Is Old Music Killing New Music?

[douglas9]

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

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.



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

[George McGovern]

1. Is it any wonder -- The old songs from the 60s and 70s were and still are the best!

[Walleye]

2. I second that emotion

[ificandream]

15. I agree, too, but ...

I don't think new music is under attack at all. New music has its base, old music has its base. And I can't see new music dying.

[Blues Heron]

3. not even slightly surprising

bump bump bump bump gets old after a while.

[Joinfortmill]

4. Certain eras produced timeless music. Here are some more recent ones that come to mind ....

Jazz Age, The Big Band Era (still resonates), The Blues, and Rock 'n Roll in all its variations (especially the 60s & 70s produced classics)

[MiHale]

5. Classical eras that produced timeless music...

Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and 20th century.

[highplainsdem]

6. New music has to compete with the very best from decades of older music.

This isn't anything like, say, radio in the 1970s, when you'd be unlikely to hear any music more than 10 years old, so newer artists were mostly competing with their contemporaries, and older bands were often derided as "dinosaurs" as soon as some newer sound began to catch the attention of record industry execs and rock journalists who wanted to be on the leading edge of whatever wave they thought was coming. And music fans felt pressure to buy the newest music, to prove they weren't stuck in the past. I remember buying Clash albums I really didn't like all that well, for instance.

The acceptance of classic rock as truly classic changed that.

[DinahMoeHum]

7. The last paragraphs of the article will tell you NO.

. . .new music is not dying, but it will take time to establish itself.

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.

To paraphrase that quote from Jurassic Park: "new" music, like life, finds a way.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

8. I'm sure that's true about physical medium, not so sure about streaming like Spotify

In order to match the count of listens to the Billy Eilish song 'bad guy' (just under 2,000,000,000) you have to sum up the listens to the top 5 songs by Led Zeppelin (Stairway, Immigrant Song, Whole Lotta Love, Black Dog, and Kashmir) or Pink Floyd (WYWH, ABITW pt 2, Comfortably Numb, Money, Time).

It has as many listens as the top 3 CCR songs (Fortunate Son, Have you Ever Seen the Rain, Bad Moon Rising) combined.

It has as many listens as the top 4 songs by The Beatles (Here Comes the Sun, Let It Be, Come Together, Yesterday) combined.

It has as many listens as the top 4 songs by the Stones (Paint It, Black, Satisfaction, Start Me Up, Gimme Shelter) combined.

It has almost as many listens as the top 4 songs by Elton John (Rocket Man, Cold Heart, Your Song, Tiny Dancer) combined.

ALL the top 10 songs of the Eagles listens count doesn't add up to one 'bad guy', neither does the entire top 10 from Dylan, and The Who is not even close with their top 10.

And the top 10 Springsteen songs combined BARELY do.

Also, not ONE of the above-named artists has ONE single song with >1B listens.

Billie Eilish has 4 of them. Dua Lipa has 5. Sam Smith has 4. Ed Sheeran has 4 (with one of them at over 3B, and 2 are very close to 2B). Olivia Rodrigo has 2. Just to name a few.

Heck, The listen counts for the top 10 songs of the Korean vocal group BTS looks very similar to the top 10 listen counts for Led Zeppelin, or Pink Floyd (cept they actually have 1 song with over 1B listens).

So the idea that, at least as far as subscription streaming goes, people are only listening to the artists of the last century ... doesn't really seem borne out by the numbers.

The TOP artists of today, at least, smoke even the biggest bands from the 20th Century in terms of Spotify listens.

[highplainsdem]

10. Spotify can be lucrative for a few newer stars, doesn't really support newer artists in general:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/arts/music/streaming-music-payments.html


Part of the dispute is over streaming's basic economics. Spotify, Apple Music and most other major platforms use a so-called pro rata system of royalty distribution. In this model, all the money collected from subscribers or ads for a given month goes into a single pot, which is then divided by the total number of streams. If, say, Drake had 5 percent of all streams that month, he (and the companies that handle his music) get 5 percent of the pot -- meaning that, effectively, he gets 5 percent of each user's money, even those who have never listened to his music.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

12. I'm talking less about the $$$ involved and more about the popularity of newer music

Looking at Spotify listen counts, the 'household name' newer acts get just as many if not more listens than the household name old acts like Stones, Beatles, Zep, Floyd, etc.

The notion that new music is 'dying' at the hands of the old stuff is probably really only true with physical medium (and perhaps purchased digital like mp3), a method of listening which really isn't that popular anymore period.

[highplainsdem]

11. Btw, the NYT article cited above says that Spotify is estimated to pay out about $4,000 per million

streams. So that Billy Eilish song with 2 billion streams would generate about 8 million in revenue to the record company, which may also take a substantial cut.

It's still a lot of money. It's also a lot of money taken in large part from people who might never listen to the song, but whose money goes to her just because of the pro rata system described above.

This is not like earning money from CD and vinyl royalties, where the money earned is all from consumers choosing your music.

I wonder how many people would stream music if they knew their choices might not be reflected at all in what their favorite artists earn.

[Midnight Writer]

9. The corporate music scene has become stagnant.

The corporations want more of the same, proven money makers. Thus, the art, whether it be music, movies, books, gets corporate support only if a room full of marketers recognize it as marketable. That limits the space for innovative art to rise. It serves the business, but not necessarily the audience.

You would be hard pressed to tell, on first listening, the difference in a popular song of today and one of thirty years ago.

By contrast, look at the Beatles, who went from I Want To Hold Your Hand to Sgt. Peppers in three years. New sounds exploded in that era, partly because the technology changed, but also because the industry signed artists that pushed the envelope. It's interesting to look back at the Billboard charts of the past and see the range of music represented. The Captain and Tennille and The Who and Earth, Wind and Fire could all chart as bestsellers in the same era.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

13. Biggest tech change of that era was the invention of the 8 track recorder

Which basically took 'recorded music' from mostly being a 'live to tape' affair into a scenario where each part could be played and recorded separately.

That made it so multi-instrumentalists like the Beatles could play upwards of 3 or 4 instruments per song, if desired (could actually record >8 tracks by 'bouncing' tracks during the process), and also allowed for many more 'takes' during development, in part because you didn't have to have every member present in the studio to work on the recording.

The tech to 'sync' 2 x 8 track recorders to get de facto 16 tracks, and then actual 16 track recorders came not too terribly long after IIRC.

[highplainsdem]

14. Article with more info on the numbers from MRC Data mentioned in that Atlantic

article:

https://musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-82-of-the-us-music-market-is-now-claimed-by-catalog-records-rather-than-new-releases2/