So, I've started and deleted a response to this thread about five times now. As a former Anthro major, these sorts of discussions are exactly the sort of thing I both love and hate. I love 'em because I love talking smack about music. I hate 'em because someone usually gets butthurt and starts throwing bad vibes around. So far, though, so good!
In general, I have a tough time coming up with coherent predictions about "music," because my first response is always "which music?" So far most of the discussion has been around rock-related music, which makes total sense - for the most part, we are a fairly rock-based board (no slight intended, and yes, there are plenty of offshoots into avant-garde and noise and electronic and all sorts of good stuff). But on a global scale (and over the modern era), rock music is barely a blip on the radar. Which is not to malign it - I grew up on it, and it's still most of what moves me. But there's so much other stuff going on out there besides it (and besides all the other parenthetical stuff I mentioned as well), that talking about "music" is like the allegory of the blind guys trying to describe an elephant.
As an example, take K-Pop. If you had told me about K-Pop ten years ago, I would have thought you were describing something out of a William Gibson novel. Not that it's THAT unbelievably futuristic, but a thing that perfectly meta-consuming, glossy, produced and mass-consumed would have seemed science fictional. Now, of course, it's all over the place. Maybe still not "mainstreet America," but pretty much everywhere else. K-pop isn't necessarily futuristic in the elements that it's based on so much as the way that they're juxtaposed and mutated.
Or what about stuff that's not so widely hyped right now, like the favela beats that Diplo made a career out of appropriating a few years back? Just because he's moved on doesn't mean that sound isn't happening, growing, and mevolving in the streets it started in.
And then what about the hyper-isolated stuff that never really leaves it's ecosystem, like Go-Go music from D.C.? I don't know if it's a living genre anymore, but I would bet that there's still places that have their regional sound (even despite the interwebs tendency to broadcast everything that gets uploaded).
Our own ohsojayadeva (he doesn't log in much anymore, but he's still an ILFer to me) has been doing some great stuff with genres not touched on here - a few years back, he released an album of Kirtan (from Wikipedia, Kirtan " is call-and-response chanting or "responsory" performed in India's bhakti devotional traditions) that drew as much on synth-pop and heavy guitars as it did devotional chants. And his "regular" band Oh So, which is nominally gothy-electronic, just released a single that owes as much to Prince as to Gary Numan as to anything "gothy" -
http://ohso.bandcamp.com/.
Hell, I went to a folk show this weekend (and I mean weird appalachian/New Englad dissonant trad-folk with old timey songs about incest, cannibalism at sea, and people freezing to death in the winter... with little blips of Tuvan throat singing and bowed banjo thrown in for good measure), and the place was packed. This is stuff that's acoustic to the bone and rejects many current notions of "modernity"... but was recorded in a modern studio, and is still available for purchase on Bandcamp -
http://timeriksen.bandcamp.com/releases (and yeah, there's an electric guitar on "Auld Lang Syne, so clearly it stirs the pot even more than I just let on).
Then there's the talk of the global music industry, which is obviously in a state of upheaval. More power of distribution going to more artists, while the traditional structures crumble means... what? Hell, my own weird "I'm recording this for my own entertainment" stuff has sold albums as far abroad as Scotland and Finland - not many, mind you, but it would have been unthinkable for the bands I used to play in that got me into music in the first place.
This isn't really meant as a refutation to anything that's been said (well, except to the person who said that music is dead, but that seemed like straight trollin'), just some pain-in-the ass reflections, caveats and additions. I think this thread's totally a valid discussion... and probably worth a PhD thesis or ten.
It took Pink Floyd years to become fully recognized. Led Zeppelin had a quick rise to fame and obsession, but it wasn't so easy for Pink Floyd (at least from what I've read).
