I was listening to rap-radio a couple days and thinking of this....If a hip hop fan from 1992 heard the new Kanye song, I think they would dismiss it as 'pop'. Reason being...there was a certain expectation amongst the hip hop fan back then that a record had certain qualities. People wanted to hear breaks. And they wanted that sound which was a result of sampling older material. Words like grimy, dusty, etc. And part of the aesthetic was not just Bernard Purdie's playing...it was the way that drums were recorded when Bernard Purdie played.

Nowadays....people don't want grimy or dusty. They want pristine, polished sound. And though technology plays a part in those changes of popular aesthetics....it's not an entirely determinate relationship. It was perfectly possible to make a 'non-grimy' song in 1992. But that's not what people wanted.

There's a lot more to discuss here....but I think a lot of the replies above are focused more on technological changes when the real driving force is aesthetic listener trends. And those things change in a way that does not correlate with technological advances in an identifiable way.

It becomes a chicken/egg scenario. Did 1992 hip hop artists sample Clive Stubblefield for the playing or the sound? Or both? If Clive's breaks sounded pristine....would they still have been used? I'd contend that no. If those same breaks were played with a 1980 drum sound, they wouldn't have become what they did. The reason why 'Funky Drummer' et al were employed so much wasn't as much for the playing....it was a rejection of modern recording techniques. Most specifically, modern engineering.

There's no clarity or unity in my thoughts on this....but I guess my point is that speculating on music in 2025 isn't so much a prediction of what technological advances will be made. It's more a fashion-cycle consideration. It's largely an aesthetic question...not a technology question.