Jonathan Rogers

I am home for Thanksgiving break which means more time around family. My youngest sister tends to camp in front of the computer, all the while playing music to listen to while she chats and surfs various social media sites.

When I am in earshot I hear the various TERRIBLE pop music that she plays. It’s not that she neccessarily has bad taste, it is all Top 40 music, so it is popular nationwide. However, it is quite simply, bad. And I don’t think this is one of those “my generation is better than your generation” things, it is simply bad music.

I have a theory that this is all due to rampant piracy.This is for several reasons:

Because music is not the profitable industry it once was, less money and effort is being put into making good music. If you are truly talented, you want to be compensated for your time. If you can’t get decent money for pop music, while put in the effort? But this alone is too easy.

Music is basically free, despite all legal efforts to the contrary. So, the cost for buying bad music that you regret obtaining is very low. It is not even monetary anymore, but simply a small time wasted cost. (almost immeasurably small now that internet speeds are so fast). In the past, you put up a lot of money, so one would take a lot of time finding something “good” that they could enjoy. Now, you just move on to the next download.

Because of this low cost to acquire and no penalty for bad music obtained, there can be a lot of crap put out that still gets listened to or at least “downloaded”. In an era where we measure success by “views” this means even bad music just listened to can be valuable. The bar for music goes down.