What's the future of the music industry?

It does. I borrowed it from the library at the college where I work tbh.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/long-distance-rocker-miller

When they’re feeling particularly ungenerous, the company will cut you out altogether. Google did that to me when they used the guitar riff from my song “Question” as the bed music in a commercial for one of the company’s crappy phones. Google hired an ad agency. The ad agency hired a jingle house, probably giving them “Question” as a reference track. Grateful for the work, some dude in a windowless room at the jingle house (probably himself another victim of the modern music biz; maybe he used to be in bands but was now trying to feed his kids by making innocuous instrumental music to go under Google ad voice-overs) re-recorded my riff, cleverly adding an extra note at the end of the progression—just enough to absolve his employer of any obligation to compensate me for having written the thing to begin with.

I did what any aggrieved artist should do when their work has been ripped off: I contacted my publishing company’s lawyers to threaten these digital brigands with a lawsuit. Within the ranks of the publishing company, it was unanimously agreed that we had Google over a barrel. But then they hired a musicologist who specialized in copyright infringement and he pointed out the almost imperceptible difference between the two recordings. His prediction was that it was possible but unlikely we could win in court. After my publishers sized up the odds of going against the great content leviathan, they advised me to drop the idea. I agreed reluctantly, and lost a few nights’ sleep thinking of how lucky the Nick Lowes of the world had been: here, some untold millions of ad viewers would be hearing a nearly note-for-note rendition of a song I wrote, and all I was getting in return was teeth-gnashing insomnia.

I considered making a video documenting the Google heist, featuring an A/B demonstration of the two versions of the song. I would certainly have prevailed in the court of public opinion at least. I could have told the story of how I’d written the song after spending a day in London falling in love with the woman I’d go on to marry, maybe show some pictures of our sweet kids that I’m busting my ass to feed in this barren new musical landscape. But in the end I didn’t want my career narrative to be overtaken by an Ahab-like quest for the leviathan’s unlikely destruction. I took a deep breath and let it go.

Music saved my life. And musicians. And club owners, record store clerks, college radio DJs, and rock critics who owed a thousand words to the local weekly. We were often reckless, short-sighted, and profligate, but we were all in this together. And now there’s no more this.

Another interesting article from that publication that fits in this thread:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-muzak-pelly

What indeed.

https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a32360709/coronavirus-music-industry/

Covid-19 might catalyse reform for the benefit of those who do stick it out. Musicians have asked Spotify to triple payments to cover lost concert revenue, which would enlarge the pie, although it’s unlikely that any streaming platform will offer up significantly more on a long-term basis – Spotify was still barely profitable at the start of year, and rivals like Apple Music are basically loss-leaders, designed to get more users into their ecosystem (as Tim Cook put it in 2018, “we’re not [doing it] for the money.”)

So musicians have to hope for more $ from streaming, more fair record contracts, and a vaccine

become a massive superstar, stick to music as a side gig, or something something YouTube variety act.

Someone should start a non-profit that teaches musicians how to transition into Minecraft youtubes. Has anyone done that?

The future is terror

https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/classic-rock-biopics-holograms-catalogs-1172087/

I can't even begin to describe the amount of dystopic visions here -- and I know not all of them will pan out but good god.

Also this is the most fundamentally depressing bit

And a lawsuit Chris Cornell’s widow has filed against the late grunge superstar’s bandmates cites her interest in tours with a replacement singer, hologram concerts, and “deep-fake renditions of Chris’ vocals drawn from extant recordings by artificial intelligence that could mint brand new Soundgarden hits.”

“The film was a wrecking ball that knocked walls down,” says Greg Lin, senior VP of marketing and reporting for Sony Legacy. “And then you’re hearing their music in all these other places because there’s a big uptick in licensing and sync requests. With Queen, you’ve got songs that are instantly recognizable. You have a compelling story. And credit where credit is due, they just nailed it.”

'nailed it'

last couple years i really started to understand why UK people of a certain age hated queen so much, they were cool as this kind of b-level, campy classic rock band oddity, but there's something so grating and oppressive about them when they are rated so highly by everyone again

"The fans only want to hear our old stuff, not our new AI-extracted deep fake renditions"

I can't even begin to describe the amount of dystopic visions here

lol does this article touch on climate change because you know

It's funny that Queen were hated by certain critics for playing the opera bit of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on tape onstage. How could anyone anticipate what levels of artifice would be accepted today.

Merck “don’t you dare call me Murky” Mercuriadis

I think about those two posthumous Michael Jackson albums from time to time, they were actually not bad but they had such an uncanny valley feeling to them, I get creeped out every time they're on (outside of "Love Never Felt So Good" b/c it has a more or less complete vocal)

I have a hard time believing there's much of an audience for "new" material from dead artists. it's gonna be tried a few times and maybe even yield a charting hit or two but I think most people will just find it really creepy

People will buy it not just for making hits, but for their own entertainment. Imagine you can order for your kid a personalized happy birthday song by Billie Eilish or Ariana Grande (created by some deepfake voice plugin), it would sell like crazy.

These septuagenarian stars selling off their entire intellectual property reminds me of the mid-90s when my dad saw a there was a model train collector convention in town. Stuck all his 1940s Lionels into liquor store boxes and came back with a thousand bucks in cash, amused that he was still the youngest guy in the room, and that that market wasn't gonna rise any further.

Good article with some surprising stats:

I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms - but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers. According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.

Those who make a living from new music - especially that endangered species known as the working musician - have to look on these figures with fear and trembling.

But the news gets worse.

The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/is-old-music-killing-new-music

Old Growth Pop

Definitely some interesting stats in that article, but it seems to be overly reliant on anecdotes ("one time I saw a kid singing along with an old song!") and specious arguments:

There are many reasons for this, some of them quite alarming. For example, the fear of copyright lawsuits has made many in the music industry deathly afraid of listening to unsolicited demo recordings. If you hear a demo today, you might get sued for stealing its melody—or maybe just its rhythmic groove—five years from now. Try mailing a demo to a label or producer, and watch it return unopened.

Are fewer "new" songs being recorded/released? Doesn't feel like it

the definition of "catalog" is older than 18 months. does it spell doom for new music if people are still listening to something like "blinding lights," which came out in november 2019? or dua lipa's levitating, which came out in april 2020?

masked wolf's "astronaut in the ocean" was released in 2019, made #20 on 2021's billboard year-end 100, but would be counted as a "catalog" song by that criterion

It *feels* like there are more new songs being released than ever, and fewer people listening to them (or when they do, it's because of a Spotify playlist or TikTok video and most of those people don't even know who did the song).

I doubt these old playlists consist of songs from the year before last—and even if they do, this still represents a stinging repudiation of the pop culture industry, which is almost entirely focused on what’s happening right now.

on spotify's top hits right now:
glass animals - "heat wave" (june 2020)
ckay - "love nwantiti" (2019)
maneskin - "beggin" (2017)

But perhaps Spotify isn't a good measure of how money is actually being made by songs.

streaming accounted for 83% of the record industry's revenue in 2020, and preliminary reports from 2021 indicate that the share has increased to 85%

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/the-us-recorded-music-industry-grew-by-over-1bn-in-2020-but-faces-big-challenges-over-streamings-pricing-and-its-growth/

my dude is using the grammy awards(!), particularly their live tv ratings (!!!!!!!) as a barometer for people's relative excitement for new music.

The hottest area of investment in the music business is old songs—with investment firms getting into bidding wars to buy publishing catalogs from aging rock and pop stars.

The song catalogs in most demand are by musicians in their 70s or 80s (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, etc.)—if not already dead (David Bowie, James Brown, etc.).

does he seriously not understand why younger musicians might not want to sell the rights to the music they're gonna make for the next 30-40 years? if taylor swift decided to sell the rights to her catalog right now, do we not think that her price would be comparable, if not much higher, than the dylan and springsteen numbers?

The hottest technology in music is a format that is more than 70 years old, the vinyl LP. There’s no sign that the record labels are investing in a newer, better alternative—because, here too, old is viewed as superior to new.

cd sales grew faster than vinyl sales last year.

i don't mean to say that things are better than ever for new musicians, obviously they're not, but the arguments made in this arguable range from specious at best to completely ignorant of mountains of data at worst

"overly reliant on anecdotes and specious arguments" - Ted Gioia's entire career summed up in seven words.

arguments made in this *article

very much enjoying the roasting of Gioia here, keep it up plz

otoh that link Ned posted 7 months back is truly horrifying

x-post

I know that there are plenty of outstanding young musicians out there. The problem isn’t that they don’t exist, but that the music industry has lost its ability to discover and nurture their talents.

Gioia makes it sound so simple. As if going back to old-school major record label practices would be enough, when the world has changed and people have plenty of other options then listening to the radio or to music at all now.

He mentions the definition of "new" music in that article as being music released in the past 18 months. Surely one can quibble with the definition, but I think the important thing from a statistical point of view is to apply a definition consistently over time to identify the trend. So if people are purchasing less of music released in the past 18 months as a share of total music purchases, that indicates the trend. It's unlikely the trend would be different if one extended the definition of new to 24 or 36 months.

the ratio of new music : old music by that definition is always going to go down, based on my understanding of linear time

That's true. The amount of old music is always increasing. That's always been true though, and I think the phenomenon of declining interesting in new music is a more recent development.

The solution is to obliterate all traces of any music recorded more than 50 years ago so there's more new music.

otoh that link Ned posted 7 months back is truly horrifying

I had blotted it from my memory but yeah.

well I don't wanna sound like a boomer or nothin' but maybe there's something to be said about how homogenous pop has become? there are like a dozen big stars and a bunch of modern singles have one of them guesting on another one's track. all the songs are written by 3 guys in Sweden. so everyone just sounds like everyone else. this isn't just me blasting modern pop music like every Dad does, I think this is actually the goal. the same thing the MCU did to movies a bunch of dudes named Björn did to pop music.

obviously people have been complaining about this my whole life but there just seemed to be so much more going on in other decades. I mean there still is but it's not really getting played on the radio or anything else mainstream. remember how all the weird shit from the 90s all kinda got lumped together? that's not really happening anymore. a band like Ween may still be popular among the youth thanks to Spotify playlists or the YouTube algorithm (or Spongebob?) but it's not really leading people to all the other stuff from that era.

I question the implied premise that newly released music should be more popular than older music in a healthy music culture.xp

xp that description doesn't sound particularly different to any time since 2000 or so and is also ignoring that rap charts about just as well as pop.

all the songs are written by 3 guys in Sweden

This may have had a large enough grain of truth 5-10 years ago to be an “I’ll allow it” level of exaggeration, but not really today…

(Fwiw - I think Ariana, Billie, Olivia, Taylor, Doja, Dua, Gaga, Katy, etc. are all pretty distinctive and don’t sound much like each other)

i think it's just as likely that very little about ppl's listening habits has changed, and instead what has changed is that we went from knowing when someone purchased an album once to having the knowledge of what everyone on earth is listening to all the time

legacy acts have been dominating the touring market for how long now? many years

Yeah, for the first few singles

that general sort of argument about the homogeneity of pop probably applies a fair bit more to something like the korean idol industry but even that's capable of putting out genuinely exciting & interesting work

songs routinely stay in the billboard charts for over a year, and tiktok has caused lots of songs to pop off over a year after their release. i honestly do think that the math would change if the “catalog” parameters were extended to 3 years instead of 18 months