I have genuinely put a lot of thought into this lately. I have the sensation like older media was more expressive and thoughtful, there's at least more... interesting flavors there generally...
I am happy to ponder and willingly accept this is probably just my perception.
I have a couple of theories. The creators of the media are becoming more and more my age. Do they have nothing interesting to say to me as our experience is shared? Is this something experienced by previous generations as their generation took over media, or is our zeitgeist as "digital natives" so newly shared that this is a new experience?
I know people who would blame "ensh*tification" and move on, but I really think that there is more to what is happening.
What I do know is it's exceedingly rare for me to watch a movie or show made after about 2015 and to find myself thinking about it days later. There are of course exceptions.
Its care.
Us humans can feel when something was made with care vs when it’s made to check some lists people with ties made.
Same with music, food, books, art, software, hardware, design, houses.
Most stuff today is made to avoid some risks instead of being what it ought to be. Not trying to please anyone is the best way to make great things. Or maybe it is my hate of focus groups who spoiled it all (and I used to be a game user researcher…)
Weird analogy, but it feels similar to the way old music differed to new music.
Old music had more variation in volume - volume rises and falls to add nuance to the piece. New music is produced differently and has a more “flat” sound due to everything being louder and variation being reduced by compression.
Seems like some parallels to other forms of media.
Music is interesting to me, because I've experienced the opposite.
What I've encountered is if you get outside the top 100, a lot of like TikTok and SoundCloud famous people are actually doing some really interesting music. Things that play with the sound in ways you would never hear on the radio.
I feel like music is the one area where I still genuinely find interesting modern stuff regularly.
I couldn't agree more. I think what has happened is that everything has become so fragmented due to the sheer volume of content being created that discovery is still a challenge. If you are someone who thinks that music, movies, novels, etc are in decline, then frankly you're just not looking hard enough.
For music, I'd recommend looking at Bandcamp Daily[0]. It's not all my cup of tea, but there are some amazing new artists out there spanning nearly every genre imaginable.
I strongly disagree. Just because compression is common in pop music (and perhaps overused in some genres) doesn't mean new music isn't innovative and dynamic. When I listen to music say from 1920 to 1950, it is so often so incredibly lame (not always). It's basic ideas and chord progressions and simple melodies with lyrics that don't say much.
Music is a way for people to express themselves and relate about how they see the world. People didn't stop doing that recently. In fact, I'd say people have been emboldened to say even more and push what music really means.
It's not just compression. Rick Beato has talked about this a lot.
Popular music no longer has any key changes:
From 1960 to 1995, between 20% and 35% of Billboard Hot 100 number one hits in any given year contained a key change. Around the turn of the millennium that rate started to dip until it hit 0% by the end of the 2000s. [1]
I believe that simple 4/4 time has also become more prevalent as compared to more complex time signatures. I don't have as good support for this claim, but the AI tells me "4/4 (simple quadruple) has dominated Western popular music since at least the 1960s, and corpus work suggests that compound and non‑4/4 meters have become less common over time in mainstream styles, implying an even higher proportion of songs in simple 4/4 today.".
Beato is also fond of pointing out how modern music is written by committee, and that modern artists are more a "product" than ever before. From memory, he's pointing out that in the past, the credited writer of popular songs was usually a band, or perhaps a single person. But more recently, the credited writer is a list of multiple people not the band (and in fact, top songs across recent years have been notable not under the name of a band, but of an individual performer).
EDIT: Further querying leads to this as well:
Timbral Variety: The "texture" of sounds. In the 70s, you had a mix of acoustic, electric, and orchestral layers. Studies show a "homogenization of the timbral palette" since the 1960s peak.
Lyrical Complexity: The vocabulary and reading level of lyrics. Analysis of Billboard hits shows the average reading level has dropped from 3.5 to 2.7 (roughly 3rd grade) since 2005.
Is the loudness war still going on? I kind of assumed it died out with streaming. Music apps are smart enough nowadays to normalize loudness anyway, and there are better ways of getting attention, right?
2026 releases have varied dynamic range but the majority is still low. Loudness war mastering sounds better on phone speakers and in cars. Even though streaming services normalize loudness, you need quiet listening environments and good headphones/speakers to properly appreciate a high dynamic range recording.
Indeed streaming killed the loudness war - all major streaming apps either require masters to meet a specific loudness target or perform normalization on their end to move their encodes to their loudness target.
I mostly listen to pop music or pop-adjacent, which is like the ultra-processed food of music. Highly compressed and generally lacking much dynamism.
I assume there is plenty of interesting dynamism outside of the pop charts and Spotify mixes, but unless I’m listening to live versions or really raw artists, I generally don’t experience them.
I wonder how much this is just a sampling bias. Older media has been repeatedly filtered over time, so you don't see all the bland, derivative ripoffs that were abundant at the time. Likewise, interesting and forward-thinking work produced today may not be widely appreciated for many years - consider that Van Gogh's work was largely ignored during his lifetime.
Similar to how music changes perceptions of movie scenes (it's usually silly but the effect is there), newsrooms have been decorated to look like a crisis center with the choice of colors and words.
People are naturally prone to pointing their attention at sources of alarm. And attention is important for advertisements which pay the bills.
News was not produced or directed back then like it is today.
Interesting thought-provoking movies still exist. They're just far away from regular people's comfort zone. I'll recommend you three post 2015 movies that will get you thinking:
Wandering (2022)
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Monster (2023)
But I'd concede that maybe making movies nowadays is harder because things are turning more and more expensive and there's too much pressure for producing profitable movies. So Art takes a back sit in movies that look for profit.
It's more of a thinker if you get past the very well done and entertaining first layer of 'slop'. (Content warning: there's some offensive potty humor and LOTS of violence in that first layer!)
The movie considers potential. A literal multiverse of potential. It also explores how society treats people using their potential and time in different ways. As fellow readers gray and their family relations start to get older they too will likely have the misfortune of knowing people entering dementia. How people are treated as they slide away from this reality is represented rather well by the film.
Yeah yeah, it isn't arthouse but, is it a less of a thinker than Pulp Fiction? I have the suspicion that GP would find IMDb Top movies agreeable and they aren't all deeply introspective films, which isn't a bad thing.
I think it's just survivorship bias, we don't remember the pre-2000 schlock because it's schlock. The two real "things used to be better before" situations IMO are:
- The loss of DVD revenue killed mid-budget productions, in the US the options are mostly indie darling or outrageous budget blockbuster.
- Big productions look flatter than before due to VFX crew exploitation. The VFX must be reworked 100 times with minimal time because planning is for suckers. No complex lighting for you and only crunch for the non-unionized Korean.
Risk management kills any attempt at bold choices, decisions are steered at the modelable and the low risk. There space is thus shrunk. When there were fewer media behemoths there were more variations on the risk models and the pattern was less descernable.
The barrier of entry for media is very low now. That means a lot of things that wouldn't have gotten made now get made.
What that also means is that there is much more cheap junk pushed out the door. The investment to try again is now much lower than to try to add meaning to so-so film, so you just quickly land it and move on.
There is certainly survivor bias when looking at the quality of older media but at the same time, the incentives to only produce quality media has evaporated.
We're in the stochastic age where all business is run on chance. Don't make 1 good films, make 20 and hope one is good.
I remember reading the letters of Cicero about Gaias Julius (Later known as Cesar) how he complains how the he and his gang is acting all amoral and wearing ridiculous scandalous clothes, waring the togas in provocative feminine fashion.
There are accounts from all over history of how "the times were more thoughtful and moral in the good old days" But here we are, thousands of years later, still complaining about the younger members of our species and how they will bring ruin to us all. Perhaps they will, but it all seems so human to complain about that.
I remember the art of the 90s - when my part of the world got access to marvelous pieces like Thunder in Paradise, Barbed Wire, American Ninja, Bay Watch ... at the time it was considered the pinnacle of art by teenagers like me, and despised by my parents. But at the same time we had things like The Matrix, The Shawshank Redemption, Leon ... We remember the good stuff and the forget the fluff.
There are some real gems being created all the time, maybe not always from Hollywood but human creativity soldiers on.
The Good Place, The Expanse, 3 Body Problem, Horizon Zero Dawn, Expedition 33, Project Hail Marry. There is a constant stream of incredible thoughtful stuff being produced - books, games, movies, essays, videos, podcasts - the medium might change but humans always try to find ways to discover, understand and express the world around us in novel ways, one just needs to listen/watch.
Not like there was a general lack of tragedy, pain, suffering, war, chaos in the intervening thousands of years.
Seems so superficial to ignore everything and just say if we're here, we exist, then the claim that things will go bad is proven false. The only thing proven false is if anyone ever claimed humanity will be extinct. But think of all the suffering in all the wars between the roman empire and now. Is that nothing? Does that not qualify as very bad stuff? Did humanity advance continuosly, or was it a chaotic path, with ups and downs? Don't the downs qualify as what the complainers predicted?
To me it seems history teaches us we will survive as a species. But there is definitely a lot of room for very bad stuff to happen. It has happened before.
> The creators of the media are becoming more and more my age.
I'm a boomer so the opposite is happening to me. The people in media look more and more like children to me. So I can't tell if the fact that they seem to be speaking more childishly is real or just the expected bias from an old fart. I should experiment with getting AI to put the same words in Walter Cronkite's mouth to see if it changes them.
It’s definitely not the only reason but it is a big reason in my opinion. All new movies are stripped of grit and edge. They have no gravitas. There are no rapes, purely objectified women, any sort of implied CSA, truly hero tier “alpha” men etc. Everyone in movies these days seem like mild mannered office workers. I feel like filmmakers are bound by many rules that turn everything into mass accessible milquetoast.
I am happy to ponder and willingly accept this is probably just my perception.
I have a couple of theories. The creators of the media are becoming more and more my age. Do they have nothing interesting to say to me as our experience is shared? Is this something experienced by previous generations as their generation took over media, or is our zeitgeist as "digital natives" so newly shared that this is a new experience?
I know people who would blame "ensh*tification" and move on, but I really think that there is more to what is happening.
What I do know is it's exceedingly rare for me to watch a movie or show made after about 2015 and to find myself thinking about it days later. There are of course exceptions.