This is such a difficult topic. It's very difficult to systematically comprehend what's happening. I've read the data that the author presented in the article, so that bit can be taken as a fact. And when it comes to causes...some things that I'd say are:
1. I think it's pretty much indisputable that today we have more music production than ever. It's easier and cheaper to make music than ever before. Loads of people who make music, music producers, artists, studio owners etc. say this. Another fact associated with this is: music labels barely have a function in today's music-space. Music becomes known and popular not by means of label marketing it, not by means of touring, not by means of FM radio play and not by means of music videos on channels like MTV. Music gets known by its presence in social media.
When these elements get combined, we have easy made and quantitatively huge amount of music, unrestricted by ability associated to playing live, unrestricted by label's selection of what (not) to publish and some completely new rules in media, where it's about moment-to-moment "sensations" that last about 1 second. This produces a huge amount of "noise".
2. In addition to "1", we don't seem to have reference points anymore. And I don't mean it in a bad sense - that everyone should follow some criteria external to themselves when they create, but merely the fact that no music today can seemingly become "great" the way Beatles or Black Sabbath or Pink Floyd or Nirvana or Metallica were great. "Great" implies both music itself and its cultural relevance at the same time. I think there's a huge amount of good music today, among all that noise, but absolutely none of it is culturally relevant. Why music isn't culturally relevant anymore? I'd like to hear everyone's ideas, but I'd say because for whatever reason, younger people don't see it as relevant for their identity anymore. It's just another thing to consume. Merely entertainment. Or a side-activity. Which factors produce this state? That's so difficult to answer. But the culture of the playlist and dominance of streaming surely are a factor. As well as distribution of music through social media and tying in music with other activities. Listening to music is not seen as an activity in itself today. This is a huge loss IMO.
3. There is also a fact that we have huge retro-nostalgia in our western societies nowadays. It probably can't even be called "nostalgia", because how can a 15 year old be nostalgic about Kate Bush or Super Nintendo? But we do have kids listening to Queen, Michael Jackson, Beatles, Pink Floyd in huge numbers. We do have mania for old games consoles like SNES or Sega Megadrive or old computers like Amiga and Atari and associated games....look at the s/h prices of any of these things. All of our fashion is some kind of postmodern mish-mash of everything in the last 50-60 years. And we seem to use all these cultural artifacts with absolutely no regard to any kind of context. They became abstract elements, pure surface with no aura, no authenticity, no meaning behind them. We use them pretty much as empty, purely aesthetic signifiers of nothing actually.
4. Why is it that pseudo-nostalgia even in younger people's listening to music is more prevalent than listening to new music? Can we even talk about past, present and future in our cultural and media context today? Isn't it wholly a one continuum of faceless "content" when we put it in modern media context? Abstract sound-bytes to use and reuse in decontextualized clips.
Very difficult to make sense of this very good and enticing topic.
