Music has gone from talented musicians to trashy excess, trend-following, autotune, misophonic hi-hats/beats, and bad repetitive songs due to record producers' deliberate pursuit of profit over original creative music. It has affected millions like me for the past 20 years, yet the music industry hasn't been aware of their lower standards, image, and monopoly during the past two decades.

In 1997, autotune shook the world. Its purpose was to fix pitch in singers’ voices to make studio recording easier. However, music fans everywhere were confused why singers’ voices were so warped, machine-like, and disturbing. The intent was originally to perfectly fix tiny mistakes during recording sessions that nobody would notice, but it became an extremely noticeable and irritable to most of the general public, audio effect. Suddenly hundreds of musicians used autotune to kickstart their career, despite autotune making their voices extremely noticeably disturbing compared to skilled, even amateur unaffected singing. However, vocalists using autotune eventually surpassed and became more successful and popular than those without, becoming a cultural trend. By the early to mid 2000s, more and more professional vocalists were obviously autotuned. By the late 2000s to 2010s, despite Jay-Z's DOA (Death of Autotune) hit song demanding musicians to avoid autotune, every high-caliber singer and rapper was autotuned, and it became even more unnatural and irritable than ever.

Following autotune was a music trend that sticks to this day: no instruments and rhythm, only dulled repetitive electronic beats that stay in your head. Almost all of the first autotuned artists when autotune first started were like this (the first autotuned song, Cher's Believe, for example), and it took over with the rising of dubstep and trap beats in the modern era. The 2000s also saw the extreme falling of the rock band. New bands used to come out all the time during the grunge movement of the 90s, and while the 90s bands continued to perform in the new millennium, not as many rock bands came to define the 2000s as compared to the 90s. To a lot of rock fans, there has still truly never been a new era of rock music and bands yet. While the 90s had many iconic and loved genres like alternative/grunge, metal, garage, golden age hip hop, techno, eurodance/eurobeat, rave, and many more, only the autotuned and dull instrumental-less beat era of pop and hip hop would define the music of the 2000s to the present. And then, suddenly modern music’s image became as negative as it sounded. Hip hop and rap exploded, and its image became less about music and more about far-fetched elitism. Pop also gained a similar negative image of flashy, plastic, sex, and avarice. Music and image-wise, pop became hip hop and hip hop became pop. So much has changed in less than a decade and it still sticks around to this day. Why hasn’t music shifted away from all of this and why hasn’t the industry prevented all of this in the first place?

Here's an article from the New York Times regarding "music factories".

Two reasons. Enter Max Martin and Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald, infamous songwriters responsible for creating the vast majority of popular music in the past 20 years. Imagine if all the chart-topping artists mentioned in the two videos above (like Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, and Maroon 5) were are only two people? It's basically a monopoly, picture if the vast majority of 80s songs used Eddie Van Halen for guitar, it would be wrong. Just for reference, the number one writer with the most hit pop songs ever is John Lennon, then Paul McCartney, then Max Martin. They're not resposible for the bad autotune and hi-hats, but the songs (even the good ones from the late 90s-early 2000s like various Avril Lavigne songs) lack timbre (flavor and quality within the music) and uniqueness, all the songs sound very similar, compare that to every song in a Red Hot Chili Peppers album, every song is creative, unique, inspiring, and musically beautiful.

The other answer is financial risk. This could be called "the fall of rock and roll." As explained in the two videos above, record producers, starting 25 years ago, started to favor all their new music to be familiar (thus not special), in pursuit of not losing millions of dollars in signing acts. It's exactly why millennial rock bands and unique artists are almost nonexistent, having similar and catchy bad pop, rap, and electronic music be the only new music releasing is a terrible idea, but it guarantees record companies that any act they sign will automatically become successful, since all music evolved to sound the same. Instead of music listeners being able to vote for talent with their ears, they're forced to like untalented music, the industry is built on familiarity over creativity.

I have autism and I love music. I have always wanted to learn music, sing, and later play modular synthesizer and be the lead singer for my own eurobeat-inspired modern rock band, and my life was going so well until my mental health made me hide from society and stop living my life and going to places because I couldn’t stand modern music anymore due to my misophonia with autotune, hi-hat trap/chillhop, and repetitive hypnotic nonsense. Everywhere I like to go (stores, malls) and everything I want to watch (YouTube channels) is playing the music I stay away from. My favorite hobbies, like Japanese anime and Japanese modified cars (JDM) have been impacted because "youth" music and otaku rap (Japanese culture trends in hip hop and trap) has changed it to fun and creative to tacky. Not only does this stop me from enjoying my hobby, others with musical misophonia who indulged in anything from sports, sneakers, apparel, makeup, food, video games, the entire internet, etc go through the same difficulties on a daily basis as me. I was 18 when it got serious, and three years later I’m still haunted and avoiding public exposure as much as possible.

My goal with this petition is to stand up to the music industry, make the industry and artists aware of the damage they have done to people like me who have suffered for many years, and demand change to make music as great as it was before autotune, trap, dubstep, Max Martin/Dr. Luke, etc. The record companies must learn that us lovers of true creative music want new music to be beautiful, inspiring, and special. Music isn't about profit, it's about art.

If you dislike most of modern day music and would like music to be great like it was during the 90s and before, please be a part of my wake-up call and make a difference! You’ll be helping to improve the quality of new and future music so everyone can enjoy it.