On Mon, 6 Aug 2012, Simon Wise wrote: That was true I think until the late 90's, and definitely has changed in the 2000's back to the way it was in the earlier period you're talking about. Pop music now seems to be about vocals, vocals, vocals...and by the way, did I mention the vocals? If there's any instrumental track to speak of at all, it usually seems to consist of some TR-909ish bass drum playing quarter notes, and maybe some sine wave synth bass on top of that, a few padding chords if you're lucky. And on top of that, it's literally all singing, all dancing. The bass drum part is only there to keep someone out there from proclaiming the emporer has no clothes when they notice there's actually no song really there. And the listeners seem to like it that way. If anything is too instrumentally complicated, they think it's "weird." Psychedelic music is now "creepy." We've re-entered the era of the campfire singalong. And let's not even get into the prevalence of karaoke games for consoles. Styles like rock and jazz are starting to feel to me, much as I love to play them, like something musicians do for eachother's enjoyment, sometimes in over-the-Net collaboration projects. It's almost become something where you have to be a player yourself to even appreciate it.