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I have no complaints about music now as compared to any other time since the advent of recording. Once it all became eternal, it was all there whenever we could get to it.
So my complaints lie with the rest of life that make me listen to music less obsessively than I once did; being more responsible than when I woke up in the afternoon, grabbed the bong and started playing records until it was time to go out and drink and see somebody play live or dj until closing time. I don't blame music that I exist in a different reality now than then. Overall, I prefer this one actually, but the soundtrack is overall much quieter and increasingly silent.
Technology has changed music in one way I've noticed in that it is becoming less geographical. The likelihood of another "Seattle Sound" ever arising seems incredibly unlikely because now we band together with likeminded people online who might be anywhere on the planet. Of course this hasn't fully started to impact the "live" experience, but the beginnings are here. An experimental or noise musician playing a show in Portland with a bunch of other acts might realistically hope to be heard by 30-40 people on a night with a pretty good turnout. That same artist could play my radioshow on a Saturday at noon and in the course of a couple weeks get literally ten times as many downloads as that from our digital archive. Most of us would rather do both of course, but the club date being a priority and the live college radio set being an after-thought may begin to be reversed when streams and MP3 archives are brought into the mix.
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