Even with digital music sales up, music is down

[Brian]

A NYT article has Atlantic reporting it has sold more digital music than retail music. Whoopee...no surprise really, it was going to happen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/business/media/26music.html?_r=1&ref=technology

But the article also talks about how music sales are down overall from $14 billion in 1999 to somewhere under $10 billion this year. We've all heard the labels bitch about how downloads have killed sales, and all of us that know better say it's because the music has sucked.

So just how far down the tubes has music gone in the past 10 years, since 1999?

Can you list any new artists/music since then that are good? Bonus points if the artists from 1999 that are *still* good today...

[BarneysAngelJen]

The only "new" bands I listen to regularly are Interpol, My Chemical Romance, and...that's about it. The rest of my music is much older than 1999. Sadly, the only people still around from 1999 are people like Britney Spears simply for the fact that they create news about themselves.

I agree with you. Music sales are down because music is horrible. Have the labels cut back on their scouts? Isn't anyone going to clubs to discover the "next big thing"? I know that country and urban are hot genres but they cannot carry the entire industry.

[Chris]

Music today is horrible. You may hear a song you like from sombody new, but 99 percent of the time the rest of their album is terrible. I have heard some new female singers that each have one song that I like, but they all kind of sound the same and non of the songs are really good enough to have any real staying power. There is a radio station up here called "The Summit" that is actually owned and run by Akron Public Schools. It is commercial free and plays a wide variety of music. Kind of a mix between CD101, Qfm and an oldies station. They play a some new music that is pretty good. I wouldn't call any of it groundbreaking, and in 6 months you probably aren't going to hear them very often. Jen is right, unless the next big movement is discovered soon, music sales will continue to slump.

[Brian]

Somewhere along the way someone said something to the effect of "people always consider any that came along after your time in high school crappy." And when I think about that in relation to my time in high school and now, that does sort of hold up.

But the bunk of that is that I listen to more music that happened WAY before I was in high school, and most cases, WAY before I was even in school or even born. So if I'm entirely happy listening to music that predates me rather than anything within the past 10 years, then music is certainly sucking.