What's the future of the music industry?

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

anyway this article is bad and gioia should feel bad for writing it

Radio stations are contributing to the stagnation, putting fewer new songs into their rotation, or—judging by the offerings on my satellite radio lineup—completely ignoring new music in favor of old hits.

my stars! why isn’t “50s on 5” playing the latest cardi b???

does it spell doom for new music if people are still listening to something like "blinding lights," which came out in november 2019?
― roflrofl fight (voodoo chili), Wednesday, January 19, 2022 11:11 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, this song is atrocious

Otherwise I don't think it's news that people listen to classics and it's actually cool to know the numbers. I was on the Rumours page yesterday on Spotify and the three main songs have between 600 and 900M listens, which I normally associate with pop and reggaeton. That those numbers are growing may just be a sign that Spotify is getting more and more democratic with our venerable parents.

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

This was a thought I had yesterday but wasn't sure how to put it.
Physical sales figures are likely to have a bias towards newer releases since people only need to buy the White Album one time. If we looked at what people listened to on the radio in 1992, I've no trouble imagining you'd see a load of classic artists.

a lot of my listening is new-to-me old music

I mean, there would have been nothing shocking about a young cashier singing along to "Light My Fire", say. (Admittedly, a song from 1949 would be less likely.)xp

in other news, i've heard that orchestras primarily play music that is older than 18 months. news at 11.

My son heard Bowie's "Starman" in the trailer for the Buzz Lightyear movie and has been playing it over and over on Spotify. Those plays get counted. If, instead, he were listening to it on my 20 some year old Ziggy Stardust CD they wouldn't be.

I feel like Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" has made inroads among The Kids; I hear the asshole teenagers who live downstairs listening to it a lot the last couple of weeks. Is it used in a notable TikTok video or something?

it’s in an episode of rick & morty

the churn of hits at radio absolutely is slowing down, and had been substantially even before the pandemic set in

yeah, i've been noticing this as well

probably a result of streaming though, right? soundscan revealed that hits had longer shelf lives than people realized, streaming made clear that soundscan was still selling short how often people keep listening to big hits

It makes sense that if pop charts were based on reported sales + airplay in the old days, neither metric was accounting for continued listening from those who actually bought the record. And in both cases if the metric was being estimated by record store owners and music directors, sudden changes would probably be more noticeable and be exaggerated.

There was always that glimpse of continued listening in the charts when they'd rerelease some monster hit of the past, like Yesterday, and it would find its way back onto the charts.

It was always very apparent with live shows, where lots of artists who haven't had a hit in years still pull in the punters.

probably a result of streaming though, right? soundscan revealed that hits had longer shelf lives than people realized, streaming made clear that soundscan was still selling short how often people keep listening to big hits

this is only part of the story imo. overall, the churn of current hits in the streaming ecosystem is and has been substantially faster than at radio during the years that they've coexisted. it's absolutely true that sustained streaming strength is requisite for a hit song to persist into the "blinding lights" tier of seemingly permanent omnipresence. consequently it's been common for casual chartwatchers to marvel at the extreme, absurd levels of longevity attained by such hits and say things like "wow, streaming really did ruin the charts." but if you actually look at the underlying numbers, the fact is that virtually always it is overwhelmingly airplay, not streaming, that is keeping these songs this high for this long. program directors are choosing to keep these songs around, and the reason they stick around so long is because they are also choosing to barely acknowledge, at best, the majority of current streaming hit titles.

top 40 radio, supposedly the center of what's new and fresh in american contemporary culture, lost track of the pulse in the middle of the last decade at the same time that they lost their grip on what had traditionally been the younger end of their audience. these listeners used to be key to breaking "edgier" and more novel-sounding hits before they would ultimately gain mass acceptance among the more passive, adult end of the top 40 listenership. it is these listeners that have been ceded to the streaming ecosystem, and top 40 is consequently left to play to an audience that is barely interested in the music it's supposed to be playing. stations that play the few songs that these listeners are familiar with 120 times a week tend to see more favorable ratings outcomes compared to what's achieved by the more adventurous ones. songs by established superstar artists can break in quick order, but everyone else needs to slowly climb playlists at smaller-market stations for 4-8 months before the machine decides whether it's ultimately going to work in power rotation nationwide.

there is a very narrow bridge indeed between this stagnant set of evergreens and the comparatively bustling and dynamic world of the streaming charts other than the social media apps, which have been helpful to the labels but also not as predictable and controllable as they'd like. songs blow up on there seemingly without explanation or effort, and plenty of songs with considerable, sometimes obvious, effort behind them go nowhere. songs that had already been pushed at radio for months, then retired, unexpectedly start blowing up again on the socials and then get revived to new heights at radio -- "levitating" was the first, and now the same is happening for that putrid "heat waves" song, and i strongly doubt it'll be the last one. new artists with aspirations for mass acceptance now routinely spend an entire year promoting their first breakthrough hit, even if it broke first on streaming.

when i speak of 'more favorable' ratings for the more limited top 40 stations, i do mean that in a relative sense, as in an absolute sense top 40 has been in continual decline for the past 10 years, with apparently no end in sight. this is not the first time that interest in 'top 40' has declined dramatically, but in the past this would be accompanied by gains at other currents-based formats, as in the '90s. today, top 40 is cratering, and all other currents-based music formats are either steady or also declining, just not as badly. there are actually tons of recent blog posts by media and market research professionals bemoaning the current state of current hits... but really the opening and closing sentences of the one i linked above pretty much say it all:

If one were to put the ‘bundle’ of radio formats that depend on new, hit music together, in the fashion of a mutual fund, it would have performed disastrously over the last decade. It is not an exaggeration to say that ‘contemporary music’ is in a crisis at American radio, and if this trend cannot be reversed, or at least halted, there may be vast implications.

...

American music radio is rapidly becoming a Kingdom of Gold, where one mostly hears the hits of yesteryear, the songs that radio made into hits back when radio made the hits.

tl;dr: top 40 saw too many black/trap artists on the streaming charts in the mid '10s and decided that oh that can't be right, then lost all their younger listeners and are now left trying, and failing, to hold the attention of people who are slow to warm to current music and barely like much of it anyway. american musical pop culture has essentially bifurcated, and the narrow sliver of the overall universe of hits that really works in both spheres as they exist today can persist seemingly forever. the sort of oppressive longevity that "blinding lights" attained recently, to much fanfare from billboard, will be replicated many times in the coming years, and oops don't look now but laroi/bieber "stay" may be on track to be the next one

always appreciate yr insights, great post

my only question is "when will the classic rock format die" cuz it can't come too soon for me

top 40 is consequently left to play to an audience that is barely interested in the music it's supposed to be playing

this was always the case though, yes? I mean at least for the last 30 years or so?

Yeah I agree - top 40 radio would've lost all their younger listeners whatever they did. Even if they played exactly what the kids want they're not listening. From what I can see it's all streaming - either the hits are made by blunt force marketing/payola (labels pay Spotify, Spotify pushes the song to passive listeners through "algorithmic suggestions", voila: high streaming numbers, which feeds into even more algorithmic streams), or hits emerge through viral social media driven trends (tiktok memes, gaming parody covers, curated playlists by influencers, instagram models with music careers on the side, etc). Either way, radio has no power over younger listeners.