What's the future of the music industry?

People will buy it not just for making hits, but for their own entertainment. Imagine you can order for your kid a personalized happy birthday song by Billie Eilish or Ariana Grande (created by some deepfake voice plugin), it would sell like crazy.

These septuagenarian stars selling off their entire intellectual property reminds me of the mid-90s when my dad saw a there was a model train collector convention in town. Stuck all his 1940s Lionels into liquor store boxes and came back with a thousand bucks in cash, amused that he was still the youngest guy in the room, and that that market wasn't gonna rise any further.

Good article with some surprising stats:

I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms - but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers. According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.

Those who make a living from new music - especially that endangered species known as the working musician - have to look on 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.

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/is-old-music-killing-new-music

Old Growth Pop

Definitely some interesting stats in that article, but it seems to be overly reliant on anecdotes ("one time I saw a kid singing along with an old song!") and specious arguments:

There are many reasons for this, some of them quite alarming. For example, the fear of copyright lawsuits has made many in the music 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.

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.