This is no doubt true, but there are a number of studies which suggest that, at least in the case of music, things really have gotten rather worse over the last two decades, thanks to corporatization and consolidation of the production model.
I don't understand this view. Heavily commercialised music has almost never been all that great anyway. Except very occasionally. Most of it is LCD garbage. Maybe the garbage has become even more garbage, I don't know. But why judge an art form by the boring average.
There's so much great new music being made every year, new genres and ideas, etc. Film music seems better than ever recently. Especially for TV series. Lots of new styles emerging there too, see Mac Quayle for instance.
The really good, modern music was almost always on the fringes, and there's more of it now than ever before.
There might also be more garbage, but there's no need to listen to it.
This is only if you listen to the most mainstream, general audience top 40 pop content-sludge.
There is an overwhelming amount of good music out there. Pick an album top 50 list from 2022, for example fantano's, or pitchfork, check out bandcamp's staff picks, listen to other musicians that are on the same label as your favourite band, keep an eye on things like NPR Tiny Desk, KEXP, la blogothèque on YouTube.
Just start listening. You are almost guaranteed to stumble upon something you like. It won't come to you algorithmically but the effort required is really low.
My favourite new album I discovered last year was Immanuel Wilkin's The 7th Hand [1], I stumbled upon it by going through a top 20 jazz albums of 2022 list to see if I had missed anything, and it immediately jumped out at me as being exactly the shit I'm into.
The research on this topic that I'm aware of fails to account for the fact that the top 40/100 lists are less representative of what people are actually listening to than they used to be. If Drake can drop an album and have every song on it chart on the Hot 100 for a week or two, that's going to influence the analysis. That simply wasn't possible before music downloads/streaming. You can see the impact on the chart records -- artists from the past decade dominate.
ETA: And "worse" in these studies tends to be defined in terms of measurable qualities where contemporary pop music most differs from "classical" music.
There are more bedroom indie music producers than ever. EDM and "rap" are better than ever with many many good artists to choose from. One of the biggest breakout rap artist right now was just a random 20 year old working with other random bedroom producers just a couple years ago.
