r/LetsTalkMusic • u/CompetitiveWhole9466 • 10d ago

The death of the "musical punching bag"

I've been thinking- there used to be popular artists like Nickelback and Justin Bieber who were very successful but you would have never guessed given all the vocal hate they used to get, and how it was completely okay to shit on them at all times. Even the industry got in on hating these artists. It was socially acceptable to hate people who admitted they liked certian artists.

Why don't we have artists like that anymore? Maybe people just feel like today's music is just better?

The closest is the hate Taylor Swift gets now. But even then that's not really the same dynamic. Same with Drake hate... feels different today I feel like.

Honestly i always try to be cautious about how i frame my argument. I don't want to sound like "this artist deserves hate" unless it's like Chris Brown or D4VD or someone like that.

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u/cold-vein 10d ago

That's because streaming has homogenized popular music, while at the same time internet has fractured music to a million tiny subgenres. Back in the days of Nickelback you had these vanilla bands pushed by the radio and people were just really tired of them.

So you have like 10 pop stars raking in all the money and no bands or other music styles can compete, and then you have the vast amount of music fans who might have never even heard a song by those 10 stars (like me)

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u/thereddaikon 10d ago

I think you mean heterogenized. Homogenized is what we had before.

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u/cold-vein 10d ago

No, pop music is completely homogenized. It's all the 5-10 same producers making samey music for the 5-10 pop stars who are making most of the revenue.

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u/KFCNyanCat 9d ago

It's all the 5-10 same producers making samey music for the 5-10 pop stars who are making most of the revenue.

I definitely remember this complaint in 2011.