Well I stand by my comments from the last time this video was linked to here:
Well I think all the points he makes are spot on - they are measurable after all:
So-called popular music is becoming less harmonically complex - well this is intuitively true and I would suggest a bad thing. And measurable/demonstrable.
So-called popular music is becoming less melodically complex - again this is intuitively obvious, the dumbed down millennial woop is something you can also count.
So-called popular music is becoming less interesting and varied in the textures and timbres used - again, the studies are irrefutable.
So-called popular music is overly risk averse, due to the amount of money needed to break a band now - I would say this is less measurable but I think perfectly defensible.
The result overall is that today's so-called popular music is pretty shit. Note that I'm talking about POPULAR music - the stuff that's forced down your ears when you go to the barbers, or got to a noisy pub, or any other source of noise pollution. The stuff that's everywhere, in Nandos, in the charts, whose stars' names are on the telly and in Hello magazine, who people are supposed to know by sight. And the fact is - it's the shittiest it's ever been.
By no means am I saying that all modern music is shit, or that all kids have bad taste. What I'm saying is that what passes for 'common', shared music of our era, the stuff that's unavoidable unless you go round with ear defenders on, is the absolute pits. Think about it - talent contest rubbish, mass manufactured crap. Was it better in the days of Showaddywaddy, Bay City Rollers and Boney M? Well probably, yes. It was certainly less offensive and had a bit more variety.
I am most certainly not talking about other kinds of music. I have kids too, now 19 and 21. My daughter's taste is completely off the wall and I doubt you'd ever find any of it in the barber's. (She's also a pianist and harpist though, so I'd expect her to have some taste). I use to take the piss that she was putting her south korean bazuki music on again. My son astonished me though, A combination of old Zappa and modern Thundercats-type stuff, his music is not far off the same sort of Jazz Rock I used to mix with classical at that age (I recently bought him a turntable, since I found he already had a vinyl collestion) - but again it's not, by any definition, pop music.
As for comparison with Dylan, the Beatles, Eric Clapton, even the Smiths - yes you can compare it perfectly legitimately, because for all it's treated as art music these days, it competed against the daily dreck and somehow made it to the top of the charts, people got their pocket money out and bought this stuff in their millions. It's a mark of how far pop music has fallen that some would now argue the comparison can't even be made.