Such is the question that I considered in the following video. The video transcript follows.
Transcript: “Was 1980s music better?”
The other day, I saw a question being debated on the Internet. It’s a question that people have brought up to me from time to time:
Was music in the 1980s objectively better than the music being produced today?
It’s a complicated question, but I think there’s a case to be made that the mainstream music marketplace of the 1980s was better than the one we have today.
Let me explain why.
Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and Today’s Popular Music
I know a group of Gen Z young women who are always telling me about the music they’re listening to. They’re into Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Olivia Rodrigo, and other contemporary performers.
I’ve gone out and sampled the music of these artists. And I don’t necessarily think they’re bad.
Let’s take Taylor Swift, for example. There’s a perception out there, particularly in certain political contexts, that older men reflexively dislike Taylor Swift.
I don’t dislike Taylor Swift.
I do, however, think that her music is mediocre by the standards of the 1980s.
If Taylor Swift had broken out in 1983, I suspect she would have risen to approximately the level of Debbie Gibson.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Debbie Gibson certainly had an audience back then, particularly among younger female listeners.
But Debbie Gibson was never the cultural phenomenon that Taylor Swift has become. And I don’t believe Taylor Swift would have become the same cultural phenomenon if she’d started her career in 1983.
Why not?
When I listen to today’s most popular younger musicians, their music strikes me as bland. Not necessarily bad, but bland.
In some ways, it reminds me of the contemporary Hollywood movie industry. We get one superhero film after another, or the fiftieth installment of some franchise that began in the 1970s or 1980s.
Much of this entertainment seems designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
It’s entertainment that relatively few people will passionately hate, but that can also be difficult to passionately love.
I watched a Harry Styles music video the other day. It wasn’t objectively awful. But it wasn’t objectively great, either.
So what’s changed?
The Musical Diversity of the 1980s
To understand the difference, we need to go back to the music industry of the 1980s.
This was the heyday of MTV, back when MTV actually played music videos. It was also the heyday of the shopping mall record store and the album-buying culture.
Record companies were investing in an incredibly diverse range of musical acts.
And when I say diverse, I mean that in the best possible sense of the word.
First, there was diversity in the sense that we most commonly use the word today.
This was a period when numerous Black performers were achieving tremendous mainstream success.
Whitney Houston broke out in the mid-1980s. Billy Ocean was huge. Michael Jackson was one of the biggest stars in the world.
Latin performers such as Gloria Estefan also achieved mainstream success during this period.
All-female bands like the Bangles were enormously popular.
And contrary to some contemporary perceptions of the 1980s, LGBTQ performers could achieve mainstream success, too.
Now, I’m not suggesting that the 1980s were some sort of paradise for LGBTQ people. Individual experiences undoubtedly varied, depending on where people lived, their families, and their circumstances.
But in the mainstream music industry, performers like Boy George and Culture Club were achieving massive commercial success.
Culture Club was among the early acts to become major stars through MTV.
All of that was happening in the 1980s.
But there was another kind of diversity, too: musical diversity.
If you liked heavy metal, as I did, you had bands like Def Leppard, with their highly polished, commercially accessible sound.
If you wanted something a little rawer, you had AC/DC.
Bruce Springsteen was enjoying a major resurgence in popularity.
There was also the entire British New Wave movement, with groups like A Flock of Seagulls.
I was never a particularly enthusiastic fan of British New Wave music, but plenty of other people were.
The point is that whatever your musical tastes, you could probably find something you liked.
And, crucially, you could find it in the mainstream commercial marketplace.
That’s an important distinction.
What Changed in the Music Industry?
The economics of the music business changed dramatically after the 1980s.
This is a complicated subject that could easily justify an entire separate essay, but one major turning point came around 2000, with Napster and the rise of Internet file sharing.
Consumers became less willing to purchase albums, and the traditional economics of recorded music were disrupted.
As the business changed, record companies became more cautious about where they invested their money.
When a company was going to invest heavily in a performer, it increasingly wanted someone who could appeal to the broadest possible audience.
Someone like Taylor Swift.
The problem with this approach is that when you try to make any form of art appeal to too many people, you risk removing the very qualities that make it distinctive.
You sand off all the rough edges.
Consider AC/DC.
I’ve discussed AC/DC in another video, and one thing that strikes me about the band is just how distinctive its sound is.
AC/DC certainly isn’t going to appeal to everyone.
But if you like that kind of music, there’s nothing quite like AC/DC.
And that distinctiveness is part of what makes the band so appealing to its fans.
The same principle applies to other forms of art, including fiction and filmmaking.
When you try to please everyone, you risk producing something that nobody particularly loves.
But Isn’t There More Musical Diversity Today?
At this point, someone is probably going to object.
They’ll say that there are thousands upon thousands of independent musicians producing every conceivable kind of music today.
And they’re right.
You can go onto YouTube, Spotify, and other streaming platforms and find musicians working in practically every genre imaginable.
In that sense, there may actually be more musical diversity today than there was in the 1980s.
I don’t dispute that.
But there’s a problem: discoverability.
When you have a million bands competing for attention on YouTube and Spotify, how does the average listener find something new?
This brings us to the issue of curation.
One of the valuable features of the 1980s music industry was that FM radio stations, MTV, and record stores performed a curatorial function.
They selected music and presented it to consumers.
Yes, that meant some deserving acts were undoubtedly left out.
But from the consumer’s perspective, the system offered an accessible selection of music that was still remarkably varied.
You didn’t have to sort through thousands of unknown bands to find something worth listening to.
You could turn on the radio, watch MTV, or walk into a record store and encounter a wide range of musical styles.
And many of those styles were supported by major record companies with the resources to develop and promote their artists.
That system had its limitations, but it also had some significant advantages.
The Problem Facing Independent Musicians
I follow a number of independent bands and musicians on YouTube.
And one thing I’ve noticed is that there are some extremely talented performers who seem to be stuck indefinitely performing cover material.
They can play the music of established artists exceptionally well.
But they don’t seem to have the institutional support necessary to develop, record, and promote their own original sound on a commercially significant scale.
To me, this is one of the most unfortunate aspects of the contemporary music marketplace.
I doubt that most talented young musicians want to spend their entire careers reprising songs that were popular when I was a teenager.
Surely many of them would like to develop their own musical identities and build audiences around their original work.
And as a listener, I’d like to hear that music, too.
I love AC/DC. But I’ve been listening to AC/DC for more than forty years.
I’d love to discover a new, commercially viable band with the distinctive sound and energy of AC/DC or Def Leppard.
I’m sure there are talented musicians out there who could produce something comparable.
But I don’t see them breaking into the mainstream marketplace.
Instead, we seem to get more Taylor Swift, more Olivia Rodrigo, and more performers working within a relatively narrow range of commercially successful styles.
So, Was 1980s Music Really Better?
I don’t believe that musical talent somehow peaked in the 1980s.
Nor do I believe that contemporary musicians are inherently less capable than the musicians of my generation.
My argument is really about the structure of the music industry and the incentives it creates.
The traditional music industry had plenty of flaws. But it also supported a surprisingly broad range of commercially successful performers.
The contemporary music marketplace was supposed to create more choice by removing the old gatekeepers.
And in one sense, it has done exactly that. There is more music available to consumers than ever before.
But availability and discoverability are two different things.
And having more music available doesn’t necessarily mean that listeners have an easier time finding music they’ll love.
The irony is that a marketplace designed to offer almost unlimited choice may have produced a narrower range of highly visible, commercially successful music.
So was music in the 1980s objectively better?
That’s ultimately a matter of personal taste.
But I would argue that the mainstream music industry of the 1980s offered a greater variety of distinctive musical experiences than the mainstream industry offers today.
And that’s one reason why so much music from that era remains popular more than forty years later.