With all due respect, this is beginning to feel pathetic. A bunch of old folks sitting around eulogizing music, music aint dead! AND IT WILL NEVER DIE! Music is not even sick, there is nothing wrong with music, but just like everything else in life, the business of music is changing for various reasons, and that has affected the way popular music is created, produced, distributed and consummated, that's it. Don't forget also that the taste of the younger generation (which is a big driving force for the business of music) has changed. In the same way that your musical taste changed from that of your parents.
And since most if not all who post here are a part of that creation, production, distribution and consummation process, guess what...............we all play a part in the continuing evolution. I find it really lame that some of the biggest CURRENT players in this game are constantly discussing how great everything was 50 years ago and how bad things are today, and how worst it will get. To top it off there is also now a mad, (almost obscene) rush to see who can post up the latest industry bad news first, leaving the rest something to "wax rhetoric" about who is to be blamed.
It doesn't do any justice if we make comparisons between the best of yesteryear and worst of today, If we choose to look beyond the Billboard charts, and the radio station playlist, if we choose to look beyond pop an rock, we will see that great music is still being made, good music played by good musicians and recorded and mixed by good engineers with good results. And if we want to be honest we will also admit that a lot of lousy shit was made in the past era too, and a lot of it sounded bad, even some of the stuff that have become poster examples of greatness don't exactly have stellar sound. While we're at it lets clear up another myth, not all the equipment that was being used back then always had this aura of romance that surrounds them now. A lot of the old equipment was temperamental, and their technical limitations restricted or hampered the artistic process in some cases. some of the modern pro-sumer gear run technical rings around the older stuff, and had Mackie been around back then......................No, I wont say it.
And yes, today we have the ability to create records with better sound quality than anything that was done before, and sometimes it does happen.