Funny, I saw the thread title and immediately thought of how bad things are today. Not only is there an extreme lack of talent, but the Loudness Wars have demolished good recording practices and illegal downloading (among a few other factors) cut Big Music's profits. The outfall of that is that Big Music no longer has the budget to support niche bands and genres, like jazz and classical. Instead, they focus on high sales volume, highly compressed crap. Times are good, however, for indie groups flying under the radar.
I'm not surprised to see the 80s take a few hits here. However, do not dismiss the decade based on the mainstream music. The 1980s were a terrific decade if you know where to look. There was terrific punk, the New Wave/alternative movement had some great music and you got the beginnings of alt.country. All are niche and somewhat forgotten today, however, there's a lot there to like. I'll take a lightweight - and tuneful -synthpop song over heavily sampled hip-hop with trite, boring and predictable gangsta lyrics.
Another huge plus for the 1980s is that you had good CDs. I've been slowly working my way back into my New Wave youth and have been surprised at the quality of the recordings. You had engineers with solid analog backgrounds applying good recording techniques to digital. There's no compression and all the computerized tricks were a decade off. Also, it seems that the New Wave has fallen largely into obscurity today - used discs are dead cheap. Oh, and because the 1980s transitioned from analog to CD, you can usually get all the music on both vinyl and pre-Loudness War CDs. What's not to like?
