 If you discuss music with people regularly, simple-minded fools will always tell you about the classics and how they wish music could be as good as it was 100 years ago or something. But the funny thing they don't discuss is that people do make music just like it was decades ago, but when we all hear it, we're totally uninterested as it doesn't affect us. While the music we enjoy is strictly about an emotional reaction and insights in us, there's an aspect of science to the music we enjoy as well. In this video, I'm gonna discuss how the low-hanging fruit music has been picked already and why the artists who make amazing music today have to work harder than anyone ever before. Hi, I'm Jesse Kennan and this is Muse Formation. It can see pretty ridiculous how little creative output musicians release today. Releasing a dozen songs every two or three years is a pretty common occurrence for established artists. Looking back on artists of the past, this is at an all-time low. Let's remember the Beatles' entire catalog occurred in nearly seven years and they recorded about 275 songs. Once the Ramones of the Clash had their intent down, it was easy to crank out four classic records in about three years. With classical composers, you'd have Beethoven, who's not even in the top five in this measure, churning out 110 minutes of music every single year. This is not to say that an artist that's turning out a large quantity always results in music we wanna hear, but with these outliers, that was the case. One of the reasons we see this slowdown in output is the immense amount of time it takes many artists to contemplate an expression that is an overly derivative of other artists and songs we've heard before. Most of the low-hanging fruit in music today is gone, so artists now need more time to develop a large understanding of music since the most simple emotions of the past have already been expressed. Today, if you wrote a song with an emotional expression at the level of the Beatles, she loves you, you'd be laughed right out of existence even at a fifth grade recital since that expression is taken for granted as being a given. While the Beatles' song in my life is one of the most thoughtful and beautiful expressions of love ever written, it has been expressed so many times, anyone looking to do that sentiment needs to find a new way to do it since that ground has already been tread so many times. The common complaint about classical music today is that every new work ends up being avant-garde since there's no new emotional ground to express in classical, classical music since it's multi-centuries old. This is also caused by most would-be classical composers now making complex electronic music like IDM, but that's another story for another time. To make music resonant, we must dig deeper than some of the more obvious themes made in the music of yesterday. We need to find new ways to express ourselves since hearing the same musical conversation over and over gets boring. You see this evidenced in pop records that regularly employ 50-plus producers and songwriters now. While internet memes will mock this throughout your Facebook feed, there's a reason for this and it has a parallel in science. Before 1975, there was plenty of lone wolf inventors who vented huge, huge discoveries on their own who made great strides in innovative scientific breakthroughs. But now that we've discovered more of the low-hanging fruit of innovation, we need contributions who are experienced in multiple disciplines to make innovative creations. The same has happened with music today. To make music that's resonant to the masses, a few heads are usually needed. The pop groups of yesteryear wrote amazing songs, but we're tired of those songs. We crave new emotions and since the bar for emotional communication has been raised, it's become more difficult for a single creator to have all the skills to evoke a new emotional expression. The cumulative skills of those collaborators may not always be necessary since there's tons of innovative music made by a handful of people, but a faster route to an inspired output achieves the results record companies want, which is sales. The innovators of every genre, though, never had it easy and I don't wanna infer that. To express an emotion within them, they had to become fluent in their expression to give us new heights of resonance. You can trace this back to their pedigrees. The Beatles, for example, played covers for thousands of hours in Hamburg, learning every tool of emotional expression in the book available for rock instruments. Mozart's most famous work was number 25. He became fluent in his expression and that took many lackluster works to get there. The Ramones changed the sound of music despite many cynics equating it to an accident from a bunch of dumb guys from Queens. It actually was no accident. While their song seems simple to play, the true intensity of the Ramones was derived from Johnny Ramones' innovation of doing all downstrokes that brought a new aggression to music that's still used today almost 50 years later. He developed this sound by disciplining himself to only play downstrokes after being a bass player in the past. It was easier for him to deal with the smaller gauge of strings to handle this expression since most musicians shied away from it. Just as the simple one-word band names are all gone, so are many of the simple ways of expressing an idea. As time goes on, you need greater fluency to make emotionally resonant work since we crave new ways to comfort our emotions. Barely a decade ago, artists rarely had access to good quality reverb. Now every computer can include it for a few hundred dollars. As we get access to a larger palette, we find more ways to express our emotions. To hit new heights, we need to form ways of expressing ourselves that are more complex than those of the past. Those developing new emotional resonances and electronic music are spending hundreds of hours in front of a computer composing a track. In rock music, they have to gain such a large fluency of a genre to evoke new emotions that becomes more rare each year, which is why we hear no new sounding rock music. This is why the artists who win the Grammy for rock these days are rarely expressing themselves with traditional rock instruments. The low-hanging fruit is gone, so for there to be any resonance among the masses, they need to discover a whole new way of communicating with different tools. Am I missing anything? Is there any other way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I want to answer them, so leave them in the comments since I answer every comment in every post. I hope you liked this video and if you did, please like, subscribe and get notified. And I'm gonna be breaking down the concepts in this video along with how to promote your music and how to make songs you're happy with in the future. I have a Facebook group linked below that is only helpful information. No playlists or con artists, only artists having helpful discussions allowed. If you want to learn more about me, work on a record with me, or check out any of my books, podcasts, or anything else I do, go to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on all the socials. One last thing, there's two playlists here. One is on how to grow your fan base from zero to 10,000 fans and the other is on how you make songs you're more happy with. 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