There is no question: It's easier to get your hands on music these days.
File sharing, mixtapes, MySpace, free downloads, and all-you-can-eat subscription services, make discovering and procuring music easier. Supply side barriers are dropping too, with recording technology getting cheaper, independent labels popping up everywhere, and online distribution allowing artists to become world renowned without leaving their bedrooms.
All this means that more music is floating around in the artistic marketplace than ever before:

• 1.3 billion tracks were downloaded in 2006 by U.S. college students alone
• iTunes has sold more than 4 billion songs in five years
• MySpace had 1.4 million registered bands in 2006

Music is everywhere, but does that mean it's getting any better?
Some would say yes. In the art marketplace, more music more easily obtained means more liquidity. In free-market theory, this means more people can get their hands on more of what they want. Supply can meet demand. Everyone wins.
Certainly, there is much truth to this view. The rise of the Internet, coinciding with a drop in price for recording technology, led to an explosion of independent music. Subgenres like noise rock, alt-country, or crunk probably would have been simply regional phenomenons - rather than nationwide scenes - without this new liquid music market. Fans of obscure artists can connect and build a community online, leveraging their strength in numbers to attract major label attention.
However, I'm not convinced that all this has really made contemporary music better. I realize "better" is quite a subjective term, but I'll try to explain what I mean.

Before the Internet - and before home recording was a reality for anyone but the richest musicians - the musical bar for success was a lot higher. It took a ton of hard work, support, and more than a little bit of luck to become a national phenomenon. Most didn't make it, or at least never broke into the big time. But when they did, it was big.
Of course, there were many downsides to this system. Chief among them, money was more important than talent. Deep-pocketed record studios pushed crappy pop music on the masses. But real broad based, artistic cultural movements existed too.
While people might have bought enough pop schlock to keep the record business going, they also latched onto something that was true when it came along. The 1950s brought us both crap from Tony Bennett and Pat Boone, and gold from Elvis Presley. The 1960s simultaneously brought us Engelbert Humperdinck and the Woodstock generation. The 1980s kicked off both the era of the diva and hip hop. In short, you had a lot of top-down crap, but a lot of huge, cohesive artistic movements too.
The music scene today seems fundamentally different. The bar of entry is much lower, which means the scene is inherently fragmented. Sure, a lot fewer Americans are listening to the radio and buying the crap the record labels think we love to hear, but that comes with the cost of less cohesive or broad based artistic movements as well.
With increased liquidity in the art market, people tend to delve deeper rather than wider. You personally might be able to find more of the music you're interested in, but you sacrifice the sense of community you get when every "cool kid" in the nation is dying their hair fire-engine red, as they did in the punk-crazed 90s.
What I'm trying to say is that though more varied musical movements exist these days - reflecting the reality of our long-tail market - there are also less nation-wide phenomenons. Beatlemania would never happen in today's fragmented world, and it's hard not to view the downfall of that kind of artistic cohesion as a loss.
I'm not sure I'd trade a return to big record companies and payola for a musical movement on the scale of what happened in the late 1960s, but I'm pretty pissed I missed out. It's an amazing thing when a generation comes together around an artistic idea. I'm dismayed by the fact that I'll probably never have the chance to participate in something like that in my lifetime.
But hell, maybe I'm wrong. Do you think we can still see broad artistic movements in America, even in today's fragmented society?
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