Casual Conversation

Music is so much better than it used to be, it's fucking incredible.
I volunteer at a non-profit youth center. We host a lot of concerts, so basically I have a part time job as a booker.
The quality of the bands who are willing to play for $200 a night (which covers the cost of getting there and back, but not even a bed for the night) is insane!
Half the bands that play there for next to nothing are just as good as any that made it big 20 years ago.
And they're all on Spotify, so you can listen to any band you like as much as you like.

Trending music may suck, just ignore it.

Everybody always says modern pop music is terrible, your suffering from recency bias. Take a look at top 40s from 20 years ago. You'll probably see a bunch of songs you forgot about because they didn't stand the test of time. Old music isn't better, you just only still hear the good stuff.

It's probably because your particular demographic is not what they are targeting with today's music.

The real money is in the young kids who use their allowance and part-time job earnings to purchase albums and to buy individual songs and to buy merch for bands.

If your particular aesthetics are stuck with what was popular in the 90s and early 2000s, chances are you have kids and responsibilities and you don't have the time or financial bandwidth to obsess over the latest trend in music.

Also, as we grow older we tend to grow more segregated and apart from our peers so we have less things to talk about and less things to relate to with music.

Those factors combine basically mean that you are aging out of pop music.

And that's okay, I recommend that you start looking more into independent labels and small bands with little following, you are more likely to find music that caters to your tastes if you put the work in, but Mass music is no longer catering to you and your preferences so it's up to you whether you want to live in a world without new music or not.