What Will Music Look Like In 2021?

My immediate feeling is that, like with society in general, an economic collapse means that more power and attention will be given to artists who already have both of those things, making it harder than ever for newer voices to break out, as the music industry will play it safer in an uncertain economy and be less willing to invest in 'riskier' artists. Maybe we'll see a strong independent response to this, and 'indie' will stop becoming a meaningless term.

We'll see a lot of artists earnestly trying to make 'the' isolation/Coronavirus-era tune, and they'll all be bad.

Further down the track, if the economic consequences are as dire as we're all expecting, we may see some necessary/radical changes to welfare or a UBI, which could be an enormous boon for creativity and collaboration as smaller artists don't have to worry as much about soul-sucking day jobs just to stay alive.

a glut of terrible acoustic albums by singer-songwriter guys with a lot of ~feelings~ in the Lewis Capaldi/Ed Sheeran mould

It appears my dream of the triumphant return of the rap / pop group (as opposed to thousands of indistinguishable solo artists) will not be coming true anytime soon

The particular aesthetics aside of what the sound of returning to 'normalcy' will be, there's going to be a major logistical clusterfuck once (and if) everyone is just given the green light one day to get back to normal en masse. Consider September, which is usually a big month for new releases: all the scheduled releases, plus 4-6 months of backup (not to mention all the rescheduled tours). Add to this mess the fact that hardly anyone will be the position to buy any of these albums due to lost wages and lost jobs, nor anywhere to buy them (the inevitably large numbers of small record stores that will not survive this), and, well, you could say I'm not feeling too positive about things right now.

I agree with triggercut that the 1% won't be too affected by this, but smaller or independent artists are now even more fucked than they were before COVID, as I see it.

Also, punk, metal, and hardcore fans, get ready for 6-8 band bills and for shows to start at 5pm, with everyone playing for a cut of the door. Yikes.

Yeah, Paul, part of that is what I've been thinking about, specifically wrt to all these delayed and pushed back albums. I mean, I get folks like Lady Gaga or whoever wanting that huge marketing muscle behind them, but at what point is it just going to be a massive glut of product that means 90% of the albums just get absolutely buried?

For bands with fans that still want physical product, seems a better thing to release the digital now for streaming numbers and then do the big marketing roll-out later with the LP orders and whatnot. Obviously this might not work as well for pop acts that live and die by streaming numbers anyway, but I just see a massive noise of releases come fall that ends up serving no one.

I mean, hell, Phish just released their surprise new studio album on Wednesday and it's tracking to be the number one album in the country. So there is clearly attention to be grabbed right now without waiting.

Okay correction, the Phish album was #1 ahead of Dua Lipa yesterday but may now be getting crowded out with today's new releases... so nevermind that particular part.

Also, punk, metal, and hardcore fans, get ready for 6-8 band bills and for shows to start at 5pm, with everyone playing for a cut of the door. Yikes.

Well, until recently we were getting 6-band bills that started at 8 PM (the dreaded "local openers"), so...