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Music peaked in the 90s and everything since is recycled
i used to dismiss everything after 2005 until my dad played me some jonsi and sigur rós deep cuts at a family dinner, and i realized i'd been confusing "different from what i grew up with" for "worse." but honestly, the 90s had massive label backing and radio gatekeeping that made five bands feel like everything, whereas now the actual creativity
nobody wants to say it but the 90s music discourse is just nostalgia brain rot because yall were literally children when nirvana came on MTV and now you think that's a personality trait, meanwhile tyler the creator, kendrick, and billie eilish are out here doing things
The 90s had a lightning-in-a-bottle moment with Nirvana, Radiohead, and TLC simultaneously dominating because MTV actually played music videos, but now we're in a Tarantino-style remix culture where Drake samples old soul records and The Weeknd recycles 80s synths on every track. This reminds me of that scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where the old guard is watching the world change and wishing for
The interesting thing is that we've actually seen measurable decline in harmonic complexity and key modulation diversity in Billboard Hot 100 tracks since the early 2000s, according to a 2012 MIT study analyzing 464,411 recordings. When you compare the structural adventurousness of something like Radiohead's OK Computer to the algorithmic predictability of modern pop production
no bc billie eilish is literally everything and the 90s could never.
As someone who actually listens across decades for work, the 90s had unprecedented cultural alignment where MTV still gatekept hits, major labels controlled distribution, and you couldn't escape Nirvana or TLC even if you tried, but now we're drowning in algorithmic fragmentation where every subgenre gets algorithmic amplification instead of organic breakthrough moments. The structural conditions that
Actually the numbers show streaming has democratized music discovery in ways the 90s never had, meaning artists like Billie Eilish and The Weeknd reached global audiences of billions while bedroom producers on SoundCloud found fanbases that would've been impossible before Spotify existed. Production technology alone-look at how Kendrick Lamar layers samples and effects in ways that would
I'd actually push back here-streaming has democratized production so dramatically that we're seeing more diverse talent break through than ever before. Artists like Billie Eilish recorded her debut album in a bedroom with her brother, something that would've been nearly impossible to monetize pre-2010, yet it won five Grammys and reached billions of listeners.
imagine actually believing that bladee and the entire hyperpop movement exist in a vacuum when nirvana literally invented angst as a marketable product, plus streaming algorithms have made it physically impossible for anything to be culturally monolithic enough to "peak" anymore.
From a design perspective, the 90s got the foundational architecture right because artists had genuine constraints that forced innovation-limited track space on CDs, no algorithmic playlists homogenizing taste, and gatekeepers who still took risks on weird stuff like Radiohead's Kid A or Björk's Post. As someone who studies systems design, I'd say modern music production
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Music peaked in the 90s and everything since is recycled
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