Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Getting Worse

One often hears that there’s no mon­ey to be made in music any­more. But then, there was no mon­ey to be made in music when Bob Dylan start­ed his career either—at least accord­ing to Bob Dylan. “If you could just sup­port your­self, you were doin’ good,” he says in an inter­view clip includ­ed in the short com­pi­la­tion above. “There was­n’t this big bil­lion-dol­lar indus­try that it is today, and peo­ple do go into it just to make mon­ey.” He appears to have made that remark in the late nine­teen-eight­ies (to judge by his Hearts of Fire look), by which time both the indus­try and nature of pop­u­lar music had evolved into very dif­fer­ent beasts than they were in the ear­ly six­ties, when he made his record­ing debut.

“Machines are mak­ing most of the music now,” Dylan adds. “Have you noticed that all songs sound the same?” It’s a com­plaint peo­ple had four decades ago, think­ing of syn­the­siz­ers and sequencers, and it’s one they have today, with stream­ing algo­rithms and arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence engines in mind.

Not that Dylan could be accused of fail­ing to change up his sound, or even of refus­ing to acknowl­edge what advan­tages they offered to the indi­vid­ual musi­cian: “You can have your own lit­tle band, like a one-man band, with these machines,” he admit­ted, how­ev­er obvi­ous the lim­i­ta­tions of those machines at the time. But he under­stood that this new con­ve­nience, like that intro­duced by so many oth­er tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments, came at a cul­tur­al price.

Even in the sev­en­ties, record­ing was becom­ing per­ilous­ly easy. In the six­ties, no mat­ter if you were the Bea­t­les, the Rolling Stones, or indeed Bob Dylan, “you played around, you paid enough dues to make a record.” But bands of the fol­low­ing gen­er­a­tion “expect to make a record right away, with­out any­body even hear­ing them.” As for the solo acts, “if you’re a good-look­ing kid, or you’ve got a good voice, they expect you to be able to do it all,” but “if you don’t have expe­ri­ence to go with it, you’re just going to be dis­pos­able,” a mere instru­ment of pro­duc­ers who took autho­r­i­al charge over the records they over­saw. All these decades lat­er, when it’s become eas­i­er than ever to find any kind of music we could pos­si­bly want, nobody must be less sur­prised than Bob Dylan to hear “so much medi­oc­rity going on.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bob Dylan’s Famous Tele­vised Press Con­fer­ence After He Went Elec­tric (1965)

Bri­an Eno on the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

The Real Rea­son Why Music Is Get­ting Worse: Rick Beato Explains

How Com­put­ers Ruined Rock Music

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

How Bob Dylan Cre­at­ed a Musi­cal & Lit­er­ary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.