2019 best year of the music of the 21st century ...? YES ... - Music

Fischman
RockMonster, JazzMeister, Bluesboy,ClassicalMaster

Gender: Male
Location: Land of Enchantment

Looking back at my lists, 2019 is shaping up to be better than any year from 2013 - 2017. Unless Hey 19 shot it's whole was in the first three months, it should finish comfortably no lower than 4th in the decade.

SleepDealer

Location: Isca Dumnoniorum

I've yet to be blown away by 2019 so far, but the 2010s have been excellent as a decade.
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PurpleHazel

baystateoftheart wrote:

If you think about this question in a different way, 2019 is the best year to listen to recorded music in human history, because there is the most of it and the easiest access.

Just not the music of 2019.

That's thinking about the question in a way that hardly bears a relationship to the one in the OP.

Are there actually more ways to listen to music in 2019 than 2018 or 2017? More and more CDS that aren't available on streaming services (not counting CD and vinyl rips on YouTube) are going out of print and ones that have been OOP for a while are overall getting more expensive and harder to find. I'm not much of a vinyl collector, but I'd imagine that gradually over time hard-to-find albums are overall also getting harder to find.

Anyway, you get points for changing this topic to a better one.

TimeLion

Not that there's anything wrong with collecting vinyl, but does it really have anything to do with the availability of music? Isn't it just a physical totem that gives an illusion of permanence to an otherwise fleeting experience?

Fischman
RockMonster, JazzMeister, Bluesboy,ClassicalMaster

Gender: Male
Location: Land of Enchantment

TimeLion wrote:

Not that there's anything wrong with collecting vinyl, but does it really have anything to do with the availability of music? Isn't it just a physical totem that gives an illusion of permanence to an otherwise fleeting experience?

Damn! That's jus too deep for this "what's better?" thread. Cool

Hayden

Location: CDMX

TimeLion wrote:

Not that there's anything wrong with collecting vinyl, but does it really have anything to do with the availability of music? Isn't it just a physical totem that gives an illusion of permanence to an otherwise fleeting experience?

Well, no. Initially, vinyl had everything to do with the availability of music.

Being said,

Quote:

More and more CDS that aren't available on streaming services (not counting CD and vinyl rips on YouTube) are going out of print and ones that have been OOP for a while are overall getting more expensive and harder to find. I'm not much of a vinyl collector, but I'd imagine that gradually over time hard-to-find albums are overall also getting harder to find.

Can't agree. The more pressings that get wide treatments, the less rare they'll become. If a record's extinct, it's extinct, but we're in an age where that's going to happen less and less, if not at all.

TimeLion

Fischman wrote:

Damn! That's jus too deep for this "what's better?" thread. Cool

Maybe, but I can’t help thinking that about all forms of collecting now. I used to enjoy collecting things, but it started feeling empty after a while. There would be brief moments of pride in my collection, but then a thought would suddenly occur to me, “Why the fuck am I doing this?” I never had an answer, so I just stopped.

PurpleHazel

TimeLion wrote:

Not that there's anything wrong with collecting vinyl, but does it really have anything to do with the availability of music? Isn't it just a physical totem that gives an illusion of permanence to an otherwise fleeting experience?

I'm not talking about collecting vinyl; I'm talking about vinyl (we'll use this word to include 78s, which weren't made from vinyl) released before the CD era and never rereleased in any format.

Quote:

Can't agree. The more pressings that get wide treatments, the less rare they'll become. If a record's extinct, it's extinct, but we're in an age where that's going to happen less and less, if not at all.

I don't quite understand what you're saying (or perhaps you misunderstood what I was getting at). I once read that 90% of all books ever published are out of print. This phenomenon applies to vinyl before the CD era (and some labels continued to release albums only on vinyl till the late 80s) and OOP CDs as well, though it may be considerably less than 90%. The area I'm most knowledgeable in is jazz (and classic funk), and I know there are probably thousands of jazz records that came out before the late 80s that have never been reissued on CD or any other format. Assume this is true of all older genres to an extent. Obviously there is a lot of music on 78s of all genres that has been lost. Also think of all the music that's been released in non-English-speaking countries between the dawn of recorded music and the 80s: Africa, Asia, South America, the Caribbean, and imagine how much of that music has never been rereleased or has been lost.

My overall point is as time goes on, more obscure music that was never rereleased is either going to get scarcer or disappear altogether. So at the same time that streaming services have made more music easily accessible to the average consumer, there is music on older formats that is gradually vanishing or becoming so prohibitively expensive that only serious collectors can afford them.

TimeLion

PurpleHazel wrote:

I'm not talking about collecting vinyl; I'm talking about vinyl (we'll use this word to include 78s, which weren't made from vinyl) released before the CD era and never rereleased in any format.

It's a fair point, but in my mind has more to do with the question of preservation than availability, since the music being lost is being lost because of lack of demand -- in other words, very few people *want* to listen to it (currently). I still think we're in an era in which the likelihood of someone being able to access music they want to listen to is increasing.

That said, digitization of these vast, currently-unwanted, archives is an admirable effort. There are far worse things one could donate to than The National Recording Preservation Foundation.

Fischman
RockMonster, JazzMeister, Bluesboy,ClassicalMaster

Gender: Male
Location: Land of Enchantment

TimeLion wrote:

Maybe, but I can’t help thinking that about all forms of collecting now. I used to enjoy collecting things, but it started feeling empty after a while. There would be brief moments of pride in my collection, but then a thought would suddenly occur to me, “Why the fuck am I doing this?” I never had an answer, so I just stopped.

I understand. I'm no fan of amassing "stuff," especially in an increasingly overpopulated an resource-constrained world.