Rick Beato – The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse
An evening pause: His conclusions have implications far beyond music itself and on the entire worsening of our culture.
Hat tip Chris McLaughlin.
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This sounds like the old craftsman lamenting the rise of factory products. Yes, many important things were lost then. But overall, industrialization was good for mankind. It also reminds me of many upper middle class people lamenting the loss of old downtown stores to Walmart supercenters. Yet a Walmart provides cheaper goods for the masses than the old store owners did. It also provides more opportunity for advancement for its employees. An ordinary clerk in an old small town store in the 50’s will have to leave town for a higher position if the owner’s son is his manager. The idylic Disney “Main Street” USA downtown never really existed. Spotify and its competitors give us yahoos better access to music than the old record stores did. You can even find a far greater variety of stuff if you are willing to look for it, just like you can still find all sorts of crafts and high art like the old craftsman made before factories came to be. Want some obscure piece of church music? Its there somewhere. What about a theme from a little known 80’s movie? You can find it on the web. We are just not forced to buy expensive stuff made by highly trained specialists when all we are willing to pay for is something cheap, in the monetary and cultural sense.
Said in another way, this video has a lot of good points about the state of the music industry. Yet it is an industry, pure and simple. It exists to serve consumers. Most people value their own individual needs over society’s nostalgia. Thats why stuff is made in factories rather than by hand. It is why Walmart replaced downtown stores. It is why spotify replaced CD’s. That is the way it is and should be, because the old days are never as good as we remember them to be. They will not come back, ever, and efforts to bring them back will likely fail. See Ecclesiasties 7:10
Another video by Beato, on what is essentially a similar topic, the comparison of Taylor Swift to The Beatles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxrwjJHXPlQ
Cloudy: Though your points are well taken, making music is not the same as making shoes or selling cosmetics. Music, like literature, is art, the highest expression of the creative talents of a civilization. For it to be debased in any way by laziness by its artists debases the civilization itself.
Beato is noting how too much music today is produced in a lazy manner, and thus has no individuality or more important, a sense of unique originality. The same could now be said of much of our literature, which even as I write is being further debased by a faddish desire to use AI to replace human thought and creativity.
That lack of originality gets reflected throughout society, as originality is increasingly seen not as a good thing but a liability that must be squashed so as to maximize profits. This is also one of Beato’s main points.
Finally, just because there is change and a new way of doing things does not mean that change or the new way is something to accept blindly. Questioning is always good, and Beato raises some questions here that everyone should think about.
Cloudy —
Astonishing. You have *so completely missed the point* of everything that Mr. Beto is saying that I am tempted to use the term “invincible ignorance” (in the Catholic sense of simply not knowing what you don’t know) in your case, but perhaps I am being too kind.
Indeed, your comments about Walmart and the decline of Main Street America are so inane and historically inaccurate as to be as laughable. Check out James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, or almost anything that has been written in the last several decades about the New Urbanism if you think that Walmart has, on balance, been a “good” influence in American life. Rather, as Chuck
Harder used to say, its ascendance is one of the purest examples of the collective “race to the bottom” in terms of both economics and human values. Or, for extra credit, look into the analogy between how sustainable ecologies (cf. Howard T. Odum) work and their replacement with “profitable” monocultures. You may be in for a nasty shock.
Getting back to the topic at hand, while there is certainly, as you suggest, a music business, “an industry, pure and simple [that] exists to serve consumers,” that is like saying that ringing the cash registers is the *only* reason that human beings have made music for as far back into history as we can go. *Music,* my friend, is such an inexorable and important part of being human that we would hardly be human without it — whether it is “profitable and easy to obtain” or not.
Finally, if you are looking for an appropriate piece of scripture that relates to your argument, check out Mark 8:36:
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
Robert —
You have put it far better than I have, and you have gotten to the core of the argument. “Music, like literature, is art, the highest expression of the creative talents of a civilization. For it to be debased in any way by laziness by its artists debases the civilization itself.”
Sadly, the debasement of our civilization proceeds apace, and there are few enough voices crying out against this trend.