I’m a guy approaching 60, so I’ll start by saying my perception may be wrong. That could be because the protest songs from the late 60’s and early 70’s weren’t the songs I heard live on the radio but because they were the successful ones that got replayed. More likely, it’s because music is much more fractured than what I was exposed to on the radio growing up. Thus, today, I’m simply not exposed to the same type of protest songs that still exist.

Whatever the reason, I feel that the zeitgeist of protest music is very different from the first decade of my life compared to the last.

I’m curious to know why. My conspiratorial thoughts say that it’s down to the money behind music promotion being very different over those intervening decades, but I suspect it’s much more nuanced.

So, why are there fewer protest songs? Alternatively, why I am not aware of recent ones?

  • @bstix
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    110 months ago

    Do you think there’s a market for it? I wrote a protest song some years ago and I’m considering if I should even bother doing anything with it. Its been through many revisions throughout the years and I’ve been contemplating if this is actually something that people need and if I should continue working on how to arrange it for a contemporary audience.

    Like, I know I have something here, and it works in any kind of genre, but I just don’t know how to serve it in a way that people would actually bother listening to.

    Music has generally gone to shit that way.