Overall, music is getting worse over the last 50 years
The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.
After 1 vote and with 3 points ahead, the winner is...
- Publication date
- Last updated date
- Type
- Standard
- Number of rounds
- 3
- Time for argument
- Two days
- Max argument characters
- 10,000
- Voting period
- Two weeks
- Point system
- Multiple criterions
- Voting system
- Open
The goodness of music depends on: Critical/audience reception, timbre/quality of the sound, the lyrical message, the success of the songs, the melodies and rhythms, so on and so forth.
- PRO forgets that “Pop” music only scratches the surface of the modern music industry. All artist’s music is geared towards a target audience. That is why genres exist. “Dubstep” music is geared towards “Dubstep” listeners, and so on and so forth.
- The resolution does not specify a genre, therefore PRO must prove that most genres of music have been getting worse over the last 50 years.
- CON believes that in order to say a music genre is worse, PRO must prove that it fulfills the wants and needs of its target audience less than music has in the past.
“Smithsonian Magazine's research is perhaps the most famous aspect of this. He notes that a) Timbre variety went down, b) pitch content decreased, and c) loudness increased. Con could try contesting the study itself, but these three ideas are pretty objective and near impossible to defeat.”
“It would alienate everyone who didn't like the basic pop formula, and even those that do enjoy the 80% of the restaurant would eventually get tired of listening to the same type of music over and over again. “
“Remember, story has been long since a crucial component of a song. It's important that it speaks of some kind of message to resonate with the listeners. But with only a few words repeating with each other, it becomes hard for the person to truly understand a deep story and results in worse songs overall. Max Leech for the Odyssey notes the domination of hip hop and how rap where you can barely even hear the lyrics is dominating the charts.”
“it gets tricky, a telephone game of difficulty where a lot of songs' "true meaning" have been lost in "translation".”
“ Con might say "hey, people can choose if they listen to good songs right?" Well, not really. You see, now that music is available with a single click, people would be paralyzed with choice.”
“ Consider the fact that RateYourMusic, a website where users freely rate songs, out of the top singles, only three of top 40 are from 2010's decade, a similar pattern in 40~80, and merely Sufjan Stevens on 80th~120th place. In other words, only 7 songs from 2010's out of 120 ranking of best singles of all time.”
“if people do not listen to any of those, are they not as good as nonexistent? Look at this graph that shows about 75% of people listen to the major genres: rock, pop, r&b/hip hop, and country. Even Statista confirms this up with America's stats alone.”
“As my overall quality analysis applies to all of these genres, even if the other 25% of music listened to vastly improved (which is up to con to prove), the majority declining would still result in an overall drop in music quality!”
“Remember that paralysis of choice can still come into effect and cause you to just listen to whatever is most accessible, rather than highest quality. It's far easier to find Despacito, than "what is the best songs in the last decades" and decide among many critic's lists.”
RECALL:“ if people are as fed up with pop as PRO says, then there is no reason to believe that a lot of choices means that people will refuse to listen to anything other than “bad” music.”
“on a utilitarian basis, music quality would have lowered!”
Utilitarianism is a system of ethics. Music quality is irrelevant to ethics.
“con argues that pop listeners will enjoy it just as much because of their frequency of listening.”
“If people wanted the industry to change, they would listen to other genres and choke artists from revenue, motivating the subsequent change. But as it stands, pop music fulfills the wants and needs of pop lovers just fine, as evidenced by consistently high amounts of pop listeners.”
“As a scholarly study reports for us, the prevalence of music videos and the way the production is ran, ruins the entire point of music.”
“"Study 1 indicates that comprehension of rock music lyrics develops with age and that lyrics are often misunderstood, particularly by young children who lack relevant world knowledge and are at a concrete stage of cognitive development.”
PRO’s own source refutes the idea that most music has meaningless lyrics, as Rock has more listeners than both Pop and Hip Hop (also according to his own source) but has lyrics hard to understand without world knowledge.
“ Consider why I mentioned loudness, which has increased within the Smithsonian article. ”
This is out of the scope of the debate, as this source and all of the arguments that follow are addressing headphone/earbud usage, not music.
RECALL: “The user has the end-say as to what the volume is... Every music device has volume controls.”
- Accessibility. “The industry is much more accessible for new, creative artists than before. In the past, if you did not conform, you were out of luck.”
- The entire 2nd Contention... Supply/Demand
- To say “every song must have meaningful lyrics” is to defy the meaning of art
“in the end, con asks pro to come up with endless evidence upon more evidence, saying it is constantly not enough, that even though 30% of people report listening to the declining rate of pop, the absurdity of rap, he has provided no counter-evidence to prove that rock and country has improved to the point that it is enough to counter-act pop and rap both of which he dropped.”
For the final time, RECALL CON’s r1 argument:“If people wanted the industry to change, they would listen to other genres and choke artists from revenue, motivating the subsequent change. But as it stands, pop music fulfills the wants and needs of pop lovers just fine, as evidenced by consistently high amounts of pop listeners.”
“Consider that the graph I offered was "what is the MAIN genre you listen to", the power of pop has also gone down as an illusion. If we allow for mutual inclusiveness, we then see just how powerful pop actually is, with 70% now reporting cross countries to listening to pop”
“Con has failed to infer that rock has stayed the same or has gotten better, which is crucial to prove the point that I'm making. Do you know any band from 2010~2020 with as much influence as Queen? The Beatles? Pink Floyd? Led Zeppelin? Metallica? I don't think so.”
“Con says ear damage can be accrued from any time period, but this is the first time that the music is so constantly loud and close to your head. Do you really think most people from 50 years ago could listen to music on the go, at above 85 decibels, for 8 hours a day? Unless you were the member of a band, I'm pretty sure vast majority of people did not have to suffer under modern technology conditions.”
- RECALL: “The user has the end-say as to what the volume is... Every music device has volume controls.”
- RECALL: “This is out of the scope of the debate, as this source and all of the arguments that follow are addressing headphone/earbud usage, not music.”
“Finally, sorry about dropping accessibility, I glanced over con's poor refutation. This has been done many times, Vsauce himself tried a research using different bean flavors, tea cups, etc. and still had the same result, so it definitely isn't only a problem with dating, but can be very casual small choices.”
“Con says that it defies the meaning of art, but I disagree. If I spent zero effort using a random word generator to create a song, it is not good music, it is not art, it is random and anyone could do it.”
“story has been long since a crucial component of a song.”
“the whole point of art is being able to express yourself however the hell you want to. If the artist does not want to use complicated lyrics, then power to them.”
This is a pretty subjective subject, in which within the first round I saw con bouncing around both using the audience appeal and the failure of it somewhat contradictorily.
I will have to assume BoP is based on the description of goodness within the description, which really could have done without the "so on and so forth" which was too open ended and could allow anything to include the personal lives of the musicians (really hoping that doesn't come into it). Perhaps worse, starting with the audience reception of it, which implies victory may be dependant on people giving up on listening to music.
Science
Pro uses a very good article about pop substituting variety with loudness (I really wish he did not counterintuitively state in the next round "Isn't music all about making you feel enjoying and able to listen to it?"), but con counters that it's just pop music. Pro defends that 75% of what people listen to is pop music, which intuitively goes into other points that people can now choose to listen to so many more genres now. Pro uses hearing loss, and con goes on to explain that the loudness was misrepresented, with ultimate volume control (and yes, hearing loss) decided by the end user.
Lyrics
Pro shows that repetition is a problem.
Con counters that listeners enjoy it.
Availability
Pro shows that listeners don't appreciate it as much given that they can't listen to it all anymore and give in to buyers remorse. Con flips this point around to show that listeners can find anything, which encourages more diverse genres, rather than being slaves to the pop peddling DJs; this preemptively undercut pro's final round point "You can name far more world-famous rock bands from 1970's," as listeners are less likely to be artificially funneled, and of course con could name more recent ironic bands.
Conclusion:
Hate to say BoP, but BoP. Pro did a fine job on some points, but con was able to cast significant doubt onto the validity of the resolution. It falls into a pretty subjective and hard to measure area, to which a debate drilled down on any one aspect of quality pro may have been able to win, but when trying to an open ended thing which begins with the audience, it's becomes an uphill battle to prove which might be impossible to prove on such a subjective topic (to which I must thank pro for his first point being trying to make it non-subjective... I think were we limited to pop, he would have won).
bloat bloat thanks 4 da vote
vote bump 2
vote bump
:O
>:(
good luck countering the hearing damage argument.... *malicious laughter follows*
I'm bad at counting. There's only 1 song from 2010's in top 40, 2 in 40~80, and 1 in 80~120. Meaning 5 songs, out of 9 million*10
Well the 80s can be better than the 70s. The only thing needing proof is that the 20s suck compared to the 70s.
It's the overall trend in question... Obviously I can't fixate on 10 year increments so don't worry about that lol
I will cry if you go for a silly argument like I have to prove the 80s. Worse than 70 and 90s worse than 80s cuz you know that’s not the topic lol
If you could rap degeneracy and materialistic music videos, then I 100% agree. There are the good ones and the bad ones.
I will be taking this one, and do not fear, I will not be playing the almighty semantics card lol.
i agree
Say Overall, Music has Gotten Worse over the Last 50 years
Come up with a standard, and it would be pretty easy to plot the data points. From there just screenshot to show the trendline, and share the spreadsheet file (or show screenshots) for review.
Well that is to personal opinions. I guess I will stop farming by not taking this debate, but please specify what makes a music low quality.