Do you agree with Rick Beato that Gen Z doesn't care about music, preferring video games?

[highplainsdem]

I ran across this video Rick posted yesterday while I was having breakfast this morning. (Please use the link to go to YouTube to view it.)

There are already several thousand comments on YouTube, and I was wondering what DUers thought.

You'll see a variety of responses just skimming down the comments, from people agreeing with Rick to those saying video games are just another way of delivering music -- and for many gamers, the games got them into music.

FWIW, I'm a Boomer who was never interested in video games, though I once corresponded a lot with a game designer (known especially for geopolitical games) who wanted to bounce some ideas off me, ideas that tbh I didn't really understand. LOL. I am NOT the person to turn to for opinions about video games.

Which is why I'm curious to hear your opinions, at least on this subject of video games and music. Please watch all of Rick's video, since he explains exactly why he formed his opinions.

I know most DUers are Boomers or at least older than Gen Z, but I hope we will hear from younger DUers on this, too.



Editing to add that I posted a link to PC magazine's 2021 list of the best video game soundtracks, ever, in reply 3 below.

I'll be listening to some of those myself, but in general, as much as I appreciate a good soundtrack while watching a film, I've almost never simply listened to a soundtrack, and have bought only a few over the decades (and those were all from musicals). For me, instrumental soundtracks are great as background music for a story. to enhance certain scenes/moods. But I prefer songs written to stand alone. Songs that ARE a story, or at least a scene from a story.

[LakeArenal]

1. I can't really lump anyone in a group.

However, music will continue to rule. Even in video games.

[onecaliberal]

2. No. My son is a music major. Also, there is music in most video games.

[highplainsdem]

3. I just did some googling and found a 2021 PC Mag article on the 20 best game soundtracks

of all time (the URL says 11, but the article was updated).

https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-11-best-game-soundtracks-ever

I'll probably listen to some of these later, though I have zero interest in the games.

Anyone here see some favorites on that list?

[msongs]

4. last video games I played were pong and that one where shapes fall top to bottom of screen

and u have to catch them and line them up

[qazplm135]

5. I'm Gen X

Love video games and anything visual, meh on music.

I grew up when video games became a thing.

[Wingus Dingus]

6. I agree with him to a large extent, but it's not necessarily video games occupying

all their time. My boys are right at the borderline between millennial and Gen Z, and music is very important to them both--my younger son is a guitarist and creates his own music with pro-tools/focus rite. My husband is also a guitarist and also creates his own music. I am not a musician but an avid lifelong music listener, can't imagine life without music. My dad and brothers are musicians, too. So maybe it's either genetic or nurture in my kids' case, that music is very important to them.

That said, they are also very avid gamers and Twitch users--but one doesn't displace the other, they're concurrent interests.

I think there's just an explosion of creative internet-related pursuits that can engage young people, while at the same time most don't have the attention span or discipline to play musical instruments anymore. My nephews and nieces are teens and early adolescents, and their non-gaming/non-sports time is spent creating Tik Tok videos of themselves. It's easy, accessible, a creative outlet--and requires no work/practice/deep concentration/discipline.

Gen Z'ers also don't really have any good music recently to draw inspiration from, that comes from actual human-played instruments. Music is just mood and atmosphere and background to them, they aren't listening for that Eddie Van Halen guitar solo or that Neil Peart drum fill anymore, like I did when I was young. It just doesn't seem to be a thing for them anymore.

[BoomaofBandM]

7. My 10 year old 5th grader grandson loves music of all types.

We often swap songs we enjoy with him. And he loves sharing his finds with us. to be fair, his dad played sax, his.mom played guitar, and I played cello and was a self taught guitar player as well as buying a uke just to fool around on. My husband plays a great radio and has the most diverse love of music of all of us.

He will be learning sax next year. Already signed up to join the band. He also likes Minecraft and Roblox, and youtube. He got bored with tiktok. And he has fun researching facts. I think his generation has so much available to them. They are so much more aware of the world than I was at their age.

Also, he called this morning from the park as he was climbing a tree lol. I would say music and gaming are a split.

[Tikki]

8. NO...there are hundreds of genres out here..

Many of these genre's have ferocious fan scenes today.

Do you know right now one of the hottest youth music scenes (yes Rock Music) is in Barcelona Spain, adrenaline rush and all.

Much of the current music scene does not have its deep roots in any of the bands or musicians the gentleman mentioned.

Kids do or don't come to music for various reasons.

I don't know anything about this gentleman but I am curious if this gentleman brings any current music to his audience.

Tikki

[malthaussen]

12. The gentleman is a music producer by trade.

And a competent guitarist. He has, however, had some bad experiences with the music industry, and these experiences do tend to sour his opinions on the current musical scene.

As a musician, he mourns the fact that most people don't appreciate music as music, and that the industry caters to such people, rather than musicians. This is not uncommon, for musicians. And he views the earlier era of "Classic Rock" through somewhat rose-tinted glasses, apparently not recognizing that most of the "Classic" rock bands were really not universally popular when they were making their music, but very much niche properties.

That said, his criticisms are legitimate, when you take his bias into account.

As for current music, from what I've seen of his work, he only brings some mainstream-popular music to his audience, in order to condemn it as crap. He has not examined much of the modern music scene beyond that, to my knowledge.

-- Mal

[Tree-Hugger]

10. Gen X here

I'm a young Gen X, born in the later 70's just a few years off from the Millennial generation. Kids my age were the ones who grew up with a heavily analog world that became digital - and we adapted. When I was very little, we had albums and 8 track in my home. By the end of my teens, I was downloading music from Napster. We also had video games and hung out for long hours in arcades. Video games music became increasingly important, especially once the 90's rolled around. And your know what? I remember this same argument from back when I was a kid and young teen, especially once Grunge started and the boomers began referring to us as " the slacker generation." We heard we didn't care about "real" music. We didn't care about the classics. All we cared about was video games. Same argument, just a different time period.

I'm a huge huge David Bowie fan and he was among the first artists to offer digital downloads of music. He also composed music for a video games series. He said in a 90's interview that the digital world was going to absolutely change the way they workd consumes music. And he was right.

I have a Gen Z kid and a Gen Alpha ( I believe that's what they call the gen after Z). They are very connected to music. My Gen Z kid is very much a gamer. He also loves music. My Gen Alpha kid is less of a gamer and she, too, loves music. Both of my kids are musically inclined, though the oldest lakes confidence to try instruments. My youngest plays the flute and violin. Tik Tok as big with both generations and that app, while decried by boomers, has introduced A LOT of music to the kids these days. I find them to be very aware of music. It's the nature of consumption that has changed these days. There seems to be less gatekeeping around music as well. As a kid back in my time, you were Grunge or Goth or Punk, a Deadhead or a headbanger or a hippie (to us, that was someone who liked that "old" 60's and 70's music), a rapper (and there were subsets here) or R&Bier, a technohead, or industrial. It was all very rigid. Nowadays, those lines seem to be more blurred. It's not that kids don't care - they're not boxing themselves in as much when it comes to music. They're downloading and streaming A TON of it. They're breaking old songs into 10 second sections and making viral dances to it. They're streaming their own musical content. They're collaborating with each other and with old heads. And they're composing for video games. Their dance studios choreograph performances to video game music. The love of music hasn't died, the nature of the relationship changed. It's gone from monogamous to polyamorous. LOL.

[malthaussen]

11. Let's dispose of the generalization, and get to the heart of the matter...

... which basically boils down to "what entertainment is popular when."

I'm going to offer a controversial suggestion: Boomers didn't care much about music, either.

"What," you say, "look at all the great music of the 60's and 70's, how can you say people didn't care about music?"

Here's how: the Top 40 generation listened to music, but they really didn't care about it as music, it was just the main form of entertainment available, and support for this or that fashionable group was a way to sort oneself into a category of fellow-thinkers. There were those who enjoyed bubblegum, those who enjoyed hard rock, those who enjoyed psychedelic rock, those who enjoyed folk-rock... you get the picture. Did they care about the music? I don't think so, on average. What they cared about was how the music they supported made them look, what group it put them in.

Nowadays, superheroes and video games have taken over the entertainment market. Is there really much difference between one mindless shooter and another? No more than our parents heard in the difference between, say, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Clever marketeers have fused these two interests: videogames about superheroes, or featuring superhero skins (that one must purchase, like Barbie's clothes) are the Top 40 of the 21st century.

There have always been people who care about music itself, and I reckon the rising generation has just as many of those folks as the Boomers did, or the Silent Generation that brought us jazz and swing. There have always been a much larger category of people who don't really "care" about music, but who enjoy it as background to other activities. All video games have a soundtrack (and it's ironic how many great tunes of the Top 40 period, or even earlier, have become popular again because they were used in a video game or a movie). Do people play the games for the music? No, they play them, again, to sort themselves into groups. The 11-year-old in my house loves Fortnight, scorns the Dark Souls series. He associates with like-minded friends. Similar to how the hard rockers and pop music "lovers" of the 60's and 70's formed separate groups and scorned the others.

Another trend I have noted is the constant cycling, in popular music, between dance music and serious music. A musician needs to deliver what is popular to make a paycheck. People have always liked to dance. Dance music doesn't require much talent or virtuosity: "all we need is a drummer, for people who only need a beat." Professional musicians will play that stuff, they have to play that stuff, but they don't like it much. What they like is music that is intricate and challenging and lets them show off their virtuosity. So, Swing gives way to BeBop, and Top 40 gives way to hard rock, and then Disco, the much-despised Disco, supplants hard rock. Because however good a song like "Stairway to Heaven" might be, you sure-enough can't dance to it (well, actually you could, but who ever did?).

Today, because of the changes in the delivery system, music is more fragmented, which is good news and bad news. There is no Top 40 dominance, there is no FM radio ghettoization, but instead a veritable smorgasbord of music, and well-performed, much of it free for nothing on You Tube. Because there is not a force in music as dominant as Top 40 was in the Boomer days, it gives the illusion that the rising generation doesn't care as passionately about music as they did then. But that is an illusion: fans scream just as loudly for bands that tour now as they did in 1964. And there is no lack of touring musicians. It is possible now to find even more niches in which to fit yourself through appreciation of a genre of music. There being only so many people to go around, the more niches, the fewer number of fans in each niche -- which can give the impression that people "don't care" about music. They care about it as much as they ever did -- they just have more choices now.

-- Mal

[Akoto]

13. Disagree. Music is now a major feature of games. We love both!

If you count me as still being young at 37, anyway, though I've gamed all of my life.

Check out the Elden Ring soundtrack. It's a magnificent game and a current hit, full orchestral score:

Serious orchestras hold video game music concerts in serious music halls now. Young people love music.