New Retro You Dont Even Know Me at All
Updated at 5:20 p.m. ET on January 31, 2022.
Old songs now represent lxx percentage of the U.Southward. music market place, co-ordinate to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm. Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—should await at these figures with fear and trembling. Only the news gets worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the marketplace is coming from onetime songs.
The 200 about popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5 percent of total streams. That rate was twice as high only iii years ago. The mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more than tilted toward older music. The current list of most-downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the previous century, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Law.
I encountered this phenomenon myself recently at a retail store, where the youngster at the greenbacks register was singing along with Sting on "Bulletin in a Bottle" (a hit from 1979) as it blasted on the radio. A few days earlier, I had a like feel at a local diner, where the unabridged staff was under 30 but every song was more than xl years old. I asked my server: "Why are you playing this one-time music?" She looked at me in surprise before answering: "Oh, I like these songs."
Never before in history have new tracks attained hit condition while generating and then little cultural impact. In fact, the audience seems to be embracing the hits of decades by instead. Success was always short-lived in the music business, just now fifty-fifty new songs that become bona fide hits tin can laissez passer unnoticed by much of the population.
Only songs released in the by eighteen months become classified as "new" in the MRC database, so people could conceivably be listening to a lot of 2-yr-old songs, rather than 60-twelvemonth-old ones. But I doubt these one-time playlists consist of songs from the year before last. Even if they did, that fact would still represent a repudiation of the pop-culture industry, which is about entirely focused on what'due south happening right at present.
Every week I hear from hundreds of publicists, record labels, ring managers, and other professionals who desire to hype the newest new thing. Their livelihoods depend on information technology. The unabridged business organisation model of the music industry is congenital on promoting new songs. As a music writer, I'm expected to practice the aforementioned, as are radio stations, retailers, DJs, nightclub owners, editors, playlist curators, and everyone else with skin in the game. Still all the evidence indicates that few listeners are paying attention.
Consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack of reaction, considering the cultural response was trivial more than a yawn. I follow thousands of music professionals on social media, and I didn't run into a unmarried expression of annoyance or regret that the biggest annual event in new music had been put on agree. That's ominous.
Tin you imagine how angry fans would exist if the Super Bowl or NBA Finals were delayed? People would riot in the streets. But the Grammy Awards go missing in action, and inappreciably anyone notices.
The declining Television receiver audience for the Grammy show underscores this shift. In 2021, viewership for the ceremony collapsed 53 percent from the previous yr—from 18.7 1000000 to 8.8 million. It was the least-watched Grammy broadcast of all time. Fifty-fifty the core audience for new music couldn't exist bothered—about 98 pct of people ages xviii to 49 had something better to exercise than lookout the biggest music commemoration of the year.
A decade agone, twoscore one thousand thousand people watched the Grammy Awards. That's a meaningful audience, but now the devoted fans of this event are starting to resemble a tiny subculture. More than people pay attending to streams of video games on Twitch (which now gets xxx meg daily visitors) or the latest reality-Boob tube show. In fact, musicians would probably do better getting placement in Fortnite than signing a record deal in 2022. At least they would have access to a growing demographic.
Some would like to believe that this tendency is just a short-term bleep, perhaps caused by the pandemic. When clubs open up once more, and DJs start spinning new records at parties, the world will return to normal, or so we're told. The hottest songs will again exist the newest songs. I'k not so optimistic.
A series of unfortunate events are conspiring to marginalize new music. The pandemic is 1 of these ugly facts, but hardly the only contributor to the growing crisis.
Consider these other trends:
- The leading area of investment in the music business is old songs. Investment firms are getting into bidding wars to buy publishing catalogs from aging rock and pop stars.
- The vocal catalogs in most demand are by musicians who are in their 70s or 80s (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen) or already dead (David Bowie, James Brownish).
- Fifty-fifty major tape labels are participating in the rush to old music: Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, and others are buying upwards publishing catalogs and investing huge sums in former tunes. In a previous time, that money would accept been used to launch new artists.
- The best-selling physical format in music is the vinyl LP, which is more than 70 years old. I've seen no signs that the record labels are investing in a newer, better alternative—because, hither besides, onetime is viewed every bit superior to new.
- In fact, record labels—once a source of innovation in consumer products—don't spend any money on research and development to revitalize their business organisation, although every other industry looks to innovation for growth and consumer excitement.
- Record stores are caught up in the same fourth dimension warp. In an before era, they aggressively marketed new music, but now they make more money from vinyl reissues and used LPs.
- Radio stations are contributing to the stagnation, putting fewer new songs into their rotation, or—judging past the offerings on my satellite-radio lineup—completely ignoring new music in favor of onetime hits.
- When a new song overcomes these obstacles and actually becomes a hit, the take chances of copyright lawsuits is greater than always earlier. The risks have increased enormously since the "Blurred Lines" jury conclusion of 2015, and the consequence is that additional greenbacks gets transferred from today's musicians to erstwhile (or deceased) artists.
- Adding to the nightmare, expressionless musicians are now coming back to life in virtual class—via holograms and "deepfake" music—making it all the harder for young, living artists to compete in the marketplace.
Every bit record labels lose interest in new music, emerging performers desperately search for other ways to become exposure. They promise to place their self-produced tracks on a curated streaming playlist, or license their songs for use in advertisement or the endmost credits of a Television show. Those options might generate some royalty income, but they do picayune to build name recognition. You might hear a cool song on a Goggle box commercial, but exercise you even know the proper noun of the artist? You love your workout playlist at the health club, but how many song titles and band names practice you remember? Y'all stream a Spotify new-music playlist in the background while you work, but did you bother to learn who's singing the songs?
Decades ago, the composer Erik Satie announced the inflow of "piece of furniture music," a kind of vocal that would blend seamlessly into the background of our lives. His vision seems closer to reality than ever.
Some people—especially Infant Boomers—tell me that this pass up in the popularity of new music is merely the consequence of lousy new songs. Music used to be better, or so they say. The erstwhile songs had amend melodies, more than interesting harmonies, and demonstrated genuine musicianship, not but software loops, Auto-Tuned vocals, and regurgitated samples.
At that place will never be another Sondheim, they tell me. Or Joni Mitchell. Or Bob Dylan. Or Cole Porter. Or Brian Wilson. I near expect these doomsayers to break out in a stirring rendition of "Old Time Rock and Curlicue," much like Tom Cruise in his underpants.
Just have those former records off the shelf
I'll sit and mind to 'em by myself …
I tin understand the frustrations of music lovers who get no satisfaction from current mainstream songs, though they endeavor and they try. I besides complaining the lack of imagination on many mod hits. Only I disagree with my Boomer friends' larger verdict. I listen to 2 to three hours of new music every day, and I know that plenty of exceptional young musicians are out there trying to make it. They exist. But the music industry has lost its power to discover and nurture their talents.
Music-industry bigwigs have plenty of excuses for their inability to notice and adequately promote great new artists. The fearfulness of copyright lawsuits has made many in the industry deathly agape of listening to unsolicited demo recordings. If you hear a demo today, you might get sued for stealing its melody—or peradventure simply its rhythmic groove—v years from now. Try mailing a demo to a label or producer, and picket it render unopened.
The people whose livelihood depends on discovering new musical talent face legal risks if they take their job seriously. That'due south only one of the deleterious results of the music industry'due south overreliance on lawyers and litigation, a hard-ass approach they in one case hoped would cure all their bug, simply at present does more impairment than good. Everybody suffers in this litigious environment except for the partners at the entertainment-police firms, who relish the abundant fruits of all these lawsuits and legal threats.
The problem goes deeper than only copyright concerns. The people running the music manufacture have lost confidence in new music. They won't acknowledge information technology publicly—that would be like the priests of Jupiter and Apollo in aboriginal Rome admitting that their gods are expressionless. Even if they know it's truthful, their task titles won't permit such a humble and abject confession. Even so that is exactly what's happening. The moguls have lost their faith in the redemptive and life-changing power of new music. How sad is that? Of course, the decision makers need to pretend that they withal believe in the hereafter of their business organization, and want to discover the next revolutionary talent. Merely that's non what they really think. Their actions speak much louder than their empty words.
In fact, zilch is less interesting to music executives than a completely radical new kind of music. Who can arraign them for feeling this fashion? The radio stations will play but songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven't changed much in decades. The algorithms curating so much of our new music are even worse. Music algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are almost identical to your favorite old songs. Annihilation that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That's actually how the current arrangement has been designed to piece of work.
Even the music genres famous for shaking upwardly the earth—stone or jazz or hip-hop—face this same tiresome industry mindset. I dear jazz, only many of the radio stations focused on that genre play songs that sound almost the aforementioned as what they featured x or 20 years ago. In many instances, they actually are the same songs.
This land of diplomacy is non inevitable. A lot of musicians around the globe—specially in Los Angeles and London—are conducting a bold dialogue between jazz and other contemporary styles. They are fifty-fifty bringing jazz back as trip the light fantastic toe music. Just the songs they release sound dangerously different from older jazz, and are thus excluded from many radio stations for that aforementioned reason. The very boldness with which they embrace the future becomes the reason they get rejected by the gatekeepers.
A country record needs to audio a sure way to go played on almost country radio stations or playlists, and the sound those DJs and algorithms are looking for dates back to the prior century. And don't even get me started on the classical-music manufacture, which works hard to avoid showcasing the creativity of the electric current generation. We are living in an astonishing era of classical composition, with 1 tiny problem: The institutions controlling the genre don't desire y'all to hear it.
The problem isn't a lack of practiced new music. Information technology's an institutional failure to discover and nurture it.
I learned the danger of excessive caution long ago, when I consulted for huge Fortune 500 companies. The single biggest problem I encountered—shared by most every big company I analyzed—was investing too much of their time and money into defending erstwhile ways of doing business, rather than edifice new ones. We even had a proprietary tool for quantifying this misallocation of resources that spelled out the mistakes in precise dollars and cents.
Senior management hated hearing this, and always insisted that defending the one-time business organisation units was their safest bet. After I encountered this embedded mindset again and again and saw its consequences, I reached the painful decision that the safest path is usually the nearly unsafe. If y'all pursue a strategy—whether in business or your personal life—that avoids all run a risk, you might flourish in the short run, simply yous flounder over the long term. That'south what is now happening in the music business.
Even so, I refuse to accept that we are in some grim endgame, witnessing the expiry throes of new music. And I say that because I know how much people crave something that sounds fresh and exciting and different. If they don't find information technology from a major record label or algorithm-driven playlist, they will detect it somewhere else. Songs tin go viral present without the entertainment industry even noticing until it has already happened. That will exist how this story ends: not with the marginalization of new music, but with something radical emerging from an unexpected identify.
The apparent expressionless ends of the by were circumvented the same manner. Music-company execs in 1955 had no thought that rock and ringlet would shortly sweep away everything in its path. When Elvis took over the culture—coming from the poorest country in America, lowly Mississippi—they were more than shocked than anybody. It happened again the post-obit decade, with the arrival of the British Invasion from lowly Liverpool (once again, a working-form place, unnoticed past the entertainment industry). And information technology happened again when hip-hop, a true grassroots motion that didn't give a damn how the close-minded CEOs of Sony or Universal viewed the marketplace, emerged from the Bronx and South Central and other impoverished neighborhoods.
If nosotros had the time, I would tell you more than about how the same thing has always happened. The troubadours of the 11th century, Sappho, the lyric singers of ancient Greece, and the artisan performers of the Middle Kingdom in ancient Arab republic of egypt transformed their own cultures in a similar style. Musical revolutions come from the bottom upwards, non the top down. The CEOs are the concluding to know. That'due south what gives me solace. New music ever arises in the least expected identify, and when the power brokers aren't even paying attention. It will happen again. It certainly needs to. The decision makers controlling our music institutions accept lost the thread. We're lucky that the music is as well powerful for them to kill.
Due to an editing mistake, this article originally stated that Erik Satie had "warned" of the arrival of "furniture music." Satie didn't oppose the idea of furniture music; he was simply announcing its arrival.
This story was adjusted from a postal service on Ted Gioia's Substack, The Honest Broker. When you purchase a volume using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you lot for supporting The Atlantic.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/
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