Re: Music and the test of time
It's probably true that there will be very few bands that have emerged in the past 5-10 years that will stand the "test of time", but I feel like this has less to do with the quality of music being made and more to do with the way music is consumed these days. Back in the "good ol' days" music consumption was a lot more centralized. You had a fistful of radio stations to choose from and you liked it. Bands were bigger and appealed to a broader audience not necessarily because they were "better", but because music was far less accessible than it is now. These days you have so many ways to consume music, from radio stations to XM, to illegal downloads to rhapsody and napster to go type models, to the recently exploded blogosphere, pandora, and even things like myspace. There are just so many ways to find, search, and listen to new music that it's become ridiculously more "spread out" than it used to be. Instead of a ton of people listening to a number of bands, there are a number of people listening to any one of a ton of bands.
That's not to say the quality of music has not declined, but I don't think the "test of time" is correlated.
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