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People are not buying albums today because the stuff labels are putting out is worthless cookie-cutter garbage with no soul or originality, and they are tired of being scammed. People are literally sick of the endless barage of untalented copy-cat artists who can't even play their instruments well, and they have basically boycotted the industry by no longer paying for the garbage.
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Maybe once you get up out of the teens. But clearly young folks, those that would have normally been the driving force in record sales, don't take this view. I've said it a hundred times. Go to Youtube. Look at lots of videos from young people, where the person has (usually illegally) used some song as background music, or often where something is playing in the background or where there are visible posters on the wall.
These folks (given downloading) have access to the entire world of popular music. If they thought that Pink Floyd and Led Zepplin and Queen where better than Lady Gaga or The Jonas Broths, they'd be listening to them and using them in their videos. But I never see that happening. I see then listening to the artists of their generation.
And you can also go to the videos where people (illlegally) have just posted those songs and read the comments. You aren't going to find many young folks posting about how bad this music sucks and I wish I could have more Elton John or Black Sabbath. They obviously like Miley Cyrus and Rhianna and Jay Z and all that stuff. It's their music, as distinct from the previous generations' music, and provides them with their own group identity.
I do still see a fair number of Cobain posters, since he seems to have acheived a godhood that has survived his era. But generally speaking, it's clearly that kids don't think that this music sucks, and they download it by the ton for that reason.
As to people 30 and older, well those people were probably saying the same thing in the 90s, and the 80s, and the 70s, and so forth, because the popular music being made wasn't targeting them, as it never is.
So anyway, I keep repeating this rant because I think it's important. Listening to people whose musical tastes were set in the 60s as a measure of the value of music made 50 years later, is not very useful generally. I wouldn't listen to a lot of it either, but I'm not so egotistical as to think that because I don't like it that it sucks and therefore all the kids who do are fooling themselves or being brainwashed.
When you wake up one day and discover that someone you've never heard of is considered by kids to be an artist from the distant past whose time is over, that's a sign.
Just give it a while and it'll change again, hopefully in a way that I like, maybe not. Given that we had ten years of grunge, and now ten years of fairly shallow pop, I'm not so sure that something grunge-like will be the next round. It could be far scarier than what's around now.