How has popular music evolved since 2000?

Blisterman

Ok, first off, this is not a "modern music v older music" thread, so please let's not get bogged down in that. I'm actually trying to start a reasonable discussion.

Just finished listening to the BBC series, Sounds of the 20th Century, which features music from 1951 to 2000 and it got me thinking about how music evolves over time. It's rarely a straightforward process. Musicians listen to a lot of different artists, and influences come from many different places. But there are generally trends that occur over time, that slowly evolve music, such that it is usually easy to figure out what period a piece of music is from.

Listening to the final episode from 2000, it struck me that much of the music sounds quite dated. I'd previously thought that there wasn't much evolution of music over the past decade. At least not compared to the 60's or 70's. But there are some trends. These are my observations.

Boundaries between genres, which had blurred for much of the 90's became even less distinguishable.

There has been a general reversal from the acoustic instrumental sounds at the start of the decade to a more electronic sound by the end.

Garage went from the mainstream, back underground through grime and evolved into Dubstep, which has definitely broken back into the mainstream.

Pop punk and nu metal gave way to emo, which faded away and nothing really seems to have replaced it.

Hip hop production became quite minimalist by the middle of the decade, but recently seems to be going in the complete opposite way.

Overall, there's been a move away from there being a few huge artists towards a pluralism, where there's a lot more artists with fewer fans.

SilverScreen

It confuses me why you put 'popular' music in the title as nearly all the artists that pushed boundaries in the 2000's achieved varying levels of popularity.

As you've mentioned already electronic music has had a great impact on other styles or has evolved quite a lot itself. Bands like Malory, M83, A Sunny Day In Glasgow and Soundpool combined shoegaze and electronic music very well and inspired other artists. Dubstep evolved from underground djs in London making dub remixes of 2-step garage to, erm, Skrillex and Korn's ill-fated attempt at dubstep. But artists such as Burial had a huge impact and played a great part in making this style of music popular.

Post-rock and post-metal also peaked during the last decade with bands like Explosions In The Sky, ISIS, Pelican, Godspeed You! Black Emperor etc pushing and exploring sonic boundaries. It also seemed to get more and more ambient towards the end of the decade. Towards the end of the 00's some European bands started to combine the darker elements of black metal with shoegaze introspection and post-rock atmospherics, bands such as Alcest, Shyy and Heretoir.

Some indie bands took in all kinds influences and pretty much blurred boundaries while also combining pop hooks with complex musical textures, bands such as Animal Collective, Yeasayer, Dirty Projectors. These bands are in stark contrast with garage rock revival bands at the start of the 00's.

As was also mentioned emo went mainstream at the start of the 00's, despite being underground for over a decade, mostly due to the success of At The Drive-In's Relationship Of Command. As the decade went on however emo became more watered-down and style-focused while also becoming a joke.

I could go on forever really, but the fact is music did change a lot over the 00's and this will become even more noticeable when we look back in another ten years time.