Is Old Music Killing New Music?

[buh buh biden]

Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market. Even worse:
The new-music market is actually shrinking.

About the author: Ted Gioia writes the music and popular-culture
newsletter The Honest Broker on Substack. He is also the author of 11
books, including, most recently, Music: A Subversive History.

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.

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.

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. Try mailing a demo to a label or producer, and watch it return
unopened.

The people whose livelihood depends on discovering new musical talent face
legal risks if they take their job seriously. That’s only one of the
deleterious results of the music industry’s overreliance on lawyers and
litigation, a hard-ass approach they once hoped would cure all their
problems, but now does more harm than good. Everybody suffers in this
litigious environment except for the partners at the entertainment-law
firms, who enjoy the abundant fruits of all these lawsuits and legal
threats.

The problem goes deeper than just copyright concerns. The people running
the music industry have lost confidence in new music. They won’t admit it
publicly—that would be like the priests of Jupiter and Apollo in ancient
Rome admitting that their gods are dead. Even if they know it’s true,
their job titles won’t allow such a humble and abject confession. Yet that
is exactly what’s happening. The moguls have lost their faith in the
redemptive and life-changing power of new music. How sad is that? Of
course, the decision makers need to pretend that they still believe in the
future of their business, and want to discover the next revolutionary
talent. But that’s not what they really think. Their actions speak much
louder than their empty words.

In fact, nothing is less interesting to music executives than a completely
radical new kind of music. Who can blame them for feeling this way? The
radio stations will play only songs that fit the dominant formulas, which
haven’t changed much in decades. The algorithms curating so much of our
new music are even worse. Music algorithms are designed to be feedback
loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to
your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is
excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That’s actually how the
current system has been designed to work.

Even the music genres famous for shaking up the world—rock or jazz or hip-
hop—face this same deadening industry mindset. I love jazz, but many of
the radio stations focused on that genre play songs that sound almost the
same as what they featured 10 or 20 years ago. In many instances, they
actually are the same songs.

Read: BTS’s ‘Dynamite’ could upend the music industry

This state of affairs is not inevitable. A lot of musicians around the
world—especially in Los Angeles and London—are conducting a bold dialogue
between jazz and other contemporary styles. They are even bringing jazz
back as dance music. But the songs they release sound dangerously
different from older jazz, and are thus excluded from many radio stations
for that same reason. The very boldness with which they embrace the future
becomes the reason they get rejected by the gatekeepers.

A country record needs to sound a certain way to get played on most
country radio stations or playlists, and the sound those DJs and
algorithms are looking for dates back to the prior century. And don’t even
get me started on the classical-music industry, which works hard to avoid
showcasing the creativity of the current generation. We are living in an
amazing era of classical composition, with one tiny problem: The
institutions controlling the genre don’t want you to hear it.

The problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure
to discover and nurture it.

I learned the danger of excessive caution long ago, when I consulted for
huge Fortune 500 companies. The single biggest problem I
encountered—shared by virtually every large company I analyzed—was
investing too much of their time and money into defending old ways of
doing business, rather than building new ones. We even had a proprietary
tool for quantifying this misallocation of resources that spelled out the
mistakes in precise dollars and cents.

Senior management hated hearing this, and always insisted that defending
the old business units was their safest bet. After I encountered this
embedded mindset again and again and saw its consequences, I reached the
painful conclusion that the safest path is usually the most dangerous. If
you pursue a strategy—whether in business or your personal life—that
avoids all risk, you might flourish in the short run, but you flounder
over the long term. That’s what is now happening in the music business.

Even so, I refuse to accept that we are in some grim endgame, witnessing
the death throes of new music. And I say that because I know how much
people crave something that sounds fresh and exciting and different. If
they don’t find it from a major record label or algorithm-driven playlist,
they will find it somewhere else. Songs can go viral nowadays without the
entertainment industry even noticing until it has already happened. That
will be how this story ends: not with the marginalization of new music,
but with something radical emerging from an unexpected place.

The apparent dead ends of the past were circumvented the same way. Music-
company execs in 1955 had no idea that rock and roll would soon sweep away
everything in its path. When Elvis took over the culture—coming from the
poorest state in America, lowly Mississippi—they were more shocked than
anybody. It happened again the following decade, with the arrival of the
British Invasion from lowly Liverpool (again, a working-class place,
unnoticed by the entertainment industry). And it happened again when hip-
hop, a true grassroots movement that didn’t give a damn how the close-
minded CEOs of Sony or Universal viewed the marketplace, emerged from the
Bronx and South Central and other impoverished neighborhoods.

If we had the time, I would tell you more about how the same thing has
always happened. The troubadours of the 11th century, Sappho, the lyric
singers of ancient Greece, and the artisan performers of the Middle
Kingdom in ancient Egypt transformed their own cultures in a similar way.
Musical revolutions come from the bottom up, not the top down. The CEOs
are the last to know. That’s what gives me solace. New music always arises
in the least expected place, and when the power brokers aren’t even paying
attention. It will happen again. It certainly needs to. The decision
makers controlling our music institutions have lost the thread. We’re
lucky that the music is too powerful for them to kill.

This story was adapted from a post on Ted Gioia’s Substack, The Honest
Broker. ??When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a
commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Ted Gioia writes the music and popular-culture newsletter The Honest
Broker on Substack. He is also the author of 11 books, including, most
recently, Music: A Subversive History.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-
music/621339/