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SUPPORT ME ON PATREON\n\nWATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE\n\nSince the beginning of popular music - and depending on how you define it that could mean hundreds of years ago, trends have been a thing. Whether due to music creators pushing through to the next or different level of composition, performance and production; or fans being attracted by something new and different, and/or wanting to jump on the latest bandwagon; or the powers that be - patrons, companies, journalists, critics - deciding what should be hot or what sells best ... what\u2019s been constant is that new styles and ideas of music replace the old. A sound or style that was hot for a while can become cliche or pass\xe9, pushing out the old style to near extinction. It can happen subtly over a few years, or overnight in a blink.\n\nAt first, modern media and the internet sped up this turnover process - like it\u2019s sped up everything. Then about 10-15 years ago, right around when streaming took over as the dominant way to absorb music, the whole thing reached an infinity point, and exploded. Trends started running into each other, overlapping, repeating, dying and regenerating, appearing and disappearing too quickly to take hold and push out anything else. In short, trends in music up and died.\n\nWhen I was starting out in music, and for decades before and a little after, trends were so dominant that you had to be super plugged in to make sure you didn\u2019t fall behind - or worse, get too far ahead. It put a whole other level of pressure on EVERYONE - creators, fans, sellers, chroniclers. You couldn\u2019t just do or like any old thing. You had to keep track of what was currently hot, still hot but fading, totally gone, gone but retro cool again, up and coming, completely off the chart, or any number of other classifications. It was exhausting and suffocating and produced tremendous anxiety.\n\nOnce you\u2019re on that track, it\u2019s really hard to jump off. You get addicted to believing that it\u2019s the only way to be relevant and succeed, and you\u2019re afraid that if you hop off the track you\u2019ll immediately be done for. So when that infinity point explosion happened, I didn\u2019t notice at first. Then I sensed something was different. And once I became aware, it slowly hit me that IT. WAS. ALL. OVER. And it felt fucking great. Liberating.\n\nI started hearing \u201cout-of-time\u201d production values \u2013 sounds, FX, ways of writing/singing/performing that didn\u2019t fit into the trending pop landscape. This was initially just in indie music \u2013 lesser known acts out of the mainstream. So I didn\u2019t think much of it. I figured it was creatives in their sandboxes building retro castles. Slowly \u2013 but really not that slowly \u2013 these sounds started showing up on the charts. First as novelties, and then as mini trends. At some point these mini trends bubbled up, overlapped, intertwined and burned off so rapidly that trying to call any one of them the \u201cnew trend\u201d was pointless. This set off a wave of creation with little to no boundary. People were doing whatever they wanted as if it was all okay \u2013 because all of a sudden it WAS. Songs could sound like they were made in any recent decade, and as long as they were good they were accepted.\n\nNow there are certainly still trends or movements in all areas of music \u2013 in the sense that creatives (producers, writers, performers) always have ears to the ground listening for awesome ideas to adapt. The difference is these are not ruling taste or ruling what\u2019s \u201callowed\u201d to be heard. They\u2019re just there.\n\n...\n\n\n--- \n\nThis episode is sponsored by \n\xb7 Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app\n\nSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/musicisnotagenre/support\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices