The Lindy effect, recently popularised by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Skin in the Game, tries to explain the “Test of Time”, or granny’s wisdom. It’s a heuristic to streamline decisionmaking over the long term, and it has predictive qualities. For example, if a business is only a year old, the most likely scenario is that it will last one year more. However, if it does last two years, then the likelihood that it will last an additional two years increases.
To state the hypothesis as it applies to music: If a song or an album has been remembered for 20 years, then it’s more likely to be remembered for another 20 years. If it’s been remembered for 50 years, then it’s probably pretty damn good. If it’s been remembered for centuries, then it’s probably better than you can understand.
If this is true, then it might explain why anyone who has been listening to music for more than a decade has the sense that music was simply better back in the day. It’s not that music is necessarily worse now, on average – we’re in the moment, and it’s difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.
What we hear in the daily soundtrack of life, when you’re getting your hair cut, out shopping, something coming from someone’s phone at the other end of the bus, is noise. The quality of this music is going to vary wildly because what is popular doesn’t necessarily correlate to what is good. The signal is the true state of music, which fluctuates, and can come from anywhere from the top of the pop charts to underground niche movements.
What we think of as “good older music” is not representative of the general state of music back then. It might be the case those songs that are remembered, and still played on the radio, TV and movies, happen to be the exceptional outliers. The Lindy effect is about filtering: Time has sifted out the mediocre songs that were popular for arbitrary or non-universal reasons, or were just faddish. If you’re going to go to the trouble of looking back to the 1980s now, what you bring back for us better be good.
And what is considered as great music from decades ago wasn’t necessarily chart material. But in the long term, they have been rediscovered by subsequent generations.
James Smith, “The myth of ‘bad’ modern music”, Being Libertarian, 2019-02-25.
May 26, 2022
QotD: They don’t make good music any more
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The other problem is that “music” is an incredibly broad term, with numerous sub-genera, each with its own definition of quality. What counts as good in orchestral music is necessarily going to be different from what counts as good in plainsong, and both will be different from symphonic metal, all of which will be different from filk.
What most people listen to is mass-market music. The aims of radio stations (even satellite radio), Spotify, and other groups is to maximize profits by selling an audience to those making ads. This means they need to find the set of music which consists of the maximum amount of the maximum number of sub-genera, in order to pull in as many people as possible while driving the minimum number of people away. What you get in such a situation is insipid crap. Stuff that speaks to people, with a real message, is going to drive people away, so it doesn’t get made.
On the plus side, we live in a golden age of music. The barriers to entry are minimized, and there’s a real proliferation of people making music. But you have to look for it. You can’t simply passively experience music and expect to see the heights (or depths) of it anymore; you have to hunt it.
Comment by Dinwar — May 26, 2022 @ 08:44
Quite true that what’s “music” to my ears might well be discordant, unpleasant noise to someone else, which does make it more difficult to define “quality”.
I pretty much stopped listening to mass-market music when my son was born, which means I was at least vaguely familiar with mass-market music from the 1950s to the early 90s, and then only occasionally did I hear anything often enough to remember it. Instead of radio, I was listening to older recorded music if I deliberately listened to anything at all.
Comment by Nicholas — May 26, 2022 @ 10:11