And cutting to M@kz for a further tangent (hope you don't mind delocating this too?)
Quote by M@kz Delissen
I think that this "laziness" is a direct consequence of the amount of information that is available, and how easy it is to get it. The problem you mention exists beyond music. It is a serious threat to general knowledge. Because of the Internet (i.e. Google) younger people have almost stopped thinking for themselves, because they have come to rely on the fact that if they want to know something, it is available on the Internet. So the need to remember stuff is gone. The same goes for music. There is so much available at a mouse click that especially the younger generation (the iPod kids) doesn't bother anymore to go and find something new. They rely on their newsgroups and RSS feeds for that.
This process is a serious threat to intelligence, I'm afraid.
Threat to intelligence in general? Nah. We just need information handling skills. There is no
need for everyone to kno everything about everything (something that was still possible some 500 years ago!), it is perfectly sufficient for the majority to kno the basics & where to look for more information, and for the experts to in addition to master their own subject, whatever it may be.
Music, tho? Yes, it is probably a risk to obscure genres, due to a lack of general academic organization of things (also, Wikipedia's notability policies
), and I'd also say it's in the end what's resulting in the industry's general decline. Hobbyists, collectors, "true fans" have always been a minority, and these days the general music-buying public has some much stuff so easily available that there's little need for them to keep buying the same stuff as the previous group (which I understand to have still been the case around the 70s?) Plus our society is kind of music-saturated now, compared to the 40s or something, so there isn't, either, a whole new generation to start any new moovments as huge as say, rock.
Music is far from"dead" over, but I'm pretty sure it's close to "all major innovations done" over. Compare with fine arts: can you name anything huge that's happened since the 60s? And yet around the previous turn of the century whole new genres were founded about yearly.
