The Quiet Devaluation of Music
I donât know if everyone feels this the same way I do. Some days I wonder if itâs just me. Is music actually getting worse, or am I just aging out of something I used to love? I donât have a neat answer to that, and I donât really trust people who claim they do. All I can say with confidence is that something feels off. Everything sounds over-polished, but very little of it sounds lived in. Music is easier to find than itâs ever been, easier to make than itâs ever been, and somehow easier to forget than itâs ever been. That combination should raise more questions than it does. The decline didnât start when people noticed it. It started when effort quietly stopped being requiredâboth to make music and to obtain it. Somewhere around the late 1990s and early 2000s, the friction that used to filter ideas, talent, and intent began disappearing. Nobody called it decline at the time. Why would they? The industry still looked massive. Records still sold. Tours still happened. Everything appeared healthy from the outside.
But the rules underneath was already shifting.
Home recording stopped being a compromise and became the norm. Editing tools moved from correcting mistakes to hiding them. The internet broke the idea that music should cost anything to acquire. Napster didnât kill musicâit killed the expectation that obtaining it should involve choice, money, or patience. The system changed long before the culture caught up. By the time streaming normalized access over ownership, the damage was already baked in. Albums still existed, but risk didnât. Genres still existed, but meaning started thinning. Labels still existed, but development didnât. Attention became the currency, not memory. None of this happened all at once. There was no announcement. No collapse moment. Just a slow erosion that only becomes obvious once youâre far enough away from where it started. Now itâs everywhere. And once you see it, itâs hard to unsee.
I. Music Isnât âGetting Worse.â It is worseâŚ
More Precisely, Music Is Being Made by People Who Never Learned the Language of Making Music.
The uncomfortable truth isnât just that music is âeasierâ to make nowâitâs that the system no longer distinguishes between learning the craft and bypassing it. Tools that once required foundational understandingârhythm, harmony, arrangement, tension and releaseânow present themselves as creativity itself. The blueprint has been abstracted away, and what remains is a polished surface that convinces the untrained theyâve built something when theyâve only assembled it.
Building something and assembling something, while having close associations, are not âone in the same.â
This mirrors the exact pathology I called out a few years ago in my essay called The Art of Fake: people projecting professional authority without professional failure. They arenât artists yetâtheyâre students, tinkerers, or app operators, mistaking access for aptitude. The danger isnât democratization; itâs that standards stopped being enforced, and the market rewards confidence and volume over comprehension. The deeper question isnât whether this music is âbad,â but whether a culture that no longer requires apprenticeship can even recognize mastery when it appears. The lines between expert and beginner have now blurred that beginners are now getting the rewards only designed for experts and only the experts are complaining about it.
II. Spotify Didnât Just Kill the Album â It Killed the Cost of Commitment
The album didnât die because listeners lost attention spans; it died because the system removed the need to commit to anything longer than a moment. The old album cycle wasnât romanticâit was transactional.
How it used to go was you would be in the car or hanging out at home, have the AM/FM radio playing. Maybe out on a bike ride with the headphones on listening to your local radio station. You would hear a new song and would really like it. Back then they would usually play a song on a rotation every hour or couple of hours. It was always likely to hear it again the same day if you heard it earlier. A few weeks later another song from the same group would be released. You then did some work to earn some money and would go to your local record store, CD Warehouse, Camelot Music, wherever you purchased music. You bought ten songs for the two you loved from the radio because scarcity demanded it. Sometimes you would love the entire album. Sometimes it was one or two other songs from the album and even sometimes it is still those two songs you bought the whole album for. That transaction forced immersion, and immersion created meaning. The album cover. The liner notes. Sometimes the photography was cool or the artwork being badass. It was an experience to listen to a new record in its entirety for the first time uninterrupted. Especially if it was a group, you already really liked. I know for a fact I got to experience that as a kid, teenager, young adult and now older adult. I still very much appreciate the full-length album.
However, times have changed. Streaming replaced that with infinite optionality, which feels like freedom until you realize nothing sticks because nothing has weight. Bands still make albums now for the same reason people still write long lettersâthey believe in the form, even if the recipient doesnât. At first, in the 2000s, when pirating was really huge, artists and labels didnât really know how to deal with this. Ultimately, streaming took over because they realized one important part of the music industry was king above all else.
Youâre still watching the movie. The music is still playing. Nothing sounds broken. Thatâs the trick. The song didnât change. What changed was who it belongs to and what itâs for. One day, music was something you bought. You owned a copy. You could play it when you wanted, as many times as you wanted, and nobody was tracking you doing it. That mattered more than people realized. Then a frame got spliced in. You didnât notice it, because nothing stopped working. The song still played. The album art was still there. The artist name was still on the screen. But behind it, the rules changed. You donât own the music anymore. Youâre renting access to it. And that small shift rewired everything.
Publishing rights are where that money actually goes now. Not to the act of selling music to people, but to the act of allowing music to exist inside other things. Videos. Ads. Clips. Streams. Background noise. Anywhere attention passes through. If a song plays in a TikTok, someone gets paid. If it plays in a YouTube video, someone gets paid. If it plays in a store, a gym, a show, a commercialâsomeone gets paid.
That âsomeoneâ is whoever owns the publishing.
It doesnât matter if you listen closely.
It doesnât matter if you remember it.
It doesnât matter if you even like what you heard.
It doesnât matter if you even know what you heard.
Or if you heard at all.
The system doesnât care.
Under the old model, money came from commitment. You bought the record. You sat with it. You lived with it. The artist and the label both needed you to actually want the music. Under the new model, money comes from placement. From being used. From being present. A song can make money without ever meaning anything to anyone. Thatâs the frame you didnât notice. Once ownership shifted from people buying music to platforms licensing sound, albums stopped being the point. Songs became modular. Shorter. Safer. Easier to drop into someone elseâs content and disappear without friction. The music didnât get worse overnight. It got lighter. Thinner. Less demanding. Because when you donât have to commit to something to own it, you stop committing at all.
And the movie keeps playing like nothing had ever changed. Then all of the sudden, a blip. Most people never realized the splice happened. A big fat cock in your face. Just like in âFight Club.â
2026. AI productivity tools are now a normal thing, and if you have money, and a little creativity with how technology works, one can make things others cannot and those things be seen by the public as polished and professional. Social media only âartistsâ flooding platforms with content: output without investment. When nothing costs the creator much, the audience assumes it shouldnât cost them much eitherâattention included. The album didnât lose relevance because it failed. It lost relevance because the environment no longer rewards endurance.
III. Genres Didnât Die â They Collapsed Under the Weight of Gatekeeping, Even more Sub-Genres and Over-Labeling
Heavy metal is the perfect case study for this. Heavy Metal has survived fragmentation without losing identity. However, with internet sub-cultures being more prevalent in the 2020s, cracks are starting to show. There are some nonsense labels out there pretending to be serious sub-genres of heavy metal. Labels like Nintendocore and Witch House Metal are not real sub-genres. A sub-genre is just a label to describe a style, within the genre. Itâs all under the Heavy Metal banner. Give or take, responsibly, there are approximately 40 legitimate subgenresâand over 100 if you indulge internet micro-taxonomiesâbut everyone still understands what âmetalâ means. The umbrella holds because the culture values lineage and skill, even when it argues about labels or which sub-genre of heavy metal this/that band/song/record should belong in.
Contrast that with modern genre logic elsewhere, where categories exist less to describe sound and more to signal belonging. When every micro-variation demands recognition, the label stops communicating anything useful. At that point, genres become aesthetic marketing tags, not musical descriptors. Like having full-blown arguments why Metalcore isnât really metal when compared to thrash or the subtle differences between Death Metal and Deathcore. At the end of the day, does it really matter? The Metal Community should feel proud there is so much metal to consume in 2026 that one will never get to it all. There was a time in my youth where there wasnât a whole lot of really great heavy metal out there. There was a lot of arena rock being called Heavy Metal and that was fine but a lot of Heavy Metal of the late 1970s and 1980s were really loud, really fast and really experimental. Not all of it was good. Most of it wasnât but then again, âgoodâ can be whatever one thinks. The old debate would be based on record sales, T-shirt sales and concert tickets sold. In todayâs culture one can still use those metrics but then you have streams, views, likes, hearts, all sorts of metrics that can sway or even dictate public opinion. None of that can actually answer if it is âgoodâ to you, the listener.
For example, I think Billie Eilish is a no talent mouth whisperer parading around as a singer. Yet, sheâs won awards. That must make her good right? Well. Sure, but âgoodâ is whatever you think it is because itâs called art. Some have strong opinions of what consists of art as a definition. There is no wrong answer. I can explain why I donât like her music, but I cannot convince anyone if that explanation is a true fact or not. I do find it funny Google or Wiki used the word âavant-garde styleâ as something regular people know what that means.
What âavant-gardeâ actually means: Avant-garde is a French term meaning âadvance guard.â In art, it refers to work that is:
Intentionally experimental.
Deliberately breaking existing forms.
Often difficult, abrasive, or unpopular at first.
More concerned with process than audience acceptance.
Avant-garde is not a sub-genre of anything. Itâs a category for no category. Which defies the concept of genre/sub-genre labeling to begin with. In Heavy Metal itâs often used as a polite shrug disguised as a descriptor. The point is the actual meaning of things, even in music and even the artists themselves are blurred to have no meaning at all. Plus, she has dead eyes. Like she is blind. I feel like she is an alien pretending to be a pop star. Hey, if you love her music good for you. She has nothing on Sabbath or even Bon-Jovi. She canât play anything to the level of Jimi Hendrix but good for her. I donât like Sleep Token, Ghost, Bad Omens, or Falling in Reverse. I might be a Metalhead but I donât love everything. If I hear something and it makes my ears hurt and brain freeze. I will explain why I donât like them. Itâs the Gatekeepers that argue and cannot give one simple example of why they donât like something and cannot explain why, then get insulting towards the asker when they canât. Anyone that listens to metal has this one thing in common. We all listen to metal. There are different styles, all different in their own ways. Itâs those differences that makes this so damn interesting. With all that said, Gatekeeping did and does serve a function. Without it, shared standards, vocabulary, and lineage, a genre collapses into aesthetics and vibes instead of remaining a meaningful, communicable musical language. They did warn us this would happen but not from music changing. AI taking the model of music, turning it on its side and reimagining it. Which is where we are now. People demanding recognition without earning distinction. The irony is that metalâs gatekeepingâoften criticizedâmay be the very thing that prevented total collapse of Heavy Metal. The question isnât whether genres still exist. Itâs whether they still mean anything beyond self-identification.
IV. Record Labels Are Useless Only If You Know What Youâre Doing
Labels didnât become obsolete because artists suddenly got empoweredâthey became optional because infrastructure decentralized. If you understand production, niche marketing, publishing rights, and audience targeting, a label becomes what it always was: a loan with interest.
In the past, that loan made sense. Artists and Bands needed upfront cash just to exist long enough to fail or succeed. Studio time wasnât cheap. Mixing and mastering werenât optional. Physical media had to be pressed. Merch had to be printed. Tours had to be booked, routed, and paid for before a single ticket sold. Flights, buses, hotels, food, crewânone of that ran on hope. Labels fronted the money, knowing full well theyâd recoup through publishing because thatâs where the real money lived. If the record sold, the label got paid first. If it didnât, the artist carried the debt. Some artists became rich. Others became cautionary tales.
Today, most of that machinery no longer requires a gatekeeper. Recording can be done at home. Distribution is digital. Marketing is targeted, not broadcast. Merch can be printed on demand. Touring can be scaled to demand instead of ego. If an artist understands the systemâand is willing to do the workâa label stops being a necessity and becomes a choice. Not everyone should self-manage, but those who can arenât rebelling against the industry. Theyâre just no longer dependent on it.
Most who claim they âdonât need a labelâ also donât understand why labels exist in the first place. They confuse independence with competence. Yes, you can self-release, self-market, self-monetizeâbut only if you actually know how those systems work. The real shift is that labels no longer develop talent, because the market doesnât reward development anymore. Artists are expected to arrive finished, validated, and profitableâor not arrive at all. Whatâs being exposed isnât label uselessness; itâs how many people never should have been trying to sell art in the first place.
Bon-Jovi didnât get really noticed till the bandâs third record. Guns and Roses released a record and no one knew it existed for almost a year before their pop started. Motley Crue didnât headline their own tour till their second record. There are many stories like this where popular bands and artists didnât become mega stars till they had some records and time under their belt. Now one is supposed to be polished before they even walk into a professional studio or play a show in front of more people than they ever played in front of before.
V. The Grammys Arenât Proof Music Is Worse â Theyâre Proof That Durability Is No Longer the Metric
How about a Grammy comparison? A Grammy comparison isnât about taste; itâs about construction and lifespan. Songs once built to survive decades were written by one or two people who understood melody, structure, and restraint. Many modern nominees are committee-built, sample-dependent, and optimized for circulationânot memory.
This doesnât make them immoral. It makes them temporary.
My older blog on this subject already diagnosed this cultural sleight-of-hand: mistaking visibility for high quality and value, engagement for quality, and consensus for excellence. When songs are designed to function inside platforms rather than culture, longevity becomes accidental, not intentional. There are reasons why songs of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s seem to feel more, âreal,â to the people that still jam that music as if it just came out yesterday, loudly and itâs the coolest thing since Crystal Pepsi. Itâs not because those decades were magically better or because people were smarter and more creative. Granted technology in music was not nearly as advanced and easy to use back then. Musicians and engineers alike had to be creative in troubleshooting. Itâs because those songs had to survive friction. They had to earn airtime on the regular old AM/FM radio. They had to justify physical production. They had to be played in rooms with other people who could disagree with you about whether they were any good. Those songs werenât optimized for algorithms, feeds, or chopped into usable fragments. They were written to exist as complete ideas, meant to be replayed, argued over, worn out, and lived with. Longevity wasnât a lucky side effectâit was the goal. When something had to clear that many real-world hurdles just to exist, what survived tended to feel heavier, louder, and more permanent. Not perfectâjust real.
The real indictment isnât that todayâs music existsâitâs that no one seems offended by how disposable itâs allowed to be. This entire argumentâAI, albums, genres, labels, awards, posersâcollapses into one core tension I have been writing about for years: Access has replaced apprenticeship, and overconfidence has replaced qualification. Music didnât quietly devolve or devalue itself. We lowered the cost of entry and removed the cost of failure, then acted surprised when standards eroded. Not everyone creating is a poser. But everyone demanding recognition without mastery is. And that distinction still mattersâwhether the culture wants to admit it or not.
A lot of these arguments come from Rick Beatoâs YouTube Channel. He brings up a lot of good points on the industry and how the almighty algorithm, big music labels and self-publishing have changed the music industry since the internet became the medium in which how humanity absorb music in the 2020s. He covers the material much better than I do. I just feel my own relationship with music, my work history in it and my life since absorbing the internet into my life also sees the music industry like this. The video game and film industry are all the same now. Nothing has memorable staying power. Things come out. They come strong but within a few months it is something less remembered. I listen to more old music than I do new music but there is plenty of new music out there I find good. Same with film and video games. I find myself rewatching old movies or watching old movies I have never seen because the quality is so low now. Especially in the horror genre. There is way more crap out there than quality and that crap doesnât even lift the quality stuff up all that much. There is a resurgence of taking older video games and remodifying them, known as âmodding,â to bring these old games up to modern standards because the quality of video games have dropped so much with all the new platforms to host games. Â
If you give me a source that has unlimited potential that can access the past whenever I feel like it. To me that is a personal win, but to the craft itself and what it is used to represent dies a little bit each year, each decade, each new piece of technology that takes the friction away.
Erosion doesnât resolve, it just⌠continues till there isn't anything left.
Tacita Devaluatio Musicae
Latin for: (The Quiet Devaluation of Music)
by David-Angelo Mineo
1/23/2026
3,427 Words
