.). Her entire album “Speak Now” was written solo, precisely (according to her) because she was fed up with critics who insisted that all her co-written songs were “really” being written by other people, and she felt she needed to prove herself to them.

    Moreover, even with most of the co-written songs, the substantial bulk comes from her. It’s worth watching the documentary “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Version”, where she discusses with her two most prolific and famous collaborators, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, about the process through which each song was created.

    The weird thing – and the thing that makes this an obvious polemic, rather than a serious analysis of Taylor Swift’s quality as a songwriter – is that he picks co-written songs, and takes out the parts (the melody and words) which are most plausibly coming from her, and focuses on the parts that don’t, and notes that they sound like her co-writer. Well – duh – of course they do!! But if you were actually interested in assessing Ms. Swift’s song-writing abilities, wouldn’t you look at HER contribution? Wouldn’t you in fact start with the (many) songs which are totally written by her, and which don’t have a co-writer at all? You could even listen to the acoustic versions of those songs, if you are worried (as he seems to be) that the producer’s work with the technology is playing too much of a role (though I doubt that you should be worried about that – as he notes, that simply is how pop songs are created nowadays).

    My conclusion: this is a polemic aimed at producing the desired conclusion, rather than a serious and balanced analysis.

    1. Yes, I was going to make the same point, she does deserve recognition for her work. I’m not a big fan but I find her songs enjoyable, if not monumental works of genius. She’s an incredibly hard worker and has built her following largely on her own. It is an impressive achievement. She also seems to be a decent person and not an egomaniac.

    2. I don’t see much difference between the career arc of Taylor Swift and Michael Jackson. Most of his earlier solo hits (and certainly when he was part of The Jackson 5) were co-written or written by others. The “Bad” album was really the first where Michael had a lot of say in the writing and producing…which was in the late 80s and several years after he had achieved superstar status.

      1. I don’t see that as the same trajectory as Swift at all. She has never sung anything which was simply written by other people – she has always had a major part in writing all of her songs (starting with “Our Song” – solo written at the age of 15). One of her most beloved songs, “Love Story”, was solo written when she was 18. Her solo written album (“Speak Now”) was her third (out of 11) albums, written when she was 20.

    3. I like Rick Beato, but I agree that he’s not as objective as he thinks he is!

    4. Her music sounds all the same and lacks any real emotional heft. Makes enough people happy to make plenty of $$$ but it feels like a formula, based on a feely boring person.

  27. This is always a tricky topic to discuss, since it’s multi-factorial with the three biggest factors being in my view:
    1) Taste in music shifts over the decades so different generations will value the same piece of music differently.
    2) Trends in music shift as new technologies arrive and trends flare up and die out. Pieces of music of different genres are very hard to compare – hence the discussion on how to rate Hip Hop.
    3) The volume of “produced” music any person has access to has increased by orders of magnitude. This has resulted in a splintering of the musical experience. I don’t have data, but I strongly suspect that the songs known by two adults (30 yr) from the same society overlap significantly less today compared to the 70ies. A discussion by necessity will revolve around the body of music that is shared by a majority – which is a commercially driven subset of the entirety of music. It’s something to keep in mind.

    To address the first point, I’d like to ask on opinions on two different versions of the same piece, produced by the same group:

    Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode – Original

    Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode – 2004 Version

    Born in the early 80ies, I prefer the second version by a large margin. What about those born in earlier (or later) decades?

    1. Also born in the early 80s, and I love Depeche Mode, so I don’t dislike the 2004 version, but I prefer the original. Both are products of their time, with the latter version just sounding like Linkin Park, seeing as one of the band members recorded the instruments and remixed it. I was never a fan of Linkin Park.

  30. I was born in 1976 so my late teen years were bang on in the “grunge” era of rock, which was really a revolt against the often awful, over-produced “glam” guitar-based rock of the 1980s, which I never got into as a kid. So I was obviously heavily into grunge…BUT I also really enjoyed the classic rock era of late 60s to early 70s. In fact, I could see a lot of similarities both musically and lyrically between the best of the grunge era and the best of the peak rock era.

    Today, I mostly listen to classic rock, and occasionally some of the standout grunge bands (Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, and of course Nirvana). But there really was something special, and irreplaceable, about that period from about 1966 to 1974ish in rock music.

Comments are closed.