I see the sentences, "Heck, one can buy it straight from their smartphone nowadays, even quicker and more convenient. Pathetic." I can *only* conclude that buying music on a smartphone is pathetic. Especially when I buy the majority of my music from a mobile device - even if I don't necessarily listen to it on the same mobile device.
I will note that the
mastering process is technically inferior today, which is mostly around ramping the gain and volume up to 'just loud enough to not clip' and that's also a symptom of the fact that people inevitably buy their music in a digital compressed form rather than any physical uncompressed form (i.e. MP3/M4A vs CD), and because a sizeable number of consumers are listening on mobile devices with tinny little speakers or earbuds with tinny tiny little speakers.
And yes, you're absolutely right that there is quality music being created today - but just as it has been for the last 50 years, what is popular is not necessarily what is good. And every generation feels the previous generation's culture was better - because they're only seeing the things that naturally rose to the top in that time. There was always a large swathe of rubbish music being played, a large swathe of *rubbish* music being played.
I find it interesting to go back and look through 'songs that were number 1 for more than a week' and see how many cringe inducing songs that includes.
The Christmas number 1's list is particularly weird - but no-one is going to tell me that all current music is objectively and unambiguously worse than 1993's
wonderful Christmas joy for example. Or, for that matter, 1971's
Ernie (Fastest Milkman In The West)
My dad was born in the late 1940s, and was a strong fan of stuff from the 1950s and 1960s, the end of the big band sound; my mother born at the start of the 1960s, and thinks that all music stopped being worth listening to if it was made after about 1993. Me, I'm from the start of the 1980s, so naturally my era is the 1980s and 1990s with some stuff from the 1970s - and for me, much of what came after 2005 or so isn't that interesting.
My sister on the other hand is 10 years younger than me, and her tastes in music run correspondingly later too.
This stuff is a lot more complicated than we give it credit for.