My understanding (which may be defective, because I’m pretty firmly embedded in the art-music context and am not well up on the activities of Popular Beat Combos) is that in some recent musical traditions the term “song” has a different meaning, something like “any piece of music suitable for putting on a single track of a CD”. It is unfortunate that this meaning is so different from the other one, and I think the other one is better because it makes a useful distinction (and we could easily use something like “track” for the broader definition), but I think stephen_s is using a different definition of “song” more than he’s ignorant of what “song” means.
[EDITED to add:] For the avoidance of doubt, I do agree that stephen_s’s use of the word “song” suggests that he is probably not familiar enough with the world of classical music[1] for his pronouncement of its senescence to be taken very seriously.
[1] By which I take it he means, or would if informed a bit more, something like “Western art music”. Or maybe not; maybe he really does mean it in the stricter sense, meaning something like “that variety of music running roughly from C P E Bach to Beethoven”, in which case it should not be surprising if production of such music is slower than it was in Beethoven’s day.
My understanding (which may be defective, because I’m pretty firmly embedded in the art-music context and am not well up on the activities of Popular Beat Combos) is that in some recent musical traditions the term “song” has a different meaning, something like “any piece of music suitable for putting on a single track of a CD”. It is unfortunate that this meaning is so different from the other one, and I think the other one is better because it makes a useful distinction (and we could easily use something like “track” for the broader definition), but I think stephen_s is using a different definition of “song” more than he’s ignorant of what “song” means.
[EDITED to add:] For the avoidance of doubt, I do agree that stephen_s’s use of the word “song” suggests that he is probably not familiar enough with the world of classical music[1] for his pronouncement of its senescence to be taken very seriously.
[1] By which I take it he means, or would if informed a bit more, something like “Western art music”. Or maybe not; maybe he really does mean it in the stricter sense, meaning something like “that variety of music running roughly from C P E Bach to Beethoven”, in which case it should not be surprising if production of such music is slower than it was in Beethoven’s day.