What's the future of the music industry?

They are to people who didn't grow up with Aerosmith and Nirvana...

The classic rock rule is usually that the song had to have charted in the top 40, which is why they rarely play even the non-charting singles of classic rock artists. Most of these modern rock bands don't even make the Hot 100.

But as been mentioned in this thread, the top 40 aren't really a very good guideline anymore in the monoculture streaming age.

(isn't)

Sure, I just mean that once you get to like 2006, if you’re pulling songs off the rock charts you’re mostly talking about stuff that barely registered in mainstream culture

They are to people who didn't grow up with Aerosmith and Nirvana...

Even the members of Shinedown themselves would probably not say this.

Aerosmith and Nirvana were massive pop culture juggernauts.

They have 4-5x the number of monthly Spotify listeners now that Shinedown and FFDP do.

the number one song for the past three weeks on the mainstream rock airplay chart is "Dead Inside" by Nita Strauss and David Draiman. I can't go anywhere without hearing it!

I just watched (some of) the video for "Dead Inside" and it looks like it should be properly billed as "Nita Strauss ft. Jeff Bezos"

I see that Nita Strauss was Alice Cooper's guitarist, though she was born the year Constrictor came out

Yeah, session player, solo shredder, instructor. The Netflix documentary Hired Gun from a few years ago covered contemporary session players and included her. It was p interesting, esp in terms of the, uh, contrast to the lifestyles you saw in the documentary on the Wrecking Crew session players from the 60s.

Anyone have a ‘classic rock’ hip-hop station in their area? We briefly had two and they didn’t seem to be doing too badly but then died without fanfare within a couple of months of each other.

We've got a "Throwback" R&B station that mixes Silk Sonic and Daniel Cesar with Al B. Sure and Sade.

silk sonic is pretty retro

My assumption is that typically when a classic rock station does a Top 500 over a holiday weekend or a Top 1079 (if the station was 107.9FM or whatever), the tracks that place will make up the core of that station's canon for the next year.

I've probably told this story before on here somewhere, but it seems relevant here.

One of our local long-standing Pacifica DJs moonlit for about six months at our local and now long-defunct Clear Channel Classic Rock station about 20 years ago. During a later Pacifica funds drive (where among other things, this guy hosted a weekly "Deep Cut" CR show) he spilled some tea about his period in the Big Leagues.

First of all, the station had recently gone to a completely digital library, with a CD library kept on site in case the system failed or other special circumstances. Said digital library had about 2000-2500 tracks, which was the station's masterlist, utilized for pulling requests and a yearly "A to Z" airing. From that list they pulled a selection of 250 songs that were the regular rotation playlist, of which 50 Tracks were concrete heavy hitters ("Stairway", "Freebird", "Hotel California", "Bohemian Rhapsody" etc.) not be removed, and the other 200 tracks were slightly rotated in and out every few weeks, favor sometimes given to performers who were coming to town for shows, and also allowing to shift focus within certain artist's catalogues (so like, say they are playing 4 CCR songs, they can gradually pivot over a couple months to 4 other CCR songs). And that's how it worked, because Clear Channel had done their research, and that was the best way to sell ads, which was what they were really there for.

Now admittedly that was 20 years ago, but I don't really see any reason radio conglomerates would change that setup.

really weird if classic rock stations are playing pearl jam but NOT smashing pumpkins these days idk

Anyone have a ‘classic rock’ hip-hop station in their area? We briefly had two and they didn’t seem to be doing too badly but then died without fanfare within a couple of months of each other.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Tuesday, January 25, 2022 11:06 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah my city had a classic hip-hop station a few years ago for like a year but it transitioned to a mainstream/current hip-hop playlist (w/ occasional not-too-old throwbacks) after some other station in the area switched formats

from what i have read a lot of these stations signed on around the same time throughout the country, did well/drew some excitement for a while, then just kinda tapered off and mostly went away (w/ some notable exceptions that i'm not knowledgeable enough to recall)

the adult r&b stations in the area have worked classic hip-hop into the mix to varying degrees also

xp Good god, the math works out to playing each song a dozen times a week.

xp Here in L.A., we have 93.5 KDAY

really weird if classic rock stations are playing pearl jam but NOT smashing pumpkins these days idk

Not really that weird considering they typically only play 4 Pearl Jam songs (the hits from Ten).

classic hits stations (the ones that basically pop, but usually somewhat rock-leaning these days) also have universes of about 200 songs, from what i recall from looking at some program director resource thing out of curiosity. and they certainly play the top tier of songs (your "edge of seventeen"s and "don't stop believin'"s) far more than a dozen times a week. there are some songs that will absolutely play every single midday without fail

it's like being in a recursive nightmare when you are involuntarily exposed to one of those overplayed kryptonite tunes, very Philip K. Dick

but yeah, top 40 stations play a truly pathetic number of songs, probably between 15 and 30, and the ones in power rotation (the only rotation level that matters whatsoever nowadays) literally do get played over 120 times a week

since these stations are struggling so badly they have actually recently started playing more "golds" (hits more than a few months/years old), but in typical fashion, they pick the same few and then spin them a ton almost like they're current hits again. if you're hearing more of jay sean "down" or rihanna "only girl in the world"/"s&m" or britney "toxic" and such lately, that's why

friend of mine drove cross country a few years ago and decided to spend as much time as possible dial-scanning radio stations as he drove, i remember he said his main takeaway was how often he heard automation errors - the same song playing twice in a row, two different songs playing at the same time, prerecorded DJ patter accidentally playing over songs, etc

Regarding the article -- there's currently more avenues for discovery, more accessibility, more variety in the direction they might lead, more opportunities than ever for listeners to choose their own adventure in virtually any situation. Logically, this has led to more listeners successfully achieving Top 40 ignorance than any point in the last 50 years or so. So when I see 30/40-somethings assuming that teens universally adore Olivia Rodrigo or Billie Eilish based on Billboard data, it feels like just as much of an armchair observation as the anecdote about young people in 2021 pumping The Police's Greatest Hits.

random fact that might be worth knowing about music. Stuff that charts in radio world makes the artists way more money than stuff that connects in the streaming world (in the literal sense -- obviously having the streaming zeitgeist will be more valuable for an artists career over the long haul if they hold onto it)

Why is that, if no ones buys singles any longer?

presumably radio royalties are much better than streaming ones, which shouldn't be surprising since streaming royalties are notoriously awful

xp Here in L.A., we have 93.5 KDAY

― Gimme little drink / From your Dunkin cup (morrisp), Tuesday, January 25, 2022 8:55 PM

i like this station when they're actually playing music. it isn't very powerful, so i often listen to the livestream.

sidebar: is the amount of ads they play on kday representative of all mainstream radio these days? because wow, they have a lot of ads.

xp Recording artists don't get radio royalties (at least in US), though - right? I think songwriters do...

This blog post says radio royalties are actually worse for songwriters than streaming royalties (but I can't verify the analysis)

They are to people who didn't grow up with Aerosmith and Nirvana...

Having trouble imagining Shinedown and 5 Finger Death Punch fans who don't also listen to Nirvana, Aerosmith, Led Zep, etc. Loving Classic Rock already seemed like an integral part of being a straightahead Rock fan when I was a teen, would've thought that as the genre becomes more marginal this would increase?

When I was a classic rock station listener for a year in 1988-9 my local CR station (WRKI in Connecticut) was playing U2 (Sunday Bloody Sunday and New Years’ Da, I distinctly remember, maybe Pride). The songs were only five years old then!

As I remember back then there wasn't really an AOR classic format, but more of a mixture of 60s/70s rock with current AOR stuff. Classic rock stations in the late 80s played 50s and 60s rock & roll and 70s AM Gold. I see that WRKI had a New Wave and Modern Rock format in 1982, so I figure they played a mix of new and old.

Having trouble imagining Shinedown and 5 Finger Death Punch fans who don't also listen to Nirvana, Aerosmith, Led Zep, etc.

Oh, I agree. I am having more trouble imagining that everyone who is now listening to Zep and Nirvana will be enthusiastic about 5FDP joining the mix.

Heh. Almost forgot about them.

As I remember back then there wasn't really an AOR classic format, but more of a mixture of 60s/70s rock with current AOR stuff. Classic rock stations in the late 80s played 50s and 60s rock & roll and 70s AM Gold. I see that WRKI had a New Wave and Modern Rock format in 1982, so I figure they played a mix of new and old.

As I remember back then there wasn't really an AOR classic format, but more of a mixture of 60s/70s rock with current AOR stuff. Classic rock stations in the late 80s played 50s and 60s rock & roll and 70s AM Gold.

Wait, we had a station like this latter thing in the late 80s but I'm p sure they called themselves oldies and I thought of them that way. The station I thought of as classic rock was more like the former. (They were actually far more adventurous than they are now, also playing new REM and Midnight Oil songs, having jazz and blues programs, and playing some weird stuff like Focus or Babe Ruth on psychedelic Sundays.)

This blog post says radio royalties are actually worse for songwriters than streaming royalties (but I can't verify the analysis)

IIRC this was always the case but the sheer volume of radio play (for the lucky few who got on radio) made up for it.

I am having more trouble imagining that everyone who is now listening to Zep and Nirvana will be enthusiastic about 5FDP joining the mix.

Equally troubling to imagine long time Nirvana/Soundgarden fans getting pumped for Glass Animals or Milky Chance.

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/its-official-new-music-is-shrinking-in-popularity-in-the-united-states/

We shouldn’t, however, jump to any obvious conclusions about golden oldie ‘catalog’ music gobbling up the listenership of today’s teenagers (Yes, even if Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill is still the No.1 global song on Spotify right now, nearly two months after it premiered in that episode of Stranger Things.)

According to Luminate’s H1 2022 report, over a third of all ‘Catalog’ streams that took place in the US in the first half of this year were actually plays of music released between 2017 and 2019 (see below).

(‘Catalog’, remember, simply means music that was released 18 months or more before someone played/purchased it.)

Music originally released in 2019 alone took a 14% share of all ‘Catalog’ streams in H1 2022; music originally released in 2018 took an 11% share.

And music originally released in either of these years was more popular on US streaming services in the first half of 2022 than all music released in the 1990s combined.

Same goes for all music released in the 1980s, and all music released in the 1970s.

wow that is wild

was looking at some numbers since this (tiktok phenomenon?) Alec Benjamin was playing a small but crowded venue nearby recently (criminally, just criminally bad music) and so I looked him up on spotify and wtf guy has a BILLION streams on one of his songs, 15 million monthly listeners (compare with Bob Dylan, 8 million, or Miles Davis, 2 million)

weird times

Probably got carried away creating a botnet to auto play his tunes on Spotify

it's maybe not that weird if you see spotify as a halfway house between radio and itunes. people will just hit play on a playlist, or let the auoplay keep going after they've listened to the one song they came for. those "passive" listens will massively boost some songs. (glenn can tell me i'm wrong here, but i think i'm right)

also, young people like listening to songs over and over and over and they also just like listening to music period, seeking it out, playing it for themselves and their friends. adults aren't as voracious. bob dylan was part of the zeitgeist 60 years ago. add up all his radio plays and the number of times people "listened" to his albums and singles since then and we'd have something to compare.

"Hit" radio has been like this for awhile--it's no longer just the current top 40, but a mix of hits from the past decade or so (with even older stuff thrown often thrown in).

also, young people like listening to songs over and over and over and they also just like listening to music period, seeking it out, playing it for themselves and their friends.

lol yes there's an implicit (and ilx0rs) there obv