Music Homogenization Quotes

From folk to tribal to Cab Calloway, Cole Porter, Gershwin to the Rolling Stones, whose first record was all covers, to country-western, bebop, blues, and even the referencing in classic hip hop to cliched love ballads of the '80s or whatever - that is kinda gone, and that's just terrifying to me.

In the mid-'60s, AM radio, pop radio, was just this incredible thing that played all kinds of music... You could hear Frank Sinatra right into the Yardbirds. The Beatles into Dean Martin. It was this amazing thing, and I miss it, in a way, because music has become so compartmentalized now, but in those days, it was all right in one spot.

You know, the radio never wanted you to speak about anything, so the music is kinda influenced by the hands of the radio which wants to homogenize it and dilute it and sanitize it. And for the most part, nobody's takin' the time to seek out the cats that are still tryin' to talk, so they have a difficult time being heard.

There was a time when people would go search out underground records. Now, underground means free, and people don't really care for it. So now artists tend to go more pop and look for the radio. You know, the radio never wanted you to speak about anything, so the music is kinda influenced by the hands of the radio which wants to homogenize it and dilute it and sanitize it. And for the most part, nobody's takin' the time to seek out the cats that are still tryin' to talk, so they have a difficult time being heard, like Chuck D said.

The big corporations and the big companies turned musicians into factory workers on an assembly line.

I think right now a lot of albums that are out there, they sound like mixtapes.

We're turning into the society that is accepting the force-feed. I don't quite understand why we're going for the things we're going for. There's no process of elimination anymore in music. They have these grooming schools, these things, and they're turning out these clones, and the music is sounding so refined that it's not even interesting.

I'm not crazy about how sort of homogenized pop music become. It used to be much more diverse. Maybe it's just what's played on the radio sounds very much the same.

You knew the difference between Barbra Streisand and Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, straight away. Now everyone sounds like each other, and I don't think that's right.

I find it quite boring when you're listening to radio, and it's the same kind of voice that's on every song on the radio. You can't really tell a lot about that singer as a storyteller and about the singer from what they're singing.

The corporations are shoving just the worst music down everybody's throats, and I think the result of that is that nobody has any taste. They have no bar as to what is good.

That's why so much of the music today sounds so much alike, because there's no in-between. So it's kind of nice to still turn some buttons every now and then.

I feel like more artists like me should be on the radio. Everything is, like, so controlled by, like, super popular music. You know what I'm saying? Like, c'mon.

Some machine-y music is great, but you can apply any groove to any song now - there's literally a massive drop-down menu on most programs. And that's what takes the human being out of the process.

Record labels collude with some of the radio stations, and the radio stations have their play lists, dependent upon what they call the, quote, 'hits.' What's commercially viable gets recycled, endlessly repeated, and as a result of that, the progressive music can't break in.

People think the world of music is so great, and it's just not. It's so boring, the way music is conceived and then declawed for public consumption.

Nothing wrong about EDM. Great songs came out of it, but there was a period when everything had to have a pace of 128 bpm and be DJ-related.

Music is all starting to sound alike in the modern era. Afro-pop sounds exactly like L.A. pop - there's no difference, no ambience, no real resonance.

Radio has changed, there was a little bit of difference around the country and now that is gone and everything is uniform. That is not the only place it's happening in music, there's a lot of consolidation.