Everyone disagreeing with you. I’m going to agree with you. Music peaked years ago. I listen to thousands of new songs every year, and my impression is music has lost its personality. Thanks to all the different streaming services, anyone can upload mediocre music. Everyone uses similar tools to make music so the genres all smear into a sound of boring sameness. Maybe it’s not bad, but it’s rarely distinct or good. I mean, I could play a guitar intro off Metallica’s Black album, a few seconds lead in of ‘70s Simon And Garfunkel song, a riff off U2’s Joshua Tree, etc…and they are distinct sounds of that group, you’d know instantly. You could play a song from ‘80s rap, R&B, or New Wave and you’d instantly know the era.

Modern music has pretty much lost anything that could set it apart. If anything defines it it’s the sameness of it all. If you listen to interviews of artists from decades ago they often spent weeks slaving over a particular sound or riff they created specifically for a song or album. Unique timing, multiple different unique instruments in a song. Lots of things went into new music that was full of new sounds. IMO now people just maybe tweak whatever comes out of software like Ableton’s instrument and synth packages a little and go with it.

Before some literalist jumps in and cites some exceptions - no, it’s not all bad. Yes, there are some good artists that have defined sounds. There is good music. The point is that the democratization of tools and the ability to share music so easily has, for the majority, drowned anything distinct out, you have to sift through a lot of crap to find the good, and I don’t think the last ~10-20 years have had the fortune of having a defined sound the way each previous decade did. Other than a lot of autotune and canned instrumentation, anyway.