I criticised a particular genre of music in a particular era for its self-indulgent, pompous complexity for the sake of complexity and failure to live up to its claims. I attacked the genre, not you. When you say: "It is remarkable how much ignorance of an entire genre of music one can express in a single sentence, isn't it? ", that's you making personal remarks about me.

However not all Progressive Music in the 1970s, or at any other time, conformed to your stereotypical view, so to apply it to the entire genre is wrong.

I never said all progressive music was exactly the same. I made a comment about prog music from the 70s, and the vast bulk of it is just plain dire.

What Bon Iver did has been done loads before and a lot better, eg Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska album, Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding, Kris Kristofferson, Neil Young and some of Steve Earle's acoustic stuff etc.Most of BI's 3 chord songs become boring and samey after a few plays. He's competent but not interesting or original enough for me nor can I stand his high droning voice. But FEFA album is well recorded compared to the terribly recorded dross around now which makes ithat album seem better than it really is..

One artist around in the 70s was the late John Martyn who wrote/performed some brilliant acoustic blues influenced stuff, which holds up well today...and he was British

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_offkmjSWE

I'm a fan of all of the above, and still rate Bon Iver's album that highly. There's nothing frightfully complicated about a lot of great tunes by these songwriters either.

Simple can be beautiful and moving, which is what I was saying all along. I wouldn't dismiss a song like State Trooper on the grounds that it's basically 2 chords. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmT-jlL8ZiY

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Today's Pop is rubbish not worth buying at all unless you like generic watered down R&B/Dance as the new form of Pop.

You don't seem to understand the use of 'too loud' in this context.What 'too loud' means is that the quieter noises that musical piece are mixed upwards (possibly the louder noises are mixed downwards to match the quieter noises to a certain extent even).
Today's sound engineers tend to reduce the dynamic range of musical recordings these days.Turning down the volume control doesn't make the music less loud / less compressed .All genres of music tend to be recorded with less dynamic range these day's.

Please read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

Some early recording's have been re-released with the peak amplitude reached more often.'Clipping' is sometimes used which means that louder noises become distorted but getting an overall louder sound.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

agreed!

But isn't that true of every genre of music?

Excellent example to use to illustrate your point - it even features that slightly reminiscent Nintendo Gameboy/SNES synthesiser sound that's been overused in the last few years.

Another 'sound' that I would say has been used on way too many chart hits is that 'drum' pattern as featured in songs like Usher's OMG..

Admittedly you can go through any period of popular music and say that certain drum patterns, chord progressions or what not were cloned (look/listen back to the 60s Motown sound for instance). However, whilst I'm not one to harp on about everything in the top 40 sounding a bit too samey samey, I've found that a lot of chart stuff has passed me by and has failed to grab my interest.

I've been more intrigued by the new releases that feature on radio 2's playlist for the last few years and listening beyond the top 20 and generally speaking the new stuff I hear sounds nothing like the sort of music that imitates that watered down dance/contemporary R&B sound.

SpaceToilets (where did that one come from ) I was listening to Pick Of The Pops a few weeks ago which was playing a week from 55 years ago in July 1957, and all I could think of as I listened to each and every track was....they all sound the same! This in a year at the birth of the rock and pop era too.

So it's nothing new is it. Maybe we have finally gone full circle?

In 1957 rock n roll was so new you could kind of forgive - you'd think more than half a century later with all the music technology we have our tastes would be a bit more ambitious. Apparently not.

Indeed, and I think the "full circle" argument is compelling - no-one was sure what to do at the beginning so they stuck closely to a formula. Diversity happened as popular music grew, matured and flourished.

As with any creative venture there was a peak, or a series of peaks, of creativity, followed by an inevitable decline, not necessarily because the pool of talent had diminished but the ways in which an artist can express themselves has - it seems pretty much everything that can be done has been done, hence so much of modern pop music sounds recycled and rehashed to the ears of those of us who have been listening to pop for decades.

The latest technological advance has been in digital recording and distribution but instead of it being a creative leap it's been largely the opposite - conservative and limiting. The process of recording music has shifted from being in the hands of creative artists who write and perform their own music to producers and executives who can knock out a track very cheaply using computerised equipment.

The result is that we have a few handfuls of singers with fairly good voices releasing songs with terribly limited and dull backing music. The public don't seem to mind as long as it's got a fast, danceable beat but the monotony of it all will wear on them eventually. People will tire of the same old stuff and then where will music go? We need a return to proper creativity and we must move away from cheaply made, mass produced computerised drivel. It's unfair on artists and it's unfair on consumers, both of whom are being short-changed (artistically if not financially) by sub-standard product.

I think outside of the "mainstream" that is already happening.

More and more artists and bands I go to see are self-funding albums to sell them at gigs, through their website, etc, rather than wait for their "big break" and the inevitable stranglehold of the record companies.

Fab post Eraserhead.

One of the most annoying things I ever heard come out of someone talking about music, was from Pete Waterman. Yeah, okay, not exactly a surprise it was him, but here's what he said once, that made me so very very angry.

It was one of those TV shows looking back on the Abba music. Up popped Waterman and said "nowadays a record like Dancing Queen would be simply impossible to make, we no longer have the ability to do things like that anymore".

That quote was about 5 years ago. It stuck in my head ever since. I don't accept it. I will not accept it. I cannot accept it. So you could make a better record in 1976 than in 2006, or 2012 as we now are? Please God I hope that Bjorn and Benny would never agree to that maddening statement.

I've often wondered why on earth more musical instruments are not used on pop tunes, whether the real thing or a generated version. The saxophone springs to mind. How often do you hear it in pop songs for example? Baker Street is the obvious, but what about Hazel O'Connor and Will You? that was a huge hit. Made by the sax solo.
Of all the musical instrumentation available, so little is even touched for pop music and it should be.
While technology improves, the product delivered by that technology diminishes. Tech stuff and electronic wizardry has not made people more creative, but infact turned many into lazy button pushers and tweakers with no real music artistry whatsoever, which almost lets the equipment lead them into some kind of generic tune that comes out at the end. David Guetta comes to mind immediately. There are many others, too many.

Yeah, it's a disaster. We're given all this headroom by CD and digital audio, and engineers are forced to crush the sound into oblivion.

It says something when vinyl has more dynamic range than a CD these days simply because engineers can't compress the audio to within an inch of its life on vinyl without pressing silence.

This is absolute nonsense. Singles sales are far higher now than they were 20 years ago. Number ones are selling into 6 figures now.

Though the lack of variety in the charts at the moment is depressing. So many auto-tuned party tunes and very little else.

Great post, totally agree.

I'll always remember when downloads were integrated into the UK singles chart for the first time. Everyone thought it would herald a new age for unknown artists to get noticed, have an impact and shake up the predictable top ten.

So what was number 1 that week? Westlife.

My brother says he still listened to CDs and vinyl because he
doesn't like the way the sound on some MP3s is affected.

Damn, so whenever i point out that people are whinging because their chosen music genre is "real" music and everything else is shit, they can just point me to this article now

Unless they like the current dance-pop in the charts of course.

What this study shows is nothing that isn't already known. People on this forum have been discussing how all these dance-pop songs use the same sounds in for a few years now.

That type of music does seem to be on its way out though. I noticed ever since they included streaming into the US charts, the generic dance songs have been doing worse.

Music is ever changing though, so while one genre might be losing popularity now, it'll be back. I remember the days when "Nu Metal" was in vogue and Limp Bizkit had a number one single and album.

But you're not comparing like with like, are you?

These days any track sold electronically is counted as a "single" and counts towards a placing in the singles chart, but the physical sale of singles is considerably lower than it was 20 years ago because back then the physical medium, CD or vinyl, was the only format available.

So it isn't "absolute nonsense" at all.