If the internet existed back in the 60's...

Would "classic" artists like The Beatles be hated? I mean, the internet has gone a long way in helping mainstream haters make their opinions common; just look at Lady Gaga, One Direction, and most obviously, Justin Bieber.

It's not so much that the internet hates anything popular; rather it hates anything that's popular with the "wrong" people, like girls. So I could see the internet mocking the Beatles' output before Rubber Soul. Then, everything after Rubber Soul would spark the biggest Broken Base imaginable.

Alright, then let's think of other popular 60's artists, like The Rolling Stones or The Beach Boys or The Who. How about then?

Rolling Stones: The purists would say something along the lines of "I liked them better when they were called BB King, Muddy Waters, and Howlin Wolf!"

Dylan would still be called a sell-out by the folk crowd. And the "Judas" incident would be subjected to countless parodies.

edited 14th Feb '14 1:16:19 PM by Quag15

Either Sufer's Choice by Dick Dale & the Del-Tones or Black Monk Time by The Monks would be the In the Aeroplane Over the Sea of the 60s. That is, a good album reduced to a punchline because of anti-mainstream types hyping it to absurd levels.

John Cage would invent vaporwave and witch house about fifty years ahead of schedule.

• Music by unsigned and independent bands at that time would be more well-known today.
• Velvet Underground would sell more records at that time despite their little-to-none radio airplay due to their lyrics on BDSM and drugs. Internet radio would help the band sell more records.
• The Beatles would receive plenty of flak especially at their boyband-era. Nevertheless, their Edward Sullivan performances would be the most discussed-about subjects on social media.
• Hundreds of Rolling Stones fan sites would be made. The Rolling Stones would be condemned by their initially-starstruck female fans after the drug bust. Their older fans would start an online petition to plead to the system to reduce their sentence.
• After The Who debuted, young superficial music listeners and fans of other popular genres of that era (jazz, doo-wop, country) would quickly jump into conclusion that the mod movement was just a fad.
• At the peak of psychedelia, websites would look like this◊ and this◊. Most online sessions for most people can only last an hour due to eye fatigue for looking at psychedelic colors too long.
• Jimi Hendrix's guitar playing would become a huge meme. People would upload Youtube parody videos of themselves playing an acoustic guitar like Jimi Hendrix after taking marijuana to the tunes of The Supremes and Bob Dylan.
• Just like today, people would complain on forums that music in the past is better. But this time around, the artists of good music in the past that they would be talking about are Jimmie Rodgers, Bessie Smith and Woody Guthrie.

edited 15th Feb '14 5:57:15 AM by tropeslave

Just like then, the grumpy old men would be complaining that everything was better in the days of Paul Whiteman and Rudy Vallee, or Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.

There'd surely be 10,000 threads demonizing Bobby Goldsboro for unleashing "Honey" onto the world.

Of course. Most of the teen idols of the mid- to late-60s would get Bieber-level hatred.

A lot of the hippie stuff of the late 60s would become famous much, much earlier than it did in real life.

And the disco backlash would have come much earlier than in real life too... Gad, isn't alternate history fun?

edited 15th Feb '14 12:36:53 PM by Aldo930

The disco backlash was engineered as much as it was organic. However, were the Internet to provide the access, the developments that we now associate with Chicago house and Detroit techno very well could have happened years earlier. I can also imagine some early form of rap catching on quickly vis a vis The Last Poets.

One does wonder about the impact of social media on civil rights in general. The potential for organisation could have been incredible.

Basically, our current musical scene would have come 25 years earlier.

I imagine that gay rights, too, may have come by 1985.

edited 15th Feb '14 1:18:13 PM by Aldo930

Well, LGBT visibility would at the very least be much greater.

There would also be greater visibility for everyone else.

But think... If the Internet existed in the 60s... How did we get there? What does it mean for us in the 2010s? Would we be living in a Jetsons-esque world?

It still wouldn't have changed Lawrence Welk's hatedom, though.

I don't think we'd be living in a Jetsons-esque utopia so much as in some kind of Fourth World post-cyberpunk other-world... which we wouldn't realise was so weird at all, really. As for how we'd get there, I can imagine Diesel, Turing and Tesla being involved in these developments.

edited 16th Feb '14 3:48:38 PM by JHM

I say Jetsons-esque because most popular views of the future from about the 30s to the 60s were among those lines...

So it's easy to suggest that the future might have developed like that.

edited 16th Feb '14 4:04:01 PM by Aldo930

Well, what exactly do you mean by "Jetsons-esque"? If you're talking flying cars, cloud cities, and humanoid robot servants, then having information technology several decades earlier would not necessarily lead in that direction. And if you're just thinking of the Raygun Gothic aesthetic, then the internet would probably make our tastes more fractured, so we'd be less likely to tear down our cities to replace them with chrome space needles.

edited 16th Feb '14 6:13:25 PM by MetaFour

The aesthetic.

Then again, the people in charge would probably believe in that aesthetic. And what they say goes.

So... the theoretical effect of internet on 60's music... would have caused a different future in everything else besides music?

It kind of came from the idea that, if the Internet existed in the 60s, how did it get there, and which kind of world would we be living in right now?

Well, this is the Music forum, so we're only talking about music, not 60's politics or scientific progresses.

Well, the ramifications of such a world would no-doubt influence the culture surrounding that music, which would probably mean that day's music would sound nothing like it does in this reality.

But that kind of speculation could probably go on forever.

Too much Wild Mass Guessing then?

Let's see... Lawrence Welk would still have a pretty huge Hatedom. It'd just be more visible.

edited 17th Feb '14 10:03:13 AM by Aldo930

There would be a huge scope and many tropers discussing Alternate History, that's for sure.