{"id":47219,"date":"2022-05-26T01:00:53","date_gmt":"2022-05-26T05:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=47219"},"modified":"2022-05-25T09:14:14","modified_gmt":"2022-05-25T13:14:14","slug":"qotd-they-dont-make-good-music-any-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/05\/26\/qotd-they-dont-make-good-music-any-more\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: They don’t make good music any more"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Lindy effect, recently popularised<\/a> by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Skin in the Game<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 we’re in the moment, and it’s difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.<\/p>\n

What we hear in the daily soundtrack of life, when you\u2019re getting your hair cut, out shopping, something coming from someone’s phone at the other end of the bus, is noise<\/em>. The quality of this music is going to vary wildly because what is popular doesn’t necessarily correlate to what is good. The signal<\/em> is the true state of music, which fluctuates, and can come from anywhere from the top of the pop charts to underground niche movements.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>: 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

James Smith, “The myth of ‘bad’ modern music”, Being Libertarian<\/em><\/a>, 2019-02-25.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,41],"tags":[200,45],"class_list":["post-47219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-quotations","tag-music","tag-nostalgia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-chB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47219"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73830,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47219\/revisions\/73830"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}