It genuinely depresses me. I think all the fantastic melodies are very quickly drying up. Most good melodies these days sound a lot like good melodies that have preceded it.

a) 4,095,029,405,466
b) 6%

I was depressed by the percentage, but the amount is giving me hope. 6% of that is 245,701,764,327.96. Should keep us plugging for a while!

I could tell you my methods, but then I'd have to kill you.

(This does include remixes, by the way.)

and 0.1% are "groin-grabbingly transcendent"

not bad really

Because that's been around for, like, FOREVER.

This doesn't stop popular music nicking bits though, so maybe sufficient recycling can produce something new? I'm thinking "Whiter Shade of Pale", for example.

because these days, a "song" can be as much about HOW the notes are presented as much as WHAT the notes are.

There are SO many people in the world, and SO many instruments and technological innovations, that the same song could be sung in different ways by different people and a fair amount would be mindblowing for different reasons. Look at the sheer amount of amazing Bob Dylan covers, for gods sake. And, don't forget, we're not born with the knowledge of every song ever written! Two people, could, theoretically, come up with the same idea completely independently (look at all the so-called "first punk bands"), but even that doesn't mean they would sound the same. So basically there'll be DiS in 50 years time and they'll be having the same arguments.

there's an infinite number of songs (or at least infinty alef one, not absolute infinity). A song can last as long as time itself. Changing the note a second before the end of time, two seconds before, etc etc creates different songs.

in the same way there is a finite number of possible lottery number combinations. I wouldn't worry about it.

You're implying that you can define good, you can't. So therefore it's pointless to speculate.

Anybody like just listening to records anymore? What a stupid debate.

why think about it? The fact is there is far more good music out there than any one person could ever listen to in an entire lifetime - and in the span of that lifetime, far more would be made on top of that.

35000 albums are released a year in America. If that = 35000 hours, well there are only 8760 hours in a year! So it'd take 4 years of non-stop (no sleep) listening to hear all that just once. Of course, a lot of it would be shite - but then think about all the good music that a) doesn't get released in America in one year for various reasons, and b) has already been released from the last few hundred years (or more specifically, last 50) that you have never heard. It's mind-boggling. In reality, on our death-beds we'll all still be saying "oh but I never got round to listening to that [band x] album yet!"

:)

-You can't define good, it's subjective.
-There's almost an unlimited amount of song possibilities, definitley more than all of us could listen to in our life times combined.

14 are good.

yeah