Popular music from the 1990s to the present includes Hip-Hop, dance and techno; the music of the decade of the 1990s may also be characterized as recycled music since many top artists covered songs from previous generations. Among these are EtienneÆs version of Neil SimonÆs ôOnly Love Can Break Your Heart,ö Sonic Youth covering the CarpenterÆs ôSuperstar,ö Smashing Pumpkins covering Fleetwood MacÆs ôLandslide,ö and Erasure covering Peter GabrielÆs ôSolsbury Hill.ö Other significant elements also characterize 1990s music. ôAny characterization of music in the 1990s must deal first and foremost with the overwhelming fact that there are far more active composers today than at any previous time in historyö (Gann). In addition, popular music of the 1990s is too diverse to be characterized in terms of a particular style compared to previous eras. This paper will discuss popular music in the 1990s through the present, focusing on how it differs from music of the 1970s and 1980s, and where it is heading.
Gann points out that since the middle of the 1980s, sequencing software has become the common mode of music-making with the result that the use of notation in compositions, so crucial in previous eras, has been fading in importance. One of the differences between todayÆs music and the music of the 70s and 80s is the physical change in the materials of music. ôThe musical atom is increasingly no longer the note, but the sample, a sonic entity that can just as easily be a sound complex or quotation as a single tone from a musical instrumentö (Gann 281). The birth of the World Wide Web in 1992 made the 1990s the first truly electronic age, changing communication modes and changing the way music is created and received. For example, instead of playing a mix of music as in previous times, radio stations tend to find a niche and stick to it. ôWith the advent of MP3 and writable CDs people could copy music to a CDS and ha...