> I think that has always been the case, we just tend to compare today’s average stuff with the best stuff from earlier days.
I agree with this of course, because generally nobody remembers the bad stuff unless it was the worst. I beg to differ with music, though, because there's an opposing effect: we tend to be left with the most marketed music, which was usually a cheap knockoff of something interesting going on at the time. The shitty commercial knockoff becomes the "classic" while the people they were ripping off don't even get a wikipedia page.
You're raising a good point about how "best" is defined.
If you ask most people, they are by definition more likely to connect with broadly disseminated cheap knock offs than they are with whatever 'legit' inventive underground creator, simply because they've heard the former and not the latter.
Just a mental exercise: If you ask 1000 people if they prefer Knock Off or Original, and 900 say Knock Off, which one was better? If the answer is still Original, by what metric do we measure quality?
I agree with this of course, because generally nobody remembers the bad stuff unless it was the worst. I beg to differ with music, though, because there's an opposing effect: we tend to be left with the most marketed music, which was usually a cheap knockoff of something interesting going on at the time. The shitty commercial knockoff becomes the "classic" while the people they were ripping off don't even get a wikipedia page.