Not inherently, but I think there are some factors that can make it feel that way, including:

• There was a higher bar to getting air time back in the day. Having decent quality recording equipment wasn’t something a normal person could afford, so they had to rent studio time. There wasn’t an internet to put stuff out there with, so you had to get your music heard by the right people, who then had to decide it was worth playing. Today is a lot easier to get something out there.
• Though every kind of media has been subject to crafted and pushed personas for decades (e.g., The Monkeys), in these days so much of what we’re exposed to is what algorithms and corporations think we’ll buy. Way more true today than ever before.
• As someone else mentioned, when people compare “today’s music” to music from a prior decade, they’re usually comparing everything on the air today to everything that’s stood the test of time from the prior decade. Classic rock stations don’t play everything, just the stuff people still like. There’s a lot of junk that’s been forgotten.
• This is anecdotal, but from what I’ve seen, people’s musical tastes are based largely on what they liked in their late teens and twenties. Even if they like new music, it tends to be music that’s influenced by that same earlier music. As with any generality, there are lots of exceptions. But I think a society’s tastes evolve over time more than a person’s tastes, so it’s not unusual to get older and think everything new is crap.

I have all of the Billboard Top 100’s for every year from 1950 to 2009. When i downloaded it i thought that litterally every popular song i’ve heard of would be on there.

Not only are there a lot missing, there’s so so much crap. It turns out bland generic love ballads have sold really well throughout the decades, and genuinely memorable songs are a lot fewer than 100 a year. Not even to mention all the ones that don’t chart. Sure 1957 had Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock, but you know what else it had? Elvis’s Loving You, Elvis’s Love Me, and Jerry Lewis’s “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody”. Cool. Thanks for that, Billboard.

Overall there’s a tremendous survivorhip bias. By definition we only remember the memorable songs, which gives the illusion that everything was memorable.

But also, having grown up in the 2000’s, i really think it’s one of the worst decades for music. So much so that i was into 60’s rock back then, and in the 2010’s i was into the new wave of thrash metal, literally one of the most regressive genres there are. I wasn’t alive for the 80’s, i didn’t like the video games or the movies and didn’t participate in virtually any of the 80’s nostalgia that was trendy at the time, but i did prefer the music to anything my current decade had to offer.

The best music sounded better, I’m not a fan of the harsh, over compressed and brick wall limited digital stuff these days. It’s tiring to listen to.

I would say no.

Honestly, since directly after the dubstep craze era, there has been suuuuuuch good music, because I feel like that’s when electronics became much more mainstream for ALL musicians to play with. Prior and during that time, I think a lot of electronic music was about experimenting with sounds. But during that era I think was when everyday musicians got comfortable with the soundscapes, and started incorporating all their other music knowledge and to make more varied, complex, and interesting stuff.

The problem is just finding the good music, since it can be so quick for anyone to produce and distribute it. There’s just way too much.

I love 60s and 70s music, heard a lot growing up from my boomer parents. So many classic, timeless hits. Then my mum found some “Fab No. 2s of the 60s” CD, a compilation of songs that didn’t quite make it to number 1…

It was truly awful, all clichéd cheesiness and triteness, so many lame songs that sounded like other, better songs. Just sucko-barfo all round. I think there are arguments for why music from the early stages of a genre (like 60s pop and soul) are particaurly good… But there’s also a hell of a lot of selection bias going on.

Drums by the fire on shrooms was the best music epoch, after that all down hill. Stoneage gang.

Yes, when comparing mainstream music.

The Shaggs come to mind

Just because there are more crap music these days, doesn’t mean music is worse these days.

There’s a new classics station in my city, playing music from the 90s, 00s and 10s. I’ve been listening to it almost exclusively. Based on that I’m going to say it wasn’t, but we’ve forgotten about the stuff we didn’t like.

It was at least real on real instruments and the singing not auto tuned etc

Captain Beefheart. I get his performance was part of an act, but if you don’t take it all as a joke the music is pretty terrible to listen to. As a joke though it’s hilarious.

Yes.

Always

Yes it was, because you could hear the singers/rappers actual voice, instead of purposefully misadjusted autotune.