Whoa, what? Deus ex HR, Mass effect 1-3, Portal 2, and especially the utterly brilliant OST of skyrim beg to differ on this regard. The AC series too have great tracks. Heck, even for pulse pounding music you have Tekken Tag 2, which by a large was praised for the music. I think music games is getting much better, now game composers are getting better in ability year on year. Jeremy Soule has definitely become one of top composers in the world.

I can't speak much for films, but TDK rises and Prometheus has quite amazing music.

Errmm... Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises. I don't think music gets any better than this.

On the game front, Heavy Rain, anyone?

I just don't agree that music in movies and video games has worsened. It has become much better and has already crossed the synth-only border.

What has happened to music in movies in games?

Only good things. :D

Well Easy from Faith no More sounds a lot like Easy from the Commodores. Yet the Faith no More version is vastly superior.

In music, even nuances of difference can make a whole new song. And any superficial similarity by Skyfall towards Diamonds Are Forever does not diminish the quality of the former.

No, I suppose what truly diminishes the quality of the former are the horrible childish lyrics (let's see how many far-fetched rhymes we can make for a single word!) and the joke that is the "video"; three minutes of blurry colours with the lyrics superimposed on them. The only redeeming feature is that Adele is a truly phenomenal singer.

However, that is just my personal subjective opinion. There is no point in arguing over matters of taste.

The track is neither techno nor dubstep. And my problem is that it's simply a bad piece of music IMO. It's okay that the composer went for an electronic version this time but the execution is in my opinion complete garbage. It's uninspired and not even professionally done. It's just "hey look, it's your favourite theme played with average synthesizer presets!". Especially the way the original melody was integrated is absolutely amateurish. I've heard better electronic fan covers of the BF1942 theme.

I guess it all depends on the movie or the video game.

Skyrim has one of those songs that really stick out. You can't expect every game to have a memorable soundtrack, just like you can't expect every movie to do so as well. The examples of movies and games you cited are pretty famous but music hits happen sporadically and in the end, only the classics are remembered while the average are forgotten.

Go back in time to the moment these classics were created and I assure you, there will be other games and movies from the time whose music never made it anywhere. Look in hindsight and all those classics bunch up together, making it look like the current music isn't up to par.