I know good modern pop music exists, I'm talking about the terrible shit that plays on radios, commercials, TV etc. The stuff that the media has decided is current pop music.
This is probably my most boomer opinion , but most of it is awful. Where have all the strong voices gone? It's all baby voiced feel good insurance commercial stuff or warbley break-up songs.
If I hear another song that sounds like 'Tonights Gonna be a Good Night." or Ed Sheeran or any of the 100 songs sung by women that all sound like infants I am going to screm.
Also anyone notice that these songs are all safe as far as lyrics go? No ones allowed to be mad or defiant in music anymore. Its all "Lets party." or "Boohoo my Boyfriend left me." Mainstream music used to have tons of "Fuck the system" songs, not any more. There seems to be no genre represented outside of singer-songwriter. Also let women have strong voices again, damn it. Also let bands that play instruments exist. Let multiple genres exist!
Anyway, Boomer_Owl out
Mainstream music nowadays is driven by three things:
Avoidance of risk by radio and record companies. Unlike what libertarians tell us, these firms avoid doing what is possible to bring them a loss. Thus, a lot of their income is from selling music by old bands (but not their new material! The old stuff. For example Memento Mori by Depeche Mode is a good album they released this year, but you won't hear songs played from it because people won't know it and might not like it.) and stuff that is already proven to be popular like the Ed Sheerans or Imagine Dragons of the world.
Tik Tok, Netflix and other popular media. You suddenly hear a ear-wormy French song? Odds are there's millions of videos of people dancing to it or explaining war crimes in Gaza to the sound of it on TikTok. You hear a song that has charted at place 149 on the charts in 1990 and hasn't been played since the first number of the year was 2? Odds are, it's blowing up because it's an insert song somewhere.
Genre specialization. Do you like the Harry Styles song that's been playing every day for the last year? No? Do you like say death metal?
In which case, you likely switch to listening to music on playlists on Spotify or whatever. You listen to one song, to another, to a third one and suddenly the vast majority of the songs that are recommended to you are death metal and nothing else. Spotify earns the money, because you keep listening to death metal and probably like it - but you won't hear any industrial rock, rap, jazz, classical music, singer-songwriter slop (or good examples of the genre), etc.
Respectively, there's also little exchange between fans of these genres and word-of-mouth exchanges. In spite of the hilarious reddit post, a fan of Olivia Rodrigo won't listen to the Swans for example.
Thus, what's mainstream music is unlikely to change much from what current tastes of the demographic that has been deemed as that is, and those people who have these specific listens-only-to-[Genre] tastes or simply dislike modern mainstream music are gonna be kept excluded.
Radio is probably only gonna keep diminishing in importance and streaming become even more leading than today. As Spotify etc. might fall, it's also likely that we will see specialization among the platforms. Streaming Service A (let's say Dub Reggae) simply won't have Metal on it. For that, you'll have to use Streaming Service B.
Taking this opportunity to give a shout out to community/college radio stations in general, because I listen to one and I did in fact hear songs from the new Depeche Mode album on the radio!
I don’t live close enough to my old school to listen to the station the old-fashioned way, but they have a streaming app so it doesn’t matter. I’m not gonna mention which specific station I listen to because I’d kinda be doxxing myself, but I’m sure there are a bunch of good and free radio station apps out there.
Ghosts Again fucking whips.
Speak to Me is their best song since Precious, all the way back in 2005 imo.