I've dug pretty deep in the genres I like...it's just all slight variations imo of the work the trendsetting artists did establishing the genre in the first place as far as I can tell.

The issue is that as music progresses and changes so too does distribution networks. Traditional, or even nontraditional to those from the pre spotify internet days, pipelines of music discovery have been largely co-opted by industry. Outlets of organic discovery are different now - and people typically don't continually keep changing their habits enough to keep up with it.

Pair this with the fact that most people settle their musical tastes to be in line with when they are experiencing the most emotionally significant time in their early lives (high school for some, college for others, etc) and the result is an assumption that

A) What they encounter forms an overall opinion of "all" new music despite being the tip of the iceberg and

B) It's not as good as what they grew up on

Because algorithmic curation shifted from what's quality to what's "sellable". That's a part of why you get sentiments that "media got worse". Hardcore media fans will still scour and find proper curations themselves (or be he curator), but the default of just letting Spotify or Netflix tell what's "quality" is long over.

Another little cut on why people are trusting big tech less ad less.

How do you objectively judge that? It's just my opinion, value that for what its worth to you (sounds like not much).

I've thought of that, but there is a trend of a retreat from newer music, this isn't just a generation gap speaking.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-...

A lot of what's happening is imo is just there's so much more competition for attention, and music has lost value as a cultural force beyond the music itself for younger people than it used to have, when young people would develop parasocial relationships or "crushes" or build their self-identity on pop stars and their fandom. A lot of this power culturally has been balkanized.

Speaking of the music itself, once the economic incentive is removed to create great songs (we are there already) we will get fewer great songs. That force is countering the fact that we have more tools and distribution channels than ever to create great songs, and those two forces are in opposition and to me, it seems like the fewer great songs force is winning (subjective).