"Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market. Even worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking."
It's so hard to know what's coming out and what's good unless you're an audiophile and actively seeking it out, for casual listeners it's just easier to retreat to the hits of decades past. This, combined with the fact that we're all getting our music from algorithms that favor the hits for their own reasons, means that there is no "mainstream" music culture anymore (and I would argue that there hasn't been one since the early 2000s).
Is this a bad thing, necessarily? Eh, I don't think it is. More people are able to make a living making music today compared to decades past when all the money was monopolized by a few dozen high-profile acts, so I'd call that an improvement. The modern music scene comes with its own bugbears to be sure, like the domination of music platforms, but overall it's a bit better than when it was dominated by record company execs.
I agree that its never been better to strike out on yr own as an indie artist, but "all the money was monopolized by a few dozen high-profile acts" is stil true in the streaming era. See: https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news-arts-culture/news/article/4926/music-streaming-dominated-by-top-artists, quote: "Just 1% of artists account for up to 80% of streamed tracks, according to new research."
Youtube Music will actively search for a bootleg video to avoid paying the artist even if you are a subscriber.
That is how scummy things are.
Bootleg uploads get copyright striked, so the money goes to the rights-holders either way. This is how YT has avoided a major lawsuit until now, but the major labels are still pissed off with them because if they earned as much money per-user as they do from Spotify premium, they would be raking in billions. As a result, labels have been forcing YT to take down certain artists catalogues and piddle with its copyright bots to make them as unfair as possible. YT made YT Music as a way of placating the labels, but it might still not be enough in the long run. If it's not, YT would have to buy a license for every single song on the platform... Which they're not going to do, because it would probably bankrupt Google. The only logical step in that scenario would be to remove music from YT altogether.
very burying the lede here; "new" music is literally only less than 18 months and its the authors idea that an unusually large share of these "old" tracks are decades old---based entirely on anecdote
yeah yeah yeah cultural stagnation is something to examine but purchasing and streaming music are rapidly changing markets and the data from them leaves out a lot. to the point its probably not a clear enough picture to accurately identify trends
18 months
Big label artists only come out with new music to publicize tours, you don’t really make money on records. You can’t really tour with COVID.
An interesting thing is how revivalism, especially of the 1980s, is prevalent in modern music. Many of the bands or artists that write songs that become either popular or carve a niche for themselves are inspired by musical styles that had their glory days in a previous era.
The Weeknd is here making heavily 80s inspired pop. Molchat Doma exploded in popularity by making post-punk that sounds exactly like something from 1982. Bruno Mars is making 70s, 80s and 90s inspired R&B (including a goddamn New Jack Swing song) and bands like Greta van Fleet are making 1970s boomer rock.
Someone who listens to more modern pop music/the musical charts than I do could probably list more examples.
Then again, it could simply be this decade's Shakin' Stevens (who made 1950s inspired music in the 1980s), but he never was more than a niche that somehow consistently got on the radio.
Dua Lipa called her new album last year "future nostalgia" and it's heavily influenced by older disco.
It's not even subtle anymore, nothing new is actually being invented. It all sounds similar
It’s not even subtle anymore, nothing new is actually being invented.
People have been complaining about this for millennia.
If you want "new music" figure out a way to do a song with the Blockchain. Past that, what are you complaining about, exactly? That nobody is inventing new physical hardware for making noises in the register the human ear finds appealing? That nobody is stringing a unique set of words together to express the idea of two people meeting each other, falling in love, fucking, growing apart, breaking up, feeling lonely, and then meeting new people again?
There is plenty of "new" music out there. Soundcloud and Bandcamp are rife with it. Some of it is even outside mainstream. You're not going to find it on the FM, but why the fuck would you ever go to an FM radio station for new music anyway?
It's just getting so obvious now fully expecting some mainstream artist to call their new album "the greatest of the 90s" or something.
nu 90s. Thats the trick right? Just put nu in front of it
can’t wait for nu-numetal
well...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIvaeu6Oxzc
It not only won the Finnish qualifier for the competition, but got fourth place in the audience vote lmao
I feel like Eurovision shouldn't count because the songs usually chart in the countries they're from but don't have much staying power.
I mean, Flo Rida made an appearance in a Eurovision 2021 song, I thought he stopped existing in 2011.
El Diablo which was Cyprus sounded like a royalty-free version of Bad Romance by Lady Gaga.
A lot of the production/instrumentation on the more pop stuff feels like it wouldn't sound out of place in 2008 and idk how to put my finger on it.
literally the same it ever was. one of the most iconic songs of my youth in the 80s, soft cell's "tainted love," is a cover of a 60s r&b song and i didn't even know until like the 2010s
That's a cover though. Modern revivalism actually emulates the sound of past genres as well.
Perhaps we should not be measuring an artistic medium by how fucking marketable it is.
Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according 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 look at 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.
U.S Catalog vs. Current Consumption Source: MRC Data The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5 percent of total streams. That rate was twice as high just three years ago. The mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more 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 Police.
I encountered this phenomenon myself recently at a retail store, where the youngster at the cash register was singing along with Sting on “Message in a Bottle” (a hit from 1979) as it blasted on the radio. A few days earlier, I had a similar experience at a local diner, where the entire staff was under 30 but every song was more than 40 years old. I asked my server: “Why are you playing this old music?” She looked at me in surprise before answering: “Oh, I like these songs.”
Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact. In fact, the audience seems to be embracing the hits of decades past instead. Success was always short-lived in the music business, but now even new songs that become bona fide hits can pass unnoticed by much of the population.
Only songs released in the past 18 months get classified as “new” in the MRC database, so people could conceivably be listening to a lot of two-year-old songs, rather than 60-year-old ones. But I doubt these old 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 almost entirely focused on what’s happening right now.
Every week I hear from hundreds of publicists, record labels, band managers, and other professionals who want to hype the newest new thing. Their livelihoods depend on it. The entire business model of the music industry is built on promoting new songs. As a music writer, I’m expected to do the same, as are radio stations, retailers, DJs, nightclub owners, editors, playlist curators, and everyone else with skin in the game. Yet all the evidence indicates that few listeners are paying attention.
RECOMMENDED READING Taylor Swift adjusts her headphones in an Apple Music ad How Significant Is the Music Industry's Rebound? SPENCER KORNHABER How the Music Industry Explains Inequality, Globalization, Middle-Class Decline ... Basically Everything DEREK THOMPSON
The Shazam Effect DEREK THOMPSON Consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack of reaction, because the cultural response was little more than a yawn. I follow thousands of music professionals on social media, and I didn’t encounter a single expression of annoyance or regret that the biggest annual event in new music had been put on hold. That’s ominous.
Can you imagine how angry fans would be if the Super Bowl or NBA Finals were delayed? People would riot in the streets. But the Grammy Awards go missing in action, and hardly anyone notices.
The declining TV audience for the Grammy show underscores this shift. In 2021, viewership for the ceremony collapsed 53 percent from the previous year—from 18.7 million to 8.8 million. It was the least-watched Grammy broadcast of all time. Even the core audience for new music couldn’t be bothered—about 98 percent of people ages 18 to 49 had something better to do than watch the biggest music celebration of the year.
A decade ago, 40 million 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 people pay attention to streams of video games on Twitch (which now gets 30 million daily visitors) or the latest reality-TV 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.
More people watch the Great British Bake Off than the Grammy Awards Source: Nielsen/Media Reports Some would like to believe that this trend is just a short-term blip, perhaps caused by the pandemic. When clubs open up again, and DJs start spinning new records at parties, the world will return to normal, or so we’re told. The hottest songs will again be the newest songs. I’m not so optimistic.
Read: Why aren’t there more women working in audio?
A series of unfortunate events are conspiring to marginalize new music. The pandemic is one 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 song 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 Brown).
Even major record labels are participating in the rush to old music: Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, and others are buying up publishing catalogs and investing huge sums in old tunes. In a previous time, that money would have 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, here too, old is viewed as 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, although every other industry looks to innovation for growth and consumer excitement. Record stores are caught up in the same time warp. In an earlier 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 by the offerings on my satellite-radio lineup—completely ignoring new music in favor of old hits. When a new song overcomes these obstacles and actually becomes a hit, the risk of copyright lawsuits is greater than ever before. The risks have increased enormously since the “Blurred Lines” jury decision of 2015, and the result is that additional cash gets transferred from today’s musicians to old (or deceased) artists. Adding to the nightmare, dead musicians are now coming back to life in virtual form—via holograms and “deepfake” music—making it all the harder for young, living artists to compete in the marketplace. As record labels lose interest in new music, emerging performers desperately search for other ways to get exposure. They hope to place their self-produced tracks on a curated streaming playlist, or license their songs for use in advertising or the closing credits of a TV show. Those options might generate some royalty income, but they do little to build name recognition. You might hear a cool song on a TV commercial, but do you even know the name of the artist? You love your workout playlist at the health club, but how many song titles and band names do you remember? You 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 warned of the arrival of “furniture music,” a kind of song that would blend seamlessly into the background of our lives. His vision seems closer to reality than ever.
Some people—especially Baby Boomers—tell me that this decline in the popularity of new music is simply the result of lousy new songs. Music used to be better, or so they say. The old songs had better melodies, more interesting harmonies, and demonstrated genuine musicianship, not just software loops, Auto-Tuned vocals, and regurgitated samples.
There will never be another Sondheim, they tell me. Or Joni Mitchell. Or Bob Dylan. Or Cole Porter. Or Brian Wilson. I almost expect these doomsayers to break out in a stirring rendition of “Old Time Rock and Roll,” much like Tom Cruise in his underpants.
Just take those old records off the shelf
I’ll sit and listen to ’em by myself …
I can understand the frustrations of music lovers who get no satisfaction from current mainstream songs, though they try and they try. I also lament the lack of imagination on many modern hits. But I disagree with my Boomer friends’ larger verdict. I listen to two 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 ability to discover and nurture their talents.
List of Song or Recording Rights Sold Since 2019 Music-industry bigwigs have plenty of excuses for their inability to discover and adequately promote great new artists. The fear of copyright lawsuits has made many in the 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. Tr
Call me a boomer, but I think music has genuinely gotten worse. (After all, neoliberalism makes everything worse.) Not worse in every way, but there is definitely some sense in which quality has been traded for quantity. You can have high production value and polish, or experimentation, but not both in the way you could in the 60s and 70s. Nobody now is doing what the Beatles or Led Zeppelin did. On the bright side though, there are way more musical niches to explore now.
Edit: Some music recs from the last five years so people don't think I'm a total philistine (in no particular order)
Nobody now is doing what the Beatles or Led Zeppelin did
nobody now is getting picked up by big labels and advertised to the moon and back? markets are just bigger and more complex now, you gotta remember that pop music wasn't very old, we're talking 30 years from the home radio to Beatlemania. Fewer channels (radio/TV), fewer entrypoints, less capital.
the most people the Beatles played for was 55000, lots of groups are doing numbers like that now. so the thing about modern music is theres a less hegemonic environment forcing everyone to hear about this or that band
and yeah im sidestepping the artistic side cause youre on some boomer shit there
Isn't that pretty close to my point though? As I said, there are more musical niches to explore. The number of options has exploded. But I think this has had the effect of emphasizing quantity and variety a bit more and quality and sophistication a bit less.
nobody now is getting picked up by big labels and advertised to the moon and back?
Nobody is getting picked up by big labels and supported in their long term musical development. Neoliberalism doesn't allow for companies to invest long term in new talent. They pretty much pick up and promote artists as-is now from what I understand. That's a huge departure from how the Beatles and Zeppelin happened, and no doubt it has had some kind of effect on music.
and yeah im sidestepping the artistic side cause youre on some boomer shit there
Nah, I'm very open minded about music. I like a wide variety of stuff, including tons of contemporary things. I'm not even really talking about the subjective aspects of art when I say there is some sense in which music has gotten worse. Singer-songwriters for example are writing objectively simpler melodies and chord progressions. I think people overstate the extent to which that is merely a change of subjective generational preference.
number of options has exploded. But I think this has had the effect of emphasizing quantity and variety a bit more and quality and sophistication a bit less.
well, no. within the much larger pot, way more artists than the beatles and led zeppelin are getting the same or more money, and having bigger tours. and this def translates into a lot of quality.
supported in their long term musical development
this is a bit euphemistic for the shitty way studios behave. Big cash cows being allowed to release whatever dumb shit they want =/= 'long term support'. everyone else who wasn't printing money was and still is subject to what studios think is worth releasing. i'd say the highest level of support from studios ever conceived would be like, archetypical K-pop and its a labor nightmare---which by the way pumps out some serious quality
Singer-songwriters for example are writing objectively simpler melodies and chord progressions
:citations-needed: no seriously. no one's quantified that, only cherrypicked. and this literally encodes the subjective importance of 'melody complexity' over many other aspects of songwriting.
Money and tours aren't what make a quality band though. The Beatles actually stopped playing shows so they could focus on studio work. Their label set them up with an absolutely incredible classically-trained producer who was essential to their development. He was basically a personal tutor for them to learn time-tested techniques, which is critical if you want to reach a level of competency where you can experiment in ways that aren't basically just esoteric. (I love experimental, esoteric music, btw. Not knocking it.) The Beatles mastered an incredible number of genres and styles before entering their really innovative phase. From what I understand, the music industry does not provide much music education anymore. I think you could accurately call the current musical landscape a collection of talented amateurs and some "corporate" acts with songs ghost written by a committee of marketing specialists. We're seeing a lot of variety and clever experimentation from random talented people, but a much lower level of refinement, and a lot of time wasted reinventing the wheel. A lot of songs frankly sound unfinished, or way overproduced.
The Beatles wrote like 200 extremely varied songs, many of which alone would have made another band's career. Interesting but concise melodies with incredible, distinct arrangements. I don't think they could have done that today.
Regarding simpler melodies, I'm not sure what you mean by "quantify". I'm just pointing to a general trend in music. I can't nail it down very specifically, but something along these lines is definitely happening. Melodies are either really simple as with many popular artists, or they're really complex for the sake of being complex, as in the case of wanky technical / experimental bands. There's not much of a middle ground anymore where you can find artists who writes complex but tasteful melodies done in a variety of styles, while not just solely rehashing previous bands' work.
this literally encodes the subjective importance of ‘melody complexity’ over many other aspects of songwriting.
I'm not saying complex melodies are the most important thing in music, just that I'd like to see some part of the music industry still prioritize it in the way it apparently used to.
Nobody now is doing what the Beatles or Led Zeppelin did
U mean ripping off black artists to sell to white middle-class audiences? Lmaoooo
Seriously though, there is way more great music than you think, but you can't expect any band now to have the same impact as those guys. The scene has become far too fractured. Stairway has been played on American radio something like 5 million times; no one will be able to beat that now, because no one cares about radio enough to push a song that hard anymore.
U mean ripping off black artists to sell to white middle-class audiences? Lmaoooo
Well, yeah. I'm not saying music used to be better ethically. We're talking about America in the 60s and 70s after all.
Anyway, what contemporary songs do you think rival Stairway in terms of quality, complexity, sophistication, whatever you want to call it? I don't think it's just the marketing that makes that song incredible. It's genuinely a masterpiece.
Here's a bunch of brilliant albums that came out only last year (I can do only rock music if you'd prefer as well)
Black Midi - Cavalcade
Black Country, New Road - For the First Time
Spellling - The Turning Wheel
Little Simz - Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
Armand Hammer & The Alchemist - Haram
Floating Points and Pharaoh Sanders - Promises
Erika de Casier - Sensational
Lingua Ignota - Sinner Get Ready
There's genuinely brilliant music coming out every year. The problem is of course that music streaming platforms, the same as video ones like Netflix, both push endless amounts of crap down peoples throats and their convenience and algorithms mean people seek out the stuff they're know and comfortable with.
My last reply was rude so I deleted it. I apologise. Also, I couldn't explain myself because I was at work.
I can't answer your question, because I don't know enough about "contemporary" music. For one thing I don't really keep up with the newest releases: I tend to drag behind by a decade or two! At the same time however, how contemporary? 1 year? 2 years? 10? One problem is that what's new today will be old tomorrow.
If you're looking for complex music, I'd argue that a song like 'Flesh and the Power it Holds' by Death is far more complex than Stairway, but it's a Death Metal song, so it'll never get played on mainstrem radio. It's also 24 years old now, so I guess that means it's not contemporary... but Led Zep IV is 52 years old, so we run into the problem again. What was new (some of it, anyway) in '98 was more complex in pretty much every way, but it's not new now so therefore it must be old. Therefore it gets grouped in with the other "oldies". For what it's worth, I've also heard local bands in my city play songs with crazy compound time signatures, which there is none of in 'Stairway'.
I could choose any song with polyphony in- let's say 'Give Me a Reason' by Pink- and compare it to a Gregorian chant from the early medieval period, and it would be more complex purely because it has polyphony in it, and Gregorian chants are by definition monophonic; therefore music produced in the 21st century is more complex than music produced in the 13th century, right? And that means that there has been a clear linear progression in the level of complexity from the 13th century to now, with no peaks or troughs, right? No! The level of harmonic complexity in the music of J.S. Bach dwarfs any pop music made in the 20th or 21st centuries because of his use of counterpoint, so legendary was it that it's still hailed 300 years later as genius. You could say the same of any number of classical composers too, but that is kind of unfair as we're talking about pop music, not classical. But you can't really compare a 70s prog rock song with a club banger from (for example) 2016 either, can you?
Certainly, capitalism has a role to play in the simplification of top 40 pop. Adorno said as much in the 50s. But my point is that you could pick any two points in time and it wouldn't tell you anything about the scene, and moreover, you can't judge the complexity of a scene by a handful of songs, especially today when there is so much on offer.
Here are some cool "contemporary" things I like, anyway.
Nakamarra by Hiatus Kaiyote (I dare you to tell me this is less complex than Stairway)
Spectres of the Blood Moon Sabbath by Hellripper. I only found these guys because they were in my recommended videos on YT. I guess the algorithm throws up some good stuff occasionally!
In the Long Run by the Staves. Love this song. I played it at an open mic recently. I've been meaning to check out the rest of their back catalogue too.
It's all good, thanks for the recs! Regarding the bands you've seen playing in compound time signatures, what genre were they? I love that kind of stuff in metal and some contemporary jazz
Generally, if you hear a compound time sig in a song by a local band, it was put in to make them sound clever and weird, but so many bands do it that it's kind of a meme for me at this point.
Either way, I'm in a sort of Punk/Grunge/Indie band and our current set has songs in 5/8 and 7/8. A lot that I've seen haven't really sounded like you'd expect them to. Most bands locally that use wacky time sigs are kind of indie or "rock"; most of the Jazz and Funky groups I see about prefer 4/4 or 6/8 because it's all about groove with them.
I rarely see "metal" locally, partly because my city is all about punk/ hardcore and jazz (there's an electronic scene too but I don't know much about it), and also because it's tricky to define. Many of the bands I've seen would have been called metal in the 80s, but are referred to as Hard Rock now. I've seen a Doom metal band here who were okay too.
I think another reason I don't see metal as much is to do with technical ability- very few people can shred, or make a double kick sound good (I've never even seen a double kick setup live), or growl and scream well. Either way, all of the Hard Rock and otherwise Heavy bands I've seen mostly stick to simple time.
At the same time. if you look at early Beatles or "culturally appropriated white boy blooz"-era Zeppelin, pop music was always pretty bad. But yeah, around the Sergeant Pepper's/Pet Sounds/Zeppelin IV era, you started getting some wild studio experimentation. You do still see this stuff pop up from time to time with other genres/niches; for instance, in the death metal world, there's stuff like how Carcass recorded the guitar tracks for the Heartwork album, or the cabinet double-miking technique used by Studio Fredman when In Flames recorded the original version of Clayman. I wouldn't call either of those very experimental musically, though -- I don't think we've had a major shake-up in the metal scene since Faith No More stumbled ass-backwards into accidentally birthing nu metal.
All of that being said, I think Gojira's "Amazonia" at least gets a nod for including a jaw harp part and later doubling it with the guitar.
Edit:
Nobody now is doing what ... Led Zeppelin did.
I know what you meant, but I gotta drop Greta Van Fleet here to be a jackass before someone really does call you a boomer.
I think the Beatles and Zeppelin were able to do that because the music industry actually invested their musical development, which apparently doesn't really happen anymore. As capital has become more and more narrowly focused on next-quarter profits, investing in promising artists and nurturing their musical development has become impossible. Basically, everyone is permanently trapped in the early Beatles stages and never get to progress to the highly innovative stage.
I know what you meant, but I gotta drop Greta Van Fleet here to be a jackass before someone really does call you a boomer.
Lol, thanks, I'll check them out. Also, I agree about metal. It feels like the genre has stagnated a bit.
i agree to an extent here? music has gotten worse, or at least stagnated: but only rock and its many, many subgenres. id say, as a whole: rap and electronic are definitely like at their peak at least in terms of innovation, sampling techniques, etc or will be at some point soon, in the next decade or so.
i mean dont get me wrong theres still some good rock out there but its certainly less common........actually fuck me i tried so hard to think of a "modern" rock band just now (as in founded no earlier than a decade or so ago) and all i could think of that wasnt a meme or just fuckin overall mediocre at best, was car seat headrest
Its extremely difficult to actually gauge how much good music is being made in the moment that it is being made, looking at the top 100s for decades past theres gonna be so much bullshit that is completely forgotten now.
The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are absolute garbage, and the prog rock and arena shit that came after was even worse. The Smiths blow them out of the water.
70s music was a complete wasteland outside of some new emerging genres like House/Disco, Punk and New Wave, which everyone in the US mocked. Music peaked in the 1990s, which you can tell from the wide variety of genres and the huge number of "one hit wonders", which implies a diverse range of popular styles.
interesting. kinda makes sense tho! as much as some songs go not of fashion, a lot dont. it should only make sense that it keeps decreasing, right? unless there is some revolution that just replaces everyones favorite songs. i dont see mr brightside going anywhere still.
I think a big factor is that new music has become so atomized/niche. There used to be a monocultural force that would put new music on everyone's radar constantly: radio, MTV etc... With streaming, you have to actively seek out new music and I'm too old to care about that shit.
I actually think streaming and podcasts have way more to do with this than some nostalgic cope. That and the fact that fewer people commute. 6 months ago I bought a terrestrial radio and I'm lucky to have like 4 stations I can pick up that play new music I like. I've added more music to my collection in those six months than I had in the 5 years before that.
There will always be more old music than new music.
As for the rebirth of old sounds, that's just because those "old sounds" are some of the last times there were new analog musical tools. Digital tools basically just emulate them so you get a combination of people using the old tools and people using the digital versions of those old tools.
