I have no idea what anyone's going out about in this thread, older music was fucking terrible for years people banged on soggy cardboard and called it a drum mix. Now you can actually hear a drum not a sopping noise. Giant fucking thread of "Life was simpler when we thought Grendel could eat our children" threatening to rear its head here.
The trick is that nothing actually sounds the same, the problem is the idea of the novelty listener who thinks everything sounds like everything else and the inability to discern where difference and experimentation occurs. You throw the same kit at a dozen kids, they might make a dozen records in the same style, but the individual desires of those people manifest all the same. The whole concept of everything being so NEW sounding was back in the day everyone had stylistic ADD and wanted everything not to sound like the same song. FFS every song on 50s 60s records to a certain degree allllll ends up being 20 variations of the same song, but over the years the individual differences get recognized and expanded. You'd never say every Motown song is exactly the same but at the end of the day its the same fucking musicians, studio, arrangements, in fact it might even have been all done in the same marathon session.
NOAH FENCE but the music listener has a real fear of dillengence and 'doing the work' in the modern age in requiring dedication to a form, to a specific sound and recognizing where it goes, watching multiple people make the same fucking record and discovering the stylistic tics, the subtle influences, think about how and why those came to be. You can't do that when the iPod/post-modernity/whatever placer has you ready to believe everything is everything and all music is up for grabs, because then you don't learn how to appreciate the good and bad of something, you just move on to another thing.