Trends and the Future Face of Music and Everything (My Spin on Things) Part Three: A New Hope

Today, there are two major factions of music fans: Those Who Listen to Top 40, and Those Who Don't.  I, being of the latter group, can not understand why people listen to Nicki Minaj, or Britney Spears, or Beyonce, or Wiz Khalifa, or... It really seems to me that people don't want to think, or if they do want to think, they want to think about degrading things and material possessions and drugs and alcohol. 
"But Shrugo, don't you see that they like to dance and that's what they can dance to?"  but they could dance to trance, for instance.  They don't need words to dance.  You can also dance to rock music, or jazz.  It's not that dancing is only capable through top 40, I think it's that they aren't willing to reject top 40 and dance to something else. 

I don't want to turn this into a bashing party, so I'll move along.  It's likely that we will experience another decade of this kind of this drugged up Pop music, since people haven't begun rejecting it en masse yet.  It may be longer than a decade from now, but I predict a rejection of this music much similar to that of disco, if not less violent; before this rejection can occur, I think the music needs to seize an even larger monopoly on the audience. 

The other music genres, before that overthrow, will most undoubtedly go through several changes.  I predict that indie music will gain more fans (the line-up at Lollapalooza supports my claim, I think), and perhaps gain some recognition into Top 40.  I don't mean indie as a genre, just as a method.  I mean independent music with either a small label or no label at all.  Big labels generally smother the creative freedom of young acts, and I think that technology is getting powerful and cheap enough to soon allow musicians to produce studio-quality work without selling their freedom to big labels.  Already, fan-funding is a popular way for artists of any kind to make money.  Check out Kickstarter, for instance.

Dubstep will probably just get more popular in the future, and most likely it will become especially prominent in the Top 40.  Once out of the underground completely, dubstep will all sound the same (it's getting close to that already) and most likely go unaccredited.  By that I mean the pop singers will have the title and the dubstep producers will get a name in the album booklet.  They won't care because they'll be getting loads of cash (I wouldn't care anyway).  I've heard predictions of mainstream mash-ups, but I find this much more likely.

Rock will probably experience another split in the future.  I can't name the participants yet, but I expect that today's metal will be part of that.  I think it will be on the losing side since, like glam-metal, it has a HUGE focus on appearance and hardly any focus on originality. The other side could be anything, but it will most likely be of a grassroots origin.  It's influences would be indie, grunge, and punk most likely (not exclusively of course) and it most likely it will be from some obscure place (I hear Fort Collins is an up and coming artist factory and possibly the next Seattle).

It's important not to leave out the fact that almost anyone can make music with the resources easily available today.  I could be optimistic and suggest that in the future there might be a "station" that people tune in to to make music in real time with random people, but frankly that's unlikely to happen.  Or if it does, it would suck.

Remember: nearly all of this is conjecture and much of it might not happen at all.  That doesn't mean I didn't research at all, but it means that no body can predict the future.  Any weather man will tell you the same.

In unrelated news:  a giant snowstorm will occur tomorrow night at 7:00 PM.