There’s composition, where music is written. A drum track may be a boring repetitive loop quantized to 4/4 beat positions, or it may have fills or polyrhythm or free time or who knows what.
There’s performance, which may be a sequencer just outputting notes at the right time or may be a human drummer of varying skill, imparting sloppiness or brilliant micro timing.
There’s recording, which today is virtually always digital, but which can theoretically be analogue tape or other exotic forms.
There’s storage medium, where we get vinyl or FLAC or MP3.
And there’s playback, where your choice of system components matters.
You can digitally record, mix, and master a bunch of drunk teenagers who don’t know how to play, and I promise it will be gloriously analog. And you can take music that was composed on an sequencer with pure quantization and no human feel at all, record/master/mix digitally, and store it on vinyl and play it in a good system and the sound will have analog warmth even while the composition and performance do not.
There’s more artistry in music today than there ever has been. More music is release every single day than was released in any entire year before 2000.
You just have to find the good stuff. If you’re hearing boring corporate crap, that reflects a need to improve discovery skill to match this new world.
When I find something new, I like to look up live performances from that artist on YouTube. Sometimes people in the comments mention other similar artists or the source that led them to the video. YouTube's algorithm is a bit of a dark and dangerous thing overall, but I do sometimes follow a suggestion for music that I end up loving.
I think a willingness to listen to unfamiliar albums and unfamiliar genres is all you really need. I look for “best of X” lists, which get posted everywhere from actual newspapers to niche sites nline forums, Twitter, and personal blogs. Type in different values for “X” and you get exposure to more music.
Some albums you cannot get digitally with the best sounding master version.
> So much precision is required that session musicians are playing most of the things you hear, not the actual artists
I’m sure the session musicians don’t appreciate this statement. Just because they can play with high precision and reliability doesn’t mean they are playing without soul.
If the featured artists can’t do so on their own, that’s sort of a knock on them, isn’t it?
Incredibly daft over-generalization, the music scene is enormous, and while for mainstream artists what you say is certainly true, you're forgetting about the rest of the 80% of the music scene, which is mostly just people who like making music and don't even earn enough to make a living from it.
In pop music this has been true since the 60s. For independent music it has mostly never been true. This hasn't changed much.
Most vinyl record buyers buy records as a collectable to show that they like a certain album, not because they're deluded audiophiles who are trying to eliminate everything digital from their audio path. Half of all record buyers don't even own a record player: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/50-of-vinyl-buyers-do... . When you look at it from that lens, I think it makes sense that records are so popular. They're the largest music format so you get the biggest version of the album art and the most extensive set of liner notes compared to buying a CD or something. Audio quality or "analogness" doesn't matter, since they're probably going to be listening to the album on Spotify instead anyway.