Music - What Happened? (hint: nothing)

So I'm going to talk about something less nerdy and kid-friendly today, but still slightly nerdy as you'll see soon. More often than not, I've heard many people, both young and old, talk about the decline of popular music. This isn't a recent development either. This has been a constant gripe for centuries, even way back when the critics first named Baroque music (translating loosely to "rough" or "imperfect"). I'm sure you've all heard it before, when you listen to music on the radio and people say things like "this is garbage. Remember ______? That was the best." You've done it, your parents have done it, and so on and so forth.

The truth is, yes, there's some horrible music out there in the mainstream right now. But is this really a new phenomenon? Actually, no. Here's the thing. Modern pop and rock stations are required to play stuff that's new, usually no more than a year old at most, and even that's stretching it. They don't categorize songs based on them being good or bad, but rather being old or new. Classic rock stations, on the other hand, categorize things based on how much people like them due to having a much more vast collection to work with, and so they filter out the bad stuff. A lot of number one singles from the 60s and 70s are most likely not even played anymore. Bands like Queen, Zeppelin, etc. barely made the charts at all for a long while. Critics hated bands like that, and even normal everyday fans saw them as being fringe interests, not quite mainstream but not quite obscure either. Those weren't the bands that outsold everyone. They were the bands that endured after all the catchy pop imitators and simplistic stuff got forgotten.

It gets more extreme as we go further back in time. Try and name all the Baroque composers you can think of. You probably thought of Bach, Vivaldi, and maybe a few others. These weren't the only composers of the era. They were everywhere. We just only remember the good ones. The forgettable ones probably don't even have copies of their music in any form anywhere at all.

Now let's look a little more recently. How many diehard Spice Girls, Hanson, or 98 Degrees fans do you know? Now compare that to when they first came out. This is a huge drop in popularity. Now how many fans of even older bands are still out there, like Metallica, the Beatles, or Led Zeppelin? Probably way more, even though they started making hits way earlier. That's what I'm talking about.

So the next time you listen to the radio, remember, for every Nicki Minaj, One Direction, and Miley Cyrus song that makes you cringe, just know that there's a Coheed and Cambria, Nightwish, and Abney Park song out there that isn't being played. This isn't the musical apocalypse. You just need to know where to look.