Music as we know it is changing. Music as we know it is degenerating its own meaning. Mainstream music is now even more meaningless than it was five years ago; the pop punk scene is becoming the new easy-genre among bands; and each genre, each type of music took a new spin this year.

Going back to the pop punk scheme. Two or three years ago there was a huge metalcore wave, there literally were hundreds of metalcore bands on MySpace playing the same music than the other bands in the scene. Today pop punk is the new metalcore, BandCamp is the new MySpace. For instance, The Story So Far released a new full-length this year (What You Don't See), which isn't bad; but there's another band that is perhaps the biggest The Story So Far rip-off so far, yes, I'm talking about Neck Deep. This guys (Neck Deep), perhaps thought that by imitating Parker Cannon's vocal style, they would be something in music; that by copying the lyric/writing style of TSSF, they would be lyrical geniuses; and the curious thing is that they are acclaimed in social networks, and the question is why? Are people dumb enough to not realize that each new band is copying the successful previous one? Or am I just being exaggerated based on simple facts? My answer is that pop punk is the new popular genre among the "underground" scene.

Now talking about the emo musical scene. I first want to state the fact that the world now knows whatemo really means, the lame excuse that people took as emo (From First To Last, Alesana, Asking Alexandria, etc.), is coming to and end. The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die (Wr.), Old Gray, Mixtape Minus, and more bands are here to show us that there are still people out there writing depressive, heart-felt lyrics with twinkly guitars. Emo is a genre that went strong through-out the late eighties and the nineties, which died because of the degeneration of the genre itself. Let's hope that the current emo wave is here to stay and continues showing authenticity within the bands playing the genre. 

What happened with radio music, mainstream music, is that it as well took a different approach on itself this year, but continues to maintain their lucrative purposes. The artists on the "genre," are so desperate to get more and more money that they degenerate the definition of what music really is to a whole new level. Because this music is so easy to listen to, it obviously gets a wider audience, which means that their "messages" gets to that wider audience. Insensitive and meaningless lyrics from so-called rappers (Lil Wayne, for instance), talking about having meaningless sex and disregarding females; reach 12 year old kids, and the catch is, what are this kids going to think when they have eighteen? What are the psychological effects on growing up with this type of music? And something else that is quite curious is what I like to call the "Miley Cyrus Hypocritical Phenomenon." This phenomenon consists in the simple facts that throughout every social media site people see what Cyrus is doing and constantly reproach her for her actions, judging her as she goes; calling her names and hating her to a supposedly new level. But the catch is, that the same people that claim to hate her, are the same people spending money to buy her new songs, to buy her latest videos, to pay hundreds of dollars to go to her concerts. It is a double-faced society, and the audience for this is enormous, and al because of one simple thing, one simple word which derives to ambition, greed, and the loss of human morals, all because of money.

As a closure I want to say that besides the negative things that went on this year (the popularization of pop punk and the power of money over music), there were some beautiful occurrences as well. This year (from my eyes), was amazing regarding music, just because a genre has been resurrected to its original meaning. We can all resume what's been going on in punk as evolution, which is fine, it's just a phase that will end maybe this upcoming year, or in two years maximum. What's going on in radio-music is nothing more than a political system we tend to call based on Marx's definition of it: capitalism.