Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, Internet's busiest music nerd. And has anyone noticed there's so much mid out there right now? Just this constant onslaught of albums that are so deeply devoid of anything substantive and attention-grabbing that they're barely even worth commenting on.

In order to make this point that I want to bring up here, I should probably talk about an old segment that I used to do on my main channel called the YUNOReview, which was like this gauntlet-style album commentary piece of content that I did where I just addressed a bunch of records every month or so that I didn't have a chance to review, but I gave some light thoughts, general thoughts.

After a while, I lost passion for doing this segment. Over time, I felt like I wasn't really able to listen to a lot of these albums deeply enough to really get a sense of why it was I didn't really like them. On top of it, at least for me personally, it felt like a lot of my criticisms were growing samey on a lot of these records. The fact is, at the end of the day, even though it is my job to come on here and have opinions of certain songs and projects and artists' works, not every album that is out there is going to elicit a strong and in-depth reaction from me.

And in addition to all of that, the other thing that was making this segment difficult to continue pulling off was just the sheer amount of albums that were being dropped every month, many of which I may have done a full-length review of, were we in a time period where less music overall was being dropped week to week? We're currently at a point where more music is coming out in a single day than in an entire year in the '80s.

Now, this intense amount of music content saturation is something that has been long predicted by the music industry and the streaming industry, and has mostly been painted as a good thing. In fact, if you dig back into any search engine, you can find any number of articles talking about how this music industry consumption long tail is going to be great for DIY and independent musicians because in theory, what is going to be created is a series of niche fandoms and communities for artists who aren't necessarily mainstream level, and they'll be able to build their own independent careers on their own creative tracks without having to worry about generating the mainstream hits that scale for the Billboard Top 40.

While there are certainly examples out there of mid-tier pop artists and relatively underground artists or independent artists building that community for themselves, simultaneously, what has also been generated in addition to that is like a bunch of algorithmically crafted musical echo chambers where mediocrity thrives because the listener bases trapped in those echo chambers subscribers just want to hear a very specific thing and don't have super high expectations for the artist that they're following and listening to. So when the artist who's music performs well in those spaces comes out with a new record that is frankly boring and unambitious and terrible, there is little or no downside to them releasing music that frankly is bad or broadly unlikable because all that matters in terms of gaining commercial success is that you're feeding that confined niche of listeners.

Case in point, the new Gunna album. And yeah, while it is true, I've never really cared for this man's music too much. Still, listening through to this new LP, there's not really anything here that this album adds to his catalog, not only in terms of the overall sound of this project just being so similar to recent releases he's put out, but also on top of that, a lot of the instrumentals across the record sound nearly the same as well. In a different time period, in a different paradigm, I feel like this is a record that would have been getting torn apart. And yet, from what I understand, this new Gunna LP still did like 80,000 first week.

And look, this issue that I'm talking about is not strictly a Gunna thing or strictly even a hip hop thing. Also, take, for example, the new Maroon 5 album, which is such a dismally basic and plain project that it's actually shocking, especially when you consider that there was a point in time where Maroon 5 was legitimately writing some of the biggest pop rock hits of the mainstream ever. And they were songs that were actually pretty good for the time period in which they came out and have aged relatively well.

Despite that legacy, despite the presumed talent that was there in the first place to make those songs, Maroon 5 just came out with this new record that is barely an album. It's not even 30 minutes in length. It's loaded with forgettable songs, stale features, production that sounds like we've just booted up the DAW, very soulless, and no live band feel at all to speak of. And again, it's another project that doesn't really add anything to the band's catalog. This record in the greater Maroon 5 canon, if you want to call it that, is utterly meaningless and doesn't really do anything in terms of contributing to the story of their sound or even their biggest songs.

Then finally, I think the most shocking instance of all of this right now at this very moment is the one and only Alex Warren, a new breakout singer and songwriter who we talked about recently on the channel due to his number one hit, "Ordinary", just going so hard commercially. In fact, it's still the number one song in the country now. This guy just dropped his brand new album, and there is just so little discussion about it. I mean, sure, people who are general music fans that I've been aware of who do music reviews have not had very positive things to say. But the discourse generally around this album, from what I've seen, is pretty small. Like, little to no passionate music fans that I follow or am aware of seem to be going crazy for it. But also on top of that, there doesn't really seem to be that much interest in pulling it apart either.

And again, to me, that's surprising when you actually look at the pretty immense commercial success that Alex Warren has been seeing behind ordinary and even the first week sales of this album. This is a project that, commercially speaking, people should be chomping at the bit to dive into. Even I myself am completely bored to tears at the thought of having to review this thing, which again is funny because the music on this record is so the hallmark for so many different sounds that people tend to get really riled up over on the internet. Whether it's songs that have lots of Christian themes peppered throughout the lyrics, or if it's the type of music that has those big dramatic, over-the-top Imagine Dragons style choruses and drum beats, or even just the whole stomp, clap, holler, singer-songwriter vibe that so many on the internet were giving much smaller figures like Brandon Abernathy such a hard time over on TikTok for months. That sound is very objectively Alex Warren sound, and he doesn't even worse job of it by comparison. And yet he is very clearly seeing little to no downside or pushback to coming out with such an offensively bland and corny and cliché record.

So yeah, again, I'm just shocked at the amount of mid out there right now in the music space. And again, I'm not saying that there weren't instances of mediocre records dropping prior to this. What's changed and what's making me zoom in on it a little bit right now in this video is that the sheer amount of it is becoming overwhelming, frankly. There's just so much mid out there right now. Let me know what you think about all this down in the comments. I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano, mid, forever.