The postwar history of musical genres and fads has a generational character - each generation creates new musical genres in the course of defining its own identity, and often these genres react to and challenge the fashions of the preceding generation. After the intensity and shock factor of GenX music in the early 90's it was reasonable to look forward and ask - how could the next generation ever hope to offend these ears. I think the answer has become clear.

Many GenX commentators lament that there are no new musical genres - declaring grunge rock and gangster rap to be the last major musical movements. This is hardly correct. Jungle, Drum and Bass, Post-rock, and Dubstep are all threads that started after those movements.

Age has a tendency to make you more aware of the derivative nature of art forms. Baby Boomers may have looked at Nirvana and observed that Neil Young was doing the same stuff in the late 1970's, and Cobain probably would have agreed with them.

However, there is some truth to the fact that current music styles are less distinct from what people were listening to 15 years ago and most popular music does not fit into a new genre or sound that was created recently. What is the "problem" with these kids today?

GenXers were very concerned with labels - they did not listen to music so much as they wore it, and listening to a particular kind of music often meant dressing a particular way, acting a particular way, and hanging out with a particular crowd. Therefore, it was particularly important to GenXers to draw clear distinctions between different musical genres and eras because they were associated with particular identity groups.

Current musical trends have found a way to subvert that desire by moving beyond labels. Current popular "alternative" music is a mix-mash of different styles and influences from different eras that cannot be clearly distinguished. It seems best represented by the YouTube mashups that were popular a few years ago. A concrete collective move in a particular direction, which GenXers seem to desire, would invite labeling - something millennials seem to reject.

Nothing is more objectionable to GenX ears than music which is detached from its "proper" sociocultural pigeon hole - or music that truly doesn't have a sociocultural pigeon hole and cannot be placed into one.

Its important to view the generational dialog over musical genres through the prism of technological change. The importance of pop music to our culture is a product of the technological context of the 1970's and earlier, when high fidelity stereo systems were the most mature form of home entertainment. You had 8 TV channels. No VCR. No video games. Coming home and putting on that Zeppelin album was one of the greatest home entertainment experiences you could have.

In the early 1990's, popular music was dominated by the radio. 20-30 channels in a particular metropolitan area devoted to particular market segments. The technology split the music into genres and having a collective cultural, generational identity meant having a unique slot on the dial with a unique style.

But that era is over - today music listening is dominated by the ipod and XM Radio and tools like pandora. The breadth of options at each person's finger tips has expanded radically. At the same time, the role of music in our lives has changed. Its not as important as it once was. The music industry likes to blame piracy for the decline in their revenues, but the fact is that they are competing for people's time with a wide variety of alternative entertainment options including home video, games, and the Internet.

This means that putting an identity stake in the ground in terms of pop music is less important to this generation than it was previously, as music is less central to people's lives and less important as a way of defining identity.

Another important development is that the human ear's need for musical novelty can now be satisfied with music from the past. It used to be the case that new genres were required to meet the demand for new sounds, and new sounds were only accessible if they were being played on the radio, and so mass movements had to bring new sounds to the forefront in order to keep things interesting. However, over decades of time vast libraries of bands with different sounds have accumulated, and using tools like pandora and ipods, listeners now have access to all of it. If you get sick of what you are listening to today, you don't have to seek out a new sound, you can go find an old one and you can get lost in exploring it, and you don't need the rest of your generation to follow with you at the same time in order to be able to hear it on the air, because you have your own unique music experience that you can take with you anywhere.

The importance of new CD releases is diminished in this environment. Artists with new material are not merely competing with other artists who are releasing new music today - they are competing with every artist who ever lived. It used to make sense to hunt out new releases in order to find new sounds, but it was a hit or miss process and now it makes less sense to risk $15 on music that may or may not be good. Why early adopt new music? Let others take the risk and decide whether new releases have merit while you explore established greats - you now have access to enough of them that you can never get bored - and if something new is really good you'll hear it eventually.

This has a number of implications:

1. We're slowly seeing the decentralization of cultural experiences - we're going to seem weirder to each other because we'll all be into different stuff and we may have less in common than we used to.

2. The music industry should never ever let anything go "out of print." The great obscure albums of the past are the future. It costs very little to ensure that Amazon has a particular MP3 available for download - even if it only gets downloaded once every few months, the revenue the industry will generate will be spread out across this sort of long tail activity. If you aren't letting people pay you for it, you're missing the chance to catch revenue.

3. The slowing demand for new music reflects a real economic and cultural reality and not merely a consequence of piracy - the supply of music is constantly increasing, once music is created it cannot be uncreated, and the demand may, in fact, be finite.

I don't mean to imply that the demand for and need for new music is going to stop, but our cultural relationship with music is changing in a way that is as profound as the change that occurred when we moved from having pianos in our homes to having stereos, and we may be breaking loose from the structure of pop culture that has existed for the past four or more generations toward something completely different.