11 ms·

New numbers on music consumption

• esarbe 4y ago
  How about getting rid of these ridiculously long copyright terms so that people can actually reinterpret and remix and reinvent the cultural artifacts of their youth? Isn't it kinda obvious that these copyright terms - tailored to suit corporations almost exclusively - are like a straitjacket in terms of creativity? All human cultural work always built up on what came before. We are - as the saying goes - standing on the shoulders of giants. But since about one generations, the giants have started to refuse to let go and don't let us climb on top anymore. So, yeah. When you prevent the old giants from dying and stop their corpses from becoming fertilizer for new ideas and approaches, that's just what you get; a stale 'creative' industry, ever regurgitating the same ideas without real innovation and experimentation.
  • NikolaNovak 4y ago
    I agree with you on copyrights in general, but I'm not sure that's the issue here. 1. Movies and their sequels/prequels: If anything, copyright should make it easier to make NEW stuff. But while there's lots of interesting movies being made (check Youtube and tiktok and vimeo etc, and even the mainstream streaming services which have tremendous long tail of weird content!), as far as cinemas specifically go - that's less and less where we watch our video entertainment, attention span is lower and lower, and people are choosing safe choices with their limited money and time, so cinema-oriented companies are making tremendously expensive visually impressive safe content. I can watch experimental interesting stuff at home. I go to cinema at cinema prices for a safe movie that has astonishing special effects that I cannot feasibly watch at home. It's an outdated medium, but that doesn't mean art itself is dead - it just moved to new forms. 2. Music may well be a discoverability problem. There's a RIDICULOUS amount of new stuff being made. Experimental and traditional, interesting and boring, in all shapes and formats and kinds. Go to reddit and see the amount of cool stuff people make at home. But it's also positively overwhelming... whereas I know I like Sultans of Swing and will always like Sultans of Swing :). And we have to consider who is the paying audience and how they pay - is the cool stuff teenagers and youngsters watch and listen to captured through traditional channels? Cool new stuff has always been shared and bootlegged. So I think cool innovative art is being made all the time, more than ever in fact; but not necessarily much or all of it is being consumed and importantly tracked at mainstream level. And that may be OK and normal. The article is looking at outdated art format/consumption, and noting that they are showing outdated content. It may be more tautologically true than an enlightening/warning sign.
    • newsclues 4y ago
      Music discovery is my number 1 problem with finding new music because computers made the barrier to entry so low there is now a lot of recorded crap. Lots of the discovery algorithms seem to be paywalled, which I don’t want to do, I want to find good music for free and CHOOSE to support artists.
      • kevinmchugh 4y ago
        If music discovery is your number 1 music problem, why won't you pay for it?
        • netr0ute 4y ago
          How does software discovery seem to always be free, but music gets special treatment?
          • newsclues 4y ago
            I have the same issue finding new good video games to play. Software discovery isn’t easy either. I kind of miss Yahoo categories and lists.
          • NikolaNovak 4y ago
            I don't think it is. Or at least not effectively. When I need a utility or have a requirement, I struggle mightily to find reliable software I can trust to fulfill that purpose. A lot of signals that would've worked 10 years ago don't anymore. Paying for software, which would be my preference, in no way guarantees that it will fit purpose, won't install Malware, Won't abuse my trust or won't be handicapped in some way. Search will lead me to slightly scammy software, and so increasingly will SEO-ed paid reviews on websites and even forums. I live the trustless Web and I hate it :-D So for me at least, easy seamless software discovery is completely lacking. Now, this is HN. I am sure there are number of people who will enjoy spending many hours Nd days on reddit and github sifting through opinions and source code, trying many things and then tweaking them until they get what they need. I used to be one. But that's not easy software discovery, that's hard physical labour for 99.99% of populace, including today myself :-> Whereas frankly, Spotify does ok job in building a radio station from a song or playlist. Unsolved problem is still finding a song that's alike to this song in some specific way that makes sense to me... But I expect that to be unsolved in my lifetime.
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
    Look up Rick Beato + spotify* on youtube. People are making crappy music. You can't really blame copyright for lack of talent, marketing, and lack of taste.
• sandworm101 4y ago
  Consumption and purchase of music are different things. The culture has not stopped. The kids just aren't paying. Thier parents are paying for easy access to Queen songs. The kids get thier music elsewhere.
  • aikah 4y ago
    Yet all the summer music festivals are packed, sold out within minutes. It's just that the kids value live experience more than they value mp3 or Spotify.
  • jmeister 4y ago
    Can you please tell us older ones where the kids are getting their music these days? When I was young I used torrents and filesharing between friends or local networks.
    • Someone1234 4y ago
      YouTube (and TikTok to a certain extent).
      • coldpie 4y ago
        Definitely TikTok, and Instagram as well. Yes, really, there's a huge independent musician community on Instagram.
      • Victerius 4y ago
        Seconding YouTube.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • hobo_mark 4y ago
      No so young anymore, but I listen to SoundCloud at least 50 hours per week (after heavily curating who I follow and writing my own SoundCloud frontend to make the site usable, fwiw). In fact most artists I follow do not publish anywhere else, except maybe Bandcamp (whose usability is even worse). ps: to any SoundCloud pm listening, I would have gladly paid for a purely linear timeline of my follows that remembers its position across devices, but no I had to build it myself.
• adamnemecek 4y ago
  I’ve been working on an IDE for music composition https://ngrid.io https://ngrid.io Launching soon. Join the discord https://discord.gg/a5ttYuG https://discord.gg/a5ttYuG
  • LegitShady 4y ago
    doesn't look like you have enough to show to get me interested, and everything you've put there is either opinion ("Write 10 songs in the same time as you used to write 1.") or things that daws or random ios apps already do. It's also totally unrelated to the article at hand so this is shameless self promotion of something that isn't really available to promote.
  • bambax 4y ago
    At first I was interested by this. But as I have seen this comment pop up everywhere on HN for a very long time, and zero progress on said IDE, I think it's just spam. Please stop.
    • adamnemecek 4y ago
      Do you think that I would be spamming this of it wasn’t real? I’m legit close to launch now.
      • detaro 4y ago
        Good that you recognize you are spamming - then please stop spamming! You've been posting about it being ready soon for 4 years now, and you keep posting it in just vaguely related threads despite having been asked multiple times to stop.
        • adamnemecek 4y ago
          You called it spamming, I would not call it that. Yeah shit took way longer than it should have. Just FYI Bitwig also took a while. Figma too. Desktop apps are hard, and audio desktop apps are double hard. Almost there though.
• somecommit 4y ago
  https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-05-22 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-05-22
  • __s 4y ago
    A bit out of place: their complaint is asserting teens are listening to oldies
    • kibwen 4y ago
      I don't see teens mentioned in the article anywhere. If anything, teens are probably underrepresented in the data due to greater willingness to use non-traditional outlets.
  • h2odragon 4y ago
    Also "The media kids enjoy today is bad for their health." As true for TikTok seizures and speech impediments as it was for Judas Priest inspired suicides and D&D Satanism.
  • KevinGlass 4y ago
• annoyingnoob 4y ago
  For me, the thing that seems to be missing from modern music is passion. Pop music isn't about art its about sales, it does not want to say anything it just wants to party. Where are the songs that say something and touch you? Where are the folks that can even sing without digital processing? I think modern tools also have an effect on how we produce music - there is lots of software and anyone can use it but everyone plays in the same playground to do it. Maybe we rely on too much automation, too many reach for the same plugins.
  • hedora 4y ago
    You might like The Mountain Goats, or even the podcast "I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats" where they talk about the story behind the lyrics, and how they used to record the vocals on a half-busted 80's boombox mic. I think they're reasonably popular. One of the local newspapers recenlty ran a cover story about their new album. Anyway, they tick all your boxes. For something amazing that ticks none of your boxes, you could check out Igorrr. Lindsey Stirling, Diablo Swing Orchestra and Sumo Cyco are in between those extremes. Those bands are all very different from each other, and mostly from automatic recommendations.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• causality0 4y ago
  This article is making a lot of assumptions that I'm not sure are correct. For example, it claims older music and older movie franchises are gaining in popularity for the same pervasive cultural reason. That's an assumption, especially because he only mentioned two categories of artistic endeavor. What about others? Old books vs new books? Old video games vs new video games? Painting, sculpture, architecture? I can't point to numbers that say he's wrong, but for my whole life I have never felt like I had access to a smaller variety of media than I had before. It's just not on billboards. It's more individualistic. None of my friends read the same books or listen to the same bands as each other.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    Yeah. We probably know some of the reasons action movie franchises (in particular) are big. Budgets have gotten huge and predictable effects-laden action franchises are very important for the international market and theater goers apparently flock to them in the US as well. The good news is there's lots of choice if that's not your thing.
• epups 4y ago
  This graph is hilarious: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7809bc5c-5e3b-42fb-b3aa-0afd476cc29d_1628x1212.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_... The putative effect is not statistically distinguishable, as observed by the fat overlapping confidence intervals. And the word "old" growing in prominence in movie titles is a very weird, unreliable proxy for the effect at hand. The rest of the article is similar drivel.
  • Closi 4y ago
    This looked odd to me too - and suspiciously like a p-hack. Besides - if the grey shaded area is where we are supposed to believe the 'actual' number should fall, we actually know the 'actual' numbers (the dots) and 60% of the datapoints fall outside of the shaded area, so this seems like total nonsense to me (presumably 95% of the points should sit inside this area?). On top of that - if you added the actual numbers to this graph (which I expect are 1-4 films a year) only a handful of releases can completely skew the data. And then even if you ignore the above, the whole premise titles such as 'old school', 'no country for old men' and 'the 40 year old virgin' are picked because of a trend towards 'old stuff' isn't in any way backed up by either data or common sense when thinking about the movie titles. When you get a graph like this which has such basic failures in stats and common sense, it does make you question the data and rigor behind the rest of the article.
  • IshKebab 4y ago
    Ha yeah you've got to love a graph that looks like random noise until you throw a fancy looking R trend line on it. Most of the data points are outside the confidence interval!
    • gwern 4y ago
      Irrelevant. The confidence interval is for the uncertainty of a parameter, the overall mean/trend: if most of your points fell inside it, that would not be good but extremely bad (you have that much imprecision that your estimate of the overall mean could be anywhere inside the range of observations?). Ideally, your CI would be so narrow that ~0 data points fell within it. (An example: you take a population census of adult heights and find the mean height is 5'7 ± 0.001 inches, say. Very few people will fall within that CI. But that's because it's such a good precise CI due to so much data, not because it's a bad CI.) You seem to be thinking of a predictive interval (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_interval https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_interval), which, however, is not what is being plotted here.
• carapace 4y ago
  "Music consumption" is an ugly turn of phrase. The music industry execs are the ones hurting here. The music industry has done fuck all for music and culture for decades. Now they have painted themselves into a corner with their paint-by-numbers crap and can't even out-compete the pop/commercial stuff from just a few decades ago. Culture is innovating just fine, all over the world. Anyone with talent and heart can gain a following large enough to support them. You just can't package culture up and sell it in a mass market anymore.
• AlexandrB 4y ago
  "AAA" gaming is also headed in a bad, but different, direction. Most money now comes from microtransactions, and the temptation to sell what amounts to an unregulated slot machine with a game attached will be hard to resist for most publishers.
  • sumitviii 4y ago
    In fact, the current CEO of Unity (One of the most popular game engine) said that anyone who's not baking monetization into their games right from the start is "f*king idiot".
• hedora 4y ago
  Read the fine print on the bar chart. They're measuring catalog by trying to figure what the current top 100 streamed songs / albums are. I can only name a song from one top forty band from the last 10 years. (The HU; I have no idea how mongolian throat metal charted in the US; check them out.) However, I regularly stream dozens of albums that came out after 2020. The article seems concerned that pop music is dying. Good riddance? I'd be much more interested in a revenue-based breakdown (inclusive of concerts, merchandise, etc.), and the number of musicians grossing over $10K, 100K, 250K 500K, 1M, etc. per year over time. If the population of musicians earning a middle class income is increasing, that'd be great news, and would be well-worth having fewer break $10M per year. Edit: misspelled "The HU"
  • sime2009 4y ago
    * You mean "The HU", unless there is another international mongolian throating singing metal band out there with a similar name.
  • sk0g 4y ago
    The HU likely charted because of their inclusion in the OST of a game by EA - Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. I was pleasantly surprised to see them start prominently in the opening of that game! Doom Eternal, for the record, also had some Mongolian throat singing from the late vocalist of Tengger Cavalry.
    • itronitron 4y ago
      Presumably they were also easier to get than The Who.
• thepasswordis 4y ago
  I can confirm this anecdotally. My teenage niece only wants to listen to music her grandfather was into. Just terrible, terrible pop music from the 70s.
  • hedora 4y ago
    She might like 89.3 KBCZ. They're based near silicon valley, and play good pop music from the 70's. However, it only comes in on route 9. They have an internet stream.
• psyc 4y ago
  Everyone who is now the age that Ozzy, Slash, and Alanis were when they did the work that made the world pay attention, was born after 9/11. Meaning, in that climate. They were never conscious of a world without the web, Facebook, and YouTube. Rock, as Marilyn Manson noted, is deader than dead. That’s a formidable and fertile tradition going back to the blues that’s just over and done as far as the mainstream is concerned. Forget Metallica- we don’t even have Nickelback and 3 Doors Down anymore. Instead of reaching for your logical fallacies and statistical poindexterism to pseudo-refute the article, maybe have a think about why it might actually be describing an actual phenomenon.
  • pbronez 4y ago
    That’s an interesting point. How would you characterize growing up in the shadow of the Global War on Terror vs growing up in the shadow of the Cold War?
    • mongol 4y ago
      The shadow of the global war on terror has been more intimate. Surveillance, airport security etc. During the cold war the fear was that we would all be blown up by the same thermonuclear bombs in a nuclear holocaust. What you could do with a passenger airplane was not the main problem.
• RicoElectrico 4y ago
  I think the "music is boring" sentiment could be about the lack of shared experiences due to hyper-fragmentation. It's easy to access all genres of music from one app at flat monthly rate. The mainstream, then, is the lowest common denominator much more so than before. Specifically it doesn't need to embrace any rising genres. And there are no longer pronounced subcultures either, if there's no friction e.g. queueing up in front of the record store - that facilitate socializing with like-tasted fans.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    I think you'll also find a sentiment going back decades that "today's music sucks" or "today's popular music sucks." That said, there's certainly a lot of fragmentation even if there's still a big pop culture head too. In TV certainly an HBO or Netflix hit has nothing like the reach of a network hit a couple decades ago. And, of course, watching is less synchronous too.
    • wombatpm 4y ago
      But I believe we are still in universal agreement that Dusco sucks. Always has, always will
      • nunez 4y ago
        then you must hate edm bc that is technically like disco v4
      • ghaff 4y ago
        Disco is certainly the genre from what would normally be my peak music taste acquisition time--college and the period thereafter--that I could never stand and which none of my peers were into either.
        • shrimp_emoji 4y ago
          D: Wtf this stuff is great https://youtu.be/LUGga_VPeTo https://youtu.be/LUGga_VPeTo
• jason-phillips 4y ago
  If this is what you believe then you're simply looking in the wrong places. I firmly believe all the best new art (including music) is digital. Everytime I go looking for it I'm astounded at what I find.
• zitterbewegung 4y ago
  “The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music,” he wrote. “Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.” Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music, Sousa said. “The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/06/the-record-effect/amp https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/06/the-record-eff...
• baristavibes 4y ago
  Has anyone thought of this in relation with age demographics? Declining birth rates in developed countries => shrinking share of younger people => most of the demand is created by older people with lower neuroplasticity => older music stars are more popular
  • hotpotamus 4y ago
    Perhaps then the best investment for music labels would be to fund research into drugs that increase neuroplasticity.
• t-3 4y ago
  > It seems impossible—after all, billions of dollars are spent every year by entertainment corporations in their quest for market dominance. Yet, despite this constant spending spree, almost every week brings a new sign of cultural stagnation. The author fundamentally misunderstands how business works, I think. Lots of money up for grabs in a highly competitive market equals hardcore conservatism from investors (the labels in this case). They will heavily bet on artists following a "winning formula", and buy up the independents that invent new winning formulas. You see the same exact behavior in every creative industry, because the money is relying on past performance to predict success.
  • lordnacho 4y ago
    Exactly right. Everything is boring because reliable is boring. A lot of what we see output by major cultural businesses is basically algorithmic: We need a well-known actor (so one of maybe 50), supported by some other known actors (several of a few hundred), in a story that's a continuation (so a dozen or so franchises), where he beats up a bad guy or two, doesn't die, and doesn't offend anyone. We'll add explosions, magical creatures, and physically impossible stunts, because people like that. We'll fill it up with either well known tropes or ironic spoofs of such for a bit of variety. Songs are similar. Make sure the chorus is good, repeat it a few times, don't make people wait too long before the memorable bit, add a featuring artist who is going to get their own release soon. What we saw in the past was people would try something new, and quite a lot of those things would crash and burn, but now and again you got a really great hit. Part of why I don't consume much mass culture is I see this algo all the time. It's a bit like a foodie who's seen all the ingredients and all the ways to cook them: you stop thinking this new dish is new, and you just want to appreciate a well-made thing, which is also something that fits in this formula, but doesn't require constant innovation, and crucially doesn't require constant consumption. Explore/exploit tends to exploit when there's a lot of money on the line. Same reason drugs are invented by little companies that get bought by the big ones.
  • fuzzfactor 4y ago
    Yup, not just the entertainment business. It takes a different kind of vision to predict things which are orthogonal to past performance. In so many areas where corporate control has been consolidated, there is more complete dominance of bureaucratic hierarchies that just happen to more systematically exclude those rare innovators and creatives who could occasionally punch through to earth-shaking effect. The allowance for true innovation is almost extinct. The difference is it's nearly universal now. People like Thos. Edison and Nikola Tesla wouldn't have a chance today, they already had it difficult in their time where the downward pressure was already palpable, and each came very close to not having a worldwide imact, just like everyone else. Keep in mind their productivity was actually decimated by going against the current like this, so their known milestones & breakthroughs are only the tip of the iceberg compared to what "could have been" in a more supportive cultural environment. And that was then. Even in places which pride themselves in non-traditional corporate behavior, the same anti-creative characteristics have become generally acceptable by comparative example, all up and down the entire chain of command. Especially among the money people, increased greed is the antithesis of increased innovation. If the only thing you want to do with money is make more of the same, that's legitimate especially if you're in debt or something, but that's not how you make more of new other things which could turn out to be more valuable than money. People in general have gradually settled for so much less innovation, in exchange for the very little financial improvement that might result without such a distraction. And creatives who would have had a (already slim) chance in previous decades are having none of it. Woz dropped out when it started getting so bad you couldn't deny it. Plus "star-making machinery" itself became so much more prominent and more like an insiders lottery. The establishment of a mechanism which can "make anyone a star" ended up being needed just to get recognition for the occasional jaw-dropping talent. But once that mechanism is in place, there's almost no talent needed after that.
• AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  Trump and Biden will be 81 and 78 respectively if they choose to run again in 2024 (and assuming they are alive to do so). The average age of congress is the oldest it has ever been. The wealth disparity between those over 54 compared to those under is the highest it has ever been. This fact pattern is visible in many places.
  • hedora 4y ago
    The data is based on number of tracks streamed. Are the bourgeois over-54s paying plebs to watch Harrison Ford movies and listen to crappy music now? Apparently, my misunderstanding of TikTok is much deeper than I previously imagined.
• mmaunder 4y ago
  While the methodology may be flawed, the point remains that we’re in an epidemic of artistic risk mitigation, where pre-sold franchises (sequels, reboots and remakes) combined with name brand artists are gobbling up an inordinate amount of attention that could be fueling new art and artists.
  • coldpie 4y ago
    Maybe the big studios are, though I feel like I've been hearing this complaint for my entire life. But there is so, so, so (so) much creativity happening in spaces like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Discord, etc. Don't write that off just because it's not coming to your local theatre.
    • mmaunder 4y ago
      Not in narrative.
    • hedora 4y ago
      Honestly, the crazy wacky internet stuff tours aggressively (how else can they get paid?), and regularly does make it to the local theater (or at least local bar). The article would have us write off anything that has fewer than a 2-day stint at a local sports arena.
• MrBlueIncognito 4y ago
  I don’t understand what is so surprising about this. The world has been producing high-quality music for decades. The catalog of old music will always grow in size relative to the catalog of new music. Were we expecting the dominance of old music to decline for no reason?
  • svantana 4y ago
    This is it. Music production technology made incredible strides from 1960-1990, as well as new ideas around production that the new equipment enabled. Thus, in that period, pop music sounded "old" very quickly. This all culminated with a computer-driven "we can do anything" style in the late 90's, where people like BT made awful hi-tech productions. Now, with hindsight, we see that 40-year old albums like Thriller still sound amazing, there simply is no new tech that can improve it.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      While I personally don't much care for much new music I hear, I'm hesitant to chalk it up to music being worse rather than I'm somewhat set in my preferences. That said, pre-COVID I had definitely reached the point where I had never heard of the bands playing trade show parties and the like and, when I did hear them, my impression was somewhere between meh and it's noise.
      • svantana 4y ago
        Hold up, I certainly didn't mean to imply that music has gotten worse - only that it stopped getting better (from a purely sonic perspective). There's lots of great new music coming out, but a lot of it has a retro sound anyway.
  • seydor 4y ago
    you could have said the same in the 40s , 50s , 60s etc. A lot of new music was made in reaction to what was considered very formulaic old music.
  • winternett 4y ago
• CommieBobDole 4y ago
  How much of this is due to some fundamental cultural decline, and how much is due to the fact that, starting relatively recently, old music stopped being something that you had to seek out and obtain, and instead became something that's provided almost effortlessly via vast archives and recommendation engines? There is an enormous amount of old music out there, and while only a small percentage is really good, that still amounts to an enormous amount of non-new good music that competes with new music.
  • fullshark 4y ago
    Not even sure it's decline so much as cultural fragmentation. The head pop culture creations (hollywood movies and the top streaming songs) are things with universal awareness (so things that came of age before the internet and mass media was created by a few brokers). The tail has been growing absurdly. Go ask a teenager what they like to watch or listen to, they'll probably mention some youtube/tiktok streamers you've never heard of, and have a tiny cultural footprint.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• squidbeak 4y ago
  I've no idea what it's like to 'consume' music. I've only ever 'listened' to it.
  • hedora 4y ago
    All I know is that analog Vinyl goes down smoother than digital CDs. Anyone that claims they can't tell the difference is full of it.
    • tenebrisalietum 4y ago
      Vinyls are mastered differently. If that same master mix was stamped on a CD and played under the same speakers/dB/amp/conditions as a record player it'll sound the same. Some people do the whole pre-amp and EQ thing and you could do that to a CD player's output too. But nothing beats the big jackets, and there's magic in mixing between turntables that isn't there with any other method.
• volkl48 4y ago
  I don't feel like 18 months and not currently on the Billboard charts is a particularly reasonable cutoff for "new vs old" music. I listen to tons of new music - current, young artists, who've released all or nearly all of their music the past 5-10 years, that's most of my listening. In spite of that, I expect that 70%+ of my listening is over this arbitrary cutoff and would count as "catalog" . Even if I find a new band opening at a show - probably they've been around a couple years and if I dive into them the majority of their music is >18 months. ----- The other aspect is I'd like to see age demographic data for the music stats. Older people have largely only gotten into Spotify and the like more recently. Are young people listening to less new music, or is this just a reflection of now having a wider age range in streaming stats?
  • Closi 4y ago
    Yep, besides, by the definition on the graph their own examples of Kate Bush's "Running up that hill" and Metallica's "Master of Puppets" would not count as "catalog" and counts as 'new music' while The Weekend's "Blinding Lights" counts as 'catalogue' music (i.e. 'old' music in the context of this article). Seems overly simplistic to me! It's also worth accounting for how music is consumed and how this is accounted for - i.e. I assume the shift to streaming platforms would naturally cause reporting of old-listens to increase (i.e. if you buy a CD once in 2015 and listen to it every year, this would be recorded as a single 'non-catalogue' sale, while in the streaming world it would be classified as 'two non-catalogue listens and then five catalogue listens'), so I assume more people streaming would drive more 'recorded' catalogue listens unless this is carefully adjusted for.
  • oneoff786 4y ago
    Yeah I see a lot of complaints but this is the salient one. 18 months is not that old. Even mainstream pop radio stations are still going to be playing a stuff that’s 3 years old regularly. Maybe it’s not brand new but it doesn’t fit their rhetoric later on.
  • yojo 4y ago
    The NYT ram an article a while back on Spotify listening by age; they found that people tend to latch on to what was popular when they were in their early teens.[1] So yes, on the music side this is probably dominated by demographics. Old people listen to old music. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/favorite-songs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/favorite-s...
• dav_Oz 4y ago
  In order to find "new music" the listeners themselves have to put in some effort, be curious and open to the experience. It helps if there is a culture around it, not around "genres" but around discovering music (be it old or new) in general. When I was a kid I always enjoyed walking into my uncle's living room being awestruck by the enormous hi-fi sound and his massive collections of LPs and later CDs. He, at times, offered me to play what I like. Because I had no real clue about music back then, I just picked the ones with "interesting" cover art. I vividly remember picking Bauhaus' The Sky's Gone Out or King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, totally alien music for me but quite the listening experience. This kind of ceremonial setting and the work and care around it, is missing in the days of immediate availability under our impulsive fingertips and with it the disposition to take a good listen with a clear intention, with a beginning and an end. It seems that we are more or less offered to be drowned in music streams making it hard to discern, unable to recover with fresh/curious ears without taking breaks and the possibility to listen more sparingly.
  • nunez 4y ago
    Something like this happened to me when I was at debate camp in high school. I roomed with a super-chill guy who had an enormous (at the time) volume of CDs with him. I told him I was starting to listen to rock music more seriously (something I hid for a long time; I'm Black and Latino and got made fun of by people when I told them I listened to Blink and Taking Back Sunday). When I told him I was listening to KROQ, he said "No. Here's a Bob Dylan CD. Listen to this; give it back to me whenever." Loved it. He then gave me White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground, which is what basically _really_ started me on punk, which I still listen to a ton of today (less Blink; more SNFU, Bad Cop/Bad Cop, and the like) and has kind-of formed a part of my identity (or at least the part that is always ALWAYS seeking new music and doesn't fixate on the music of my college years). Sharing music is a huge part of discovery.
  • fortran77 4y ago
    > In order to find "new music" the listeners themselves have to put in some effort This is a very good point. I listen to a lot of great "new" music, but I do that by listening to oddball radio stations (like KCSM San Mateo), going to music festivals (just got back from the Sicily Jazz Festival in Italy), and "new music" events (like the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music https://cabrillomusic.org/ https://cabrillomusic.org/ ), and I play the piano with amateur groups and in amateur recitals. It takes a lot of work, but all I hear is new music, or fresh takes on old music. But sadly, the audience for this is either people like me (men 55+ and some women) and kids who are music majors. There's little in the middle. I think the average kid who simply followed pop and rock back in the 70s knew more about "music" than the kid today to whom it's just a branding, or a backdrop for a TikTok. They don't listen and pay attention. Pop culture doesn't resolve around music anymore. There's too many other things (games, social media) to worry about.
• vlunkr 4y ago
  This is lame. It spends most of its time going over film and architecture in order to prove that music is stagnating. It’s not a good comparison. Film is stagnating creatively because the budgets are too big to take a risk. The same is not true of music at all. One real point they make is that people are listening to older music. So what? That’s what we do in a culture. People continue to be inspired by the classics because they good. And my last snarky point is that if you think music isn’t good or creative anymore, you just aren’t paying attention. Go take a dive on a streaming service for a while. It’s an amazing time to be alive for music.
  • winternett 4y ago
    Shows like "The Boys" are produced with higher writing and cinematic quality than most of the recent Marvel movies if you ask me... There is always deeply creative stuff out there being made on shoestring budgets. The rewards for those undiscovered creations are dramatically less now because the Internet buries them under algorithms, and far less people are aware of hidden gems within a sea of bad and cheap content.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      According to Wikipedia, The Boys had a budget of $11.2 million per episode in S1. So that's not a great example of a shoestring budget. (Though I agree with your basic point. I'd rather watch The Boys than pretty much any Marvel film.)
      • winternett 4y ago
        There are many facets to the discussion of course, but many examples of movies and shows that were exceptional based on lower budgets. When comparing the budget of an entire season of The Boys to almost any single Marvel film though, the wasted money on individual Marvel Films is far more apparent. Movies like Desperado, Way of the Gun, No Country for Old Men, Fall (by Eric Shaeffer) and many others are far more enjoyable to me than big budget blockbusters, but others may disagree... Those had far lower budgets than many ensemble cast/empty script superhero movies, but preferences are always subjective, so it's not really something I'd really want to argue with anyone about.
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• dougmwne 4y ago
  This has a simple explanation. The creative frontier has moved on to social media and the internet. Looking at box office movies and declaring stagnation is like looking at the music industry minus MTV in the 80’s.
• 32121386 4y ago
  The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly. It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.
• Mixtape 4y ago
  From a sales-only perspective, this article makes sense, but the very obvious influence of TikTok seems noticeably absent from the analysis. TikTok, by nature of its scale, has completely changed how the music industry works. If you want to prove this, check the top 40 chart of your favorite music streaming service or listen to your local top 40 station for a bit. Both of these were originally designed to provide a good metric on what songs people enjoy listening to from beginning to end. However, they're now almost entirely populated with songs made popular by 30 seconds to a minute of their content rather than the entire work. TikTok has created a fundamental shift in the metrics by which people collectively evaluate music's popularity. Forty years ago, what was most "safe" for radio (in the sense that it was palatable enough for most people) was what got played. Now, the shareability of even a single segment of a song is its entry point into the feedback loop of exposure that creates viral hits. Whether this is a good or bad thing is honestly subjective (and likely polarizing to some) but the article's failure to recognize it feels significant. In a system where the extent to which people get bored of listening to a song in its entirety is no longer a concern, people are revisiting old releases and finding that they perform extremely well under the current metrics. That's why we have Kate Bush and Metallica in the top 40. Their songs performed well under the previous system before fading into irrelevance, and they just happen to perform well under this new system as well. Stranger Things may have given them the push they needed to re-enter the public conscience, but what followed was the same process that would have happened if their music was released, say, ten years ago rather than 40. Age itself is secondary when shareability is king. Personally, I'm of the belief that this will stabilize in the long term if short-form shareability remains the dominant metric of a song's popularity. In the same way that radio stations stop playing songs as people get bored of them, so too do older songs fade from popularity on TikTok as they begin to become tiresome to enough people. Combined with the fact that this happens at an extremely fast pace and that the amount of legacy pop music is finite, this means that TikTok users are bound to run out of sufficiently popular legacy content to use eventually.
• MrBlueIncognito 4y ago
  The article may have an interesting premise, however the only statistics we are offered in support of the author’s claim is two years’ worth of data (2021 and 2022). What about the more long-term trends? We might be missing the big picture for short-term cyclical trends. Also, the data for 2022 is, without doubt, incomplete.
• mellosouls 4y ago
  Is it just me, or are posts moaning about the quality of contemporary music not as good or original as old-school articles moaning about it?
  • riebschlager 4y ago
    For sure. Gimme some good ol' "Pop Punk isn't Actually Punk" articles. Now THAT was some great music culture criticism. Kids these days....
• oblak 4y ago
  This is the second time this guy's blog has been featured here in a week. His articles are borderline trolling to for old guys. I am not even young myself. "They don't make anything new :(". No, bruh. It's you
  • hamandcheese 4y ago
    I’m a younger guy, but the sentiment of the article does ring true to me. There is an overwhelming amount of regurgitation, at least within the realm of popular culture.
    • oblak 4y ago
      Time to put your big boy pants and see the real world. Ta ta taaa. It's pop culture. Regurgitation is the very essence of it.
      • hamandcheese 4y ago
        I’m not sure you are understanding the point of the article. It’s not a matter of if there is good art to be found if you go looking, it’s about whether modern society is undergoing a cultural decline.
• BurningFrog 4y ago
  I have a theory around this. Short version: Music is no longer the center of popular culture. Longer version: the 60s/70s/80s saw a technical revolution in producing and distributing music. Each year, new and even more amazing things were possible, and a steady stream of geniuses came in and produced groundbreaking masterpieces using the new tech. It changed the world, and the world loved it. But now, that's all pretty much done, and the exciting things are happening elsewhere. You can see similar cycles earlier in history when novels or films were where new amazing things constantly captured the world's imagination. What's the current "thing"? Computer games, internet stuff, maybe streaming TV.
  • mongol 4y ago
    Short clips as TikTok
    • est31 4y ago
      Which ironically contain music. Often it's TikTok specific remixes of famous older songs. But does that mean that culture still revolves around music?
    • winternett 4y ago
      Short clips have trivialized the value of music. If you go on TikTok, the same songs rotate very very frequently because TikTok pre-designates what trends. Only a handful of music artists are added at a time to the cue, and everything else (the independent (and often far more desirable/creative/undiscovered music) often languishes with little to no views in virtual storage there. TikTok is a smokescreen for major music label influence based on my observation, and boy is it tediously repetitive, even when you click the "I don't want to see this again" button.
  • dougmwne 4y ago
    Vr. AI assisted art.
  • Tade0 4y ago
    I consider the use of auto-tune in Cher's "Believe"(1998) the very last example of technological innovation in music.
• art4ur 4y ago
  We're no longer only fed music by the top 40. That's not a bad thing. We're in a musical renaissance.
  • matwood 4y ago
    We’re in a content renaissance. We have more access to more content at completely unsustainable prices.
• jSully24 4y ago
  If you’re looking to discover some up and coming bands from across many genres check out https://mileofmusic.com/ https://mileofmusic.com/ a crazy good festival in northern WI (Appleton). Free outside of beer, food, and the merch you pick up to support these bands. They have a channel on Spotify of each year’s 150 artists, all doing strictly original music. (I’m one of “older ones”)
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• stevenjgarner 4y ago
  I would posit that the "numbers on music consumption" are incorrect, and that Billboard, iTunes, Spotify, radio, television etc have no connection with "the whole creative culture". They are by their very construct focused on "old songs" and an old way of thinking about art. I am a musician and deeply grounded in virtually every genre of music. Not a day goes by that I am not blown away at some no-name musician on YouTube or other medium - at how they have extended the whole performance capability of their instrument(s) and of the creative process itself. Keep music LIVE!!
  • hedora 4y ago
    I'm a big fan of Tidal's recommendations. It somehow thought that I'd like Rush a few days ago (not wrong) and started playing popular 70's music. My initial reaction was "I didn't even know that it could do that!" Usually, it's people that are one step past YouTube track, and actually have an album out.
• l5870uoo9y 4y ago
  Besides entertainment cooperations and tech algorithms putting newer artists at a disadvantage, I reckon demographics also plays a part. Post WW2 generation has established cultural preferences.
• nemo44x 4y ago
  The haircut known as “The Mullet” is making a comeback. This is all you need to know about a culture that is out of ideas and is desperately looking backwards for anything that isn’t today, but is too timid and soaked in irony to sincerely attempt something novel. Something real. I don’t know but I think something broke during the financial crisis that hasn’t mended yet and it has led to stagnation.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  A few months ago, I posted a comment on an idea that I sent in to Apple[0]. I also mentioned how pessimistic I was, that anything like it would happen, because, even if they did, they'd poison it with commercialism, and wreck it. It's like when a favorite local food treat is brought out by a major conglomeration. Everyone is thrilled, because their local fave will now be going national. Except that the conglomerate "waters down" the treat. They may do some stuff to help with preservation and transport, but the stuff that kills the product, is the "taste adjustment." Maybe they reduce the spiciness, or substitute a cheaper ingredient, or one supplied by a crony company. Soon, absolutely no one likes it; including the folks that invented it, and the product dies. I see that happening in many creative industries. It's also happening in the tech industry. As megacorps borg smaller companies, they start bowdlerizing the work. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30996691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30996691
• seydor 4y ago
  There's a time for everything. Cinema was so '60s , the glamour, the star system, music was so '80s-90s, we ll save the world with music. That's old history now, the human reward systems have adapted. Nowadays it's probably shifting to a combination of porn/sex addiction sprinkled with hallucinogenics, as predicted by Aldous Huxley
• pbronez 4y ago
  This is overwrought. It’s demographics weighting the population statistics. Movies star old people? Old billboard hits are more popular than new ones? DUH. That is boomer culture. Boomers have the numbers - dollars and bodies. They watch movies with their heros from yesteryear. They keep listening to the bands they discovered when they were young. So would anybody! To the extent that this turns into a population level phenomenon, it’s just market share. Yeah, the gereotocracy is a problem. Yes, the overall picture DOES look stagnant. But it’s not like there’s zero fresh ideas. Young people are doing it in new places which aren’t counted in the old metrics. Also, older folks can be creative too. Age is a state of mind, stagnation is a habit. I know plenty of folks who are hitting retirement age but are still interested in new media, new technology, new ideas. So I think the culture is ok. There’s just a lot of money in nostalgia for an abnormally big generation. As the boomers go, so goes the nation. The real question is: what happens when they’re gone? 10 years out they’ll be tired. 20 years out they’ll be over it. 30 years out, they’ll be gone. Then we‘ll have a group of long-suppressed folks taking charge. Their ages will be more uniformly distributed. What impact will that have? Will they best people rise regardless of age? Will it be harder to achieve a social consensus? Will new ideas flourish? Will assumed competencies be lost? I don’t know.
• rossdavidh 4y ago
  Possible explanations: 1) our average age is older, so of course we have older actors, music, etc. People's tastes are more malleable in adolescence (usually), and adolescents are a smaller percentage of the population 2) the amount of recorded back catalog to listen to is larger 3) the percentage of music listening which is pre-20th century (mostly classical) is actually falling compared to 50 years ago, so it's not clear that we listen to less old music, we may just be listening to newer old music than Bach, Haydn, Mozart, etc.
• analog31 4y ago
  I'm reading Gioia's history of jazz right now, haven't gotten past the swing era. But one impression I've already made is that there was a period of time when someone could aspire to a modest but decent enough middle class life as a musician. I think that I grew up at roughly the tail end of that era. As for trends in the movies, I'm not sure they're related.
• bayareabadboy 4y ago
  Music industry is still recovering from lil peep’s untimely expiration. Things will bounce back. In the meantime, show some respect, please.
• pimlottc 4y ago
  I understand the point the author is trying to make but some of it unnecessarily mean-spirited and ageist. I haven't seen it yet, but by all reports, the new Top Gun movie was very well received. And no one has even seen the new Indiana Jones film yet, so is the AARP dig really necessary? There are better ways to make your point about recycled content and franchises than saying "lol, these actors are old".
• wikitopian 4y ago
  Every medium of expression has a finite band of creative potentialities which are pioneered and explored, then exhausted. Expecting new artists to achieve what the Rolling Stones achieved with their music is as asinine as expecting me to achieve as much as Lewis and Clark when I go on a hike. There are new media of creative expression to explore, if you know where to look. Not that originality for it's own sake is intrinsically good.
• einpoklum 4y ago
  > Even arts and entertainment businesses require constant infusions of fresh talent Who cares about art and entertainment _businesses_? We care about artists and to some extent entertainers. > It seems impossible —after all, billions of dollars are spent every year by entertainment corporations in their quest for market dominance. Yet, despite this constant spending spree, almost every week brings a new sign of cultural stagnation. The author seems to conflate money expenditure with cultural activity, in line with the conflation of business and art.
• dieselgate 4y ago
  The author has some great points here and it’s interesting to see parallels drawn between both music and movie/film/streaming genres. I was a radio dj in college and the only real rule (aside from legal stuff etc) was we could play an artist only once per quarter - the result for me was just playing the newest music that was coming into the studio. It’s quite appropriate imo to identify music streaming as kind of a common denominator for music age - people just play what they’re familiar with. I love music and a big big part of this is the discovery process; the radio is great for discovery but it’s ephemeral - and a streaming or listening service such as spotify is a great way to expand on those leads. No firm opinions here, it just seems like more people listening more to older music makes sense and is kind of a weighted average. The “moving picture” medium is a different thing, maybe..
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• jeroenhd 4y ago
  How silly: using last century's centralised, radio-based, publisher-controlled popularity index to measure anything after the widespread adoption of the internet. Nobody cares about the top 100 anymore because there are too many possible source to run into any songs that'll get listened to enough to form a generic top 100. Music has both specialised and generified over the years. The "pop" numbers are all the same, as they have been for the last 70 or 80 years now. Pop music isn't produced out of a desire to make art, it's produced to sell as many copies to as many people in as many countries as possible. Engineered lyrics are exchanged between agencies and used and reused until an artist makes a breakthrough. It's brute forcing culture to make a profit. That's not a recent thing either. Listen to older songs and you'll find that a lot of it is safe, generic, uninteresting stuff, even from the big bands. We've filtered down about 100 years of music to the stuff that's considered good, but back in the day there was a lot of crap that was in the top of the charts for a single year and then disappeared. Today, we have a choice. For pennies we can listen to any type of music by bands we've never heard of all day long. Good luck finding a Mongolian throat singing metal band in 1980 if that's the music you're interested in. Good luck finding anything made by someone who's in it for the art if you're in a small town with a small record shop before the internet came along. The top 100 is no longer centralised by publishers advertising to radio stations. They're still trying, desperately even, to keep this business model going, but by these measurements, it's just not working. You can say that "people don't know how to make music anymore" but you'll have to back this up with actual statistics, not some useless measurement of corporately engineered preferences. Count the total amount of songs you can get your hands on instead. I wouldn't be surprised to find that more music gets added to Spotify in a month than got made available in an 80s record store over an entire year! And you know what? I don't see the problem with liking older music. We've got almost a century of crisply recorded music available to us right now. You can find enough music to develop and expand your musical preference for a lifetime even if no new music gets published ever again. People will always make music and these days that involves more remixing and more derived work, not because we don't know how to do it, but because we have the tools available to us.
• plaguepilled 4y ago
  The "new" numbers? This is new? Wat? Yes, many people would probably like a little more experimental music in the public sphere, no, we probably won't get that, but also this is sort of established knowledge. It would have been nice if the author spent less time talking about the trend and more time on their suggested next steps. Or, doing better data analysis than 'the number of times "old" is in movie titles went up'. Sooking about a supposed societal collapse correlated with bad music is annoying, questionable in a statistical sense, and unhelpful in a practical sense.
• winternett 4y ago
  many people have been innovating the hell out of music... I also work hard to innovate, You just rarely ever see them and I on the Internet, because there is a paywall around independent music... Not just for listeners, it's there for artists as well. Independent musicians now are required to pay the same promotional rates as everyone else for social media boosting, requiring even unprofitable musicians to pay the same rates as major artists to promote their music online. The issue here seems like the results of the stranglehold that big interests has had on social media and music outlet (Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music) promotion for years. Major artists now have views in the millions showing on many of their YouTube videos, but most independent labels (like mine) struggle to get past 1,000 and even 100 views every day for new releases because of the new promotional economy. This is because platforms sit back and do nothing for independent musicians promotion-wise. They've created systems where payola is literally the glass wall to being ever heard to musicians and bands... You can't find and see music now unless you already know about the artists, and artists can't reach listeners unless they pay to boos visibility on each social post they make (at a dramatic financial loss compared to the income the streams make). Many labels have been innovating the hell out of stagnant-growth music genres for years... But it's in their interest of what little profit is made for dominant music companies to carefully limit the exposure of that new music to dedicated listeners in order to reduce the threat to their shrinking (but often "first in line to the feeding table" position). Big artists have always paid for promotion to an extent, but being featured is so costly, many big artists are doing controversial and embarrassing things on social media just to lower their overall promo costs by staying viral in the news. The entire music industry regularly suffers from the scent of desperation now, because everyone needs to pay to be under the spotlight, while the entities that make the most money have nothing to do with creating and supporting the music or even the industry ultimately... Money is being siphoned out of the music economy (and never reinvested back into it) regularly. Many "potential hit" musicians work day jobs and do other things for money to supplement their art, that ritually keeps them from innovating as much as they used to when a hit album would normally provide a better life... Now kids being "signed" off of a TikTok viral song literally and totally get ripped off when they are discovered, and likely paid below 10% of the money their song generates overall for use... Back in the day it was TLC getting ripped off, now it's every artist in a way, even the prominent ones, that are making fractions off of the real money that their music generates, while platforms like TikTok and Instagram post profits in the Billions year after year. The stats just aren't right, too many artists are lying about their success (earnings), and the music that makes it to your ears is carefully restricted and controlled unless artists pay a lot of money to promote their work. The problems with music industry success and innovation have festered since Social Media started charging for post promotion... If you want to hear innovative music, you have to dig deep and go through a lot of not so great stuff to find the real artists making music. I search for, collect, and share undiscovered (and under promoted) music from artists I find exceptional all the time, because I can't enjoy life without exceptional music around me. The best stuff these days have views under 10-20k on YouTube if you ask me. Our monthly listeners have sat under 50... (Not 50k... F*ckin 50) listeners for over 4 years now... The entry point for promoting on Spotify charges artists a minimum of $250, and that's just for one platform of many that an artist needs to promote for a chance to be heard (with little money returned even if it works). We only have had under about ~400 subscribers on YouTube for over 10 years, these numbers are crazy considering how long and hard we've worked on our music over that time... While a lot of people would say that may reflect the quality of music, literally on YouTube you know damn well that even fart reaction videos make it regularly into the 1 Million view +categories on YouTube all the time, something is deeply broken. Independent music is being crushed by the Major Industry... Has not and will not stop ppl like me though. For proper context, our music and collection of tunes is at RuffAndTuffRecordings.Com (Sorry if this looks like an angry rant, I'm not angry and/or defeated, it's just a result of being overworked and underpaid for ages)
• snet0 4y ago
  This might be entirely missing the point, but doesn't simply the production of new music, assuming it has any listeners at all, dilute the listenership of old music? If there's new music released in year N, and it has some share of the listenership, all music from 0->N-1 will have decreased listenership. Right?
• jtode 4y ago
  I remember feeling very excited about Spotify at one point - I figured there would be ways to get exposed to new and interesting artists. As it turns out, their algorithms, at the paid behest of those reliable old villains, the majors, are dead certain that what I want is the same fifty songs, over and over, that I've been hearing on FM radio for literally my entire life. Billy Bragg said it decades ago: capitalism is killing music.
• jp57 4y ago
  His conclusion seems like measurement bias. Cloud-based streaming now means we can measure what people listen to, rather than only what they buy. Back in the days of LPs and CDs, it was natural that people only purchased new recordings, but most people maintained at least a small collection of favorites, often years old, that they listened to over and over. Likewise for movies and TV: TV broadcasts and movie theaters presented new works, only new works, but a favorite movie could be purchased once and watched as many times as needed. Or it could be rented. Now that we can measure all media consumption, we're discovering that people like to listen to their favorites over and over, and somehow concluding that's artistic stagnation.
  • smugma 4y ago
    This also explains why the value of catalogs has gone through the roof. This is evident by the huge valuations of the majors eg Universal going public, indie publishers such as Reservoir and Hipgnosis, and artist and writer catalogs eg Queen, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Paul Simon, etc. A few times a year I will read about a writer/artist catalog getting sold for $100M. Except for maybe a death like Whitney or MJ, that never happened 10 years ago.
    • jamiek88 4y ago
      Is this the long tail we heard so much about?
      • smugma 4y ago
        It’s kind of the opposite of that. Almost all of the value in music comes at the “head”. Something like 80% of the value is in the top 100K tracks and 95%+ in the top 1M. 100K tracks are added each week but most don’t have any commercial value. Even if you are modestly successful with say, 1M plays, that’s not enough to live on for very long (about $10,000, split by however many people in the band, publishing costs, etc.).
  • mynegation 4y ago
    That is, IMO, is spot on and I cannot upvote you enough. In addition to that it is a question of accessibility. In the old times, let’s say in the 90s you discovered an obscure piece of music from 70s. Good luck going to a CD or vinyl store and digging it up. Now the whole discography of that artist is on your fingertips.
• VictorPath 4y ago
  90% of music market share in the US belongs to three companies. Warner Music has a 12.1% market share. Sony has a 23.4% market share. Universal has a 54.5% market share. Over half the market share of music in the country is from one company. It's a long way from magazines like Broadside and Sing Out and independent record labels like Folkways and Vanguard. Even songs on major record labels were influenced by this milieu. Most songs today are a corporate product packaged for consumers. The article says people seem to prefer music made before this all happened. The grunge/alternative scene that was commodified in the early 1990s is the last independent music scene that was mainstreamed that I can think of. Can't think of anything else - Reggaeton or a variety of other things never really became mainstream.
• hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  One of the things that was most interesting to me was the linked Ringer article that shows the advancing age of leading stars in movies: https://www.theringer.com/movies/2022/6/27/23181232/old-actors-aging-tom-cruise-top-gun-maverick https://www.theringer.com/movies/2022/6/27/23181232/old-acto... I think this is pretty fascinating, and I think points to what I call "The age of data optimization". That is, starting in the early 00s, pretty much all businesses everywhere started to have much more actionable data on consumer trends and preferences, primarily due to the Internet. This culture of "neverending analytic optimization" is by its very nature risk averse - these data algorithms don't deal that well with a completely "new" input, like a young, untrusted actor. So, instead, these algorithms are fundamentally biased towards "what worked before", meaning actors that were able to come of age before all this data analysis started. And to be clear, I'm not saying movie studios have a single algorithm that they run that says "pick me a leading actor". But major studios have all gotten much more "data driven" in general in the past 25 years', where before that time movie making was much more of an "artistic" and personality-driven affair.
  • CSSer 4y ago
    This seemingly applies to virtually everything now too. It makes me wonder how direct the connection is between this phenomenon and young people feeling like the system is rigged against them. I don’t necessarily think it’s new or unique to society but it does seem exacerbated because of this.
  • m3047 4y ago
    I'm thinking Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
• lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  Meh. What we are seeing is the fall of "the" mass market. Starting with Elvis, and going nuclear with Arnie, there were literal billions of dollars poured into promoting particular star actors / singers / entertainers. We can all name them because we all grew up with newspapers radio TV and cinema pouring them into our brains. These stars were acceptable. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes mediocre, but they could appeal to at least one or two standard deviations of paying customers. They were the tomato and cheese pizzas of the global entertainment industry. And we ate them in billions of tiny portions, even globally. The way it works is if the film succeeds in making its money back more money goes to that star to promote the next film. Then something like the internet / youtube / social media happens. Suddenly I can get spaghetti bolognese or fish and chips and someone else can go for a light omelette. And the money still works the same way - but on much smaller scales. Spag bol will keep growing, never reaching the heights of previous generations but plenty good enough. But the pizza distribution network still exists. It just has no more pizza - every young star is really spag bol or omelette- the venn diagram of who previously had tasted pizza will now have two smaller circles - spag and omelette. And it's not worth throwing pizza levels of distribution money at either spag or omelette. So the money has to keep throwing it at the aging pizza. One day even the pizza will retire or die and then we will look back on a time when everyone had seen one movie of tv show.
• TekMol 4y ago
  This article made me type "most popular albums 2022" into Google. Funny: When you click on the albums on the top of the page, there always is a YouTube link that brings you to music.youtube.com where you can listen to the whole album without any fuzz. Why would anyond still buy this music if you can listen to it for free? So far, I did not like any of the albums though...
• processing 4y ago
• zuminator 4y ago
  Traditional top music charts didn't exclusively show "music" per se. They would list comedy and spoken word albums as well if they sold enough to be on the main chart. Music was just the lion's share of prerecorded auditory entertainment. Fast forward to today and the situation has changed. Instead of listening to traditional radio, a person can get audiovisual stimulation from TikTok. TikTok allows people to remix the sound and/or visual component from other people's clips into your own. So there can be thousands of people making TikTok content from the same exact music clip. But, as before, it's not necessarily "music" that counts. People will remix audio from movies, old cartoons, comedy bits, random spoken excerpts, non-charting independent music, etc. However, unlike Richard Pryor comedy albums, these little clips aren't showing up on Gioia's traditional chart sources. Is prerecorded auditory entertainment getting less creative or is it just less bounded by what we traditionally think of as music? Frankly I doubt lack of creativity is even a problem. Quite the opposite. The very fact that old stuff is still popular shows that people don't care if music is "creative" or not. If the traditional mainstream music industry is searching for the next big thing to revive sales, an exciting new genre, I don't think it's going to happen. More "creative" buggy whips isn't the issue.
• yodon 4y ago
  The period between about 1970 (when the huge generation of Baby Boomers started buying records in fantastic numbers) and 1995 (when the first web browser started making large scale piracy of intellectual property trivial) was the only 25 year period in the history of the world when large numbers of artists managed to get fantastically wealthy. Looking back through the entirety of recorded history, that had never happened before, and it likely never will again. More artists became fantastically wealthy in those 25 years than in the previous 2000 years. It looks very likely that, with the invention of the web browser, we're back to historical norms. This article has lots of data backing up that return to the mean. Being a musician or actor is still a good thing, but it's once again not a very probable way of getting incredibly rich, just as it has been, on average, for the past 2000 years.
• tomdell 4y ago
  "The largest investments in music are the acquisition of old publishing catalogs, while almost nothing is spent developing new artists." While music companies are certainly spending big on old publishing catalogs, the second statement here is fact-free. Investment in new artists still represents a very substantial portion of the big three record labels' budgets, and is very much still viewed by execs as the most important part of the business. I'd like to add that the most significant innovations in popular music have not been a result of record label investment but rather of grassroots creative work by individual people and communities, largely unpaid (and thanks to technological innovations and new instruments more than anything the labels themselves do) - the record labels just pick people out of a preexisting music culture and turn them into stars and brands. The labels are ultimately not the driving force behind musical innovation, so this article comes across as unnecessarily alarmist.
• pbuzbee 4y ago
  I noticed that many artists that I like put out albums in 2021, but far fewer have put out albums in 2022, even accounting for the year only being half over. I think this is partially due to the pandemic: with artists unable to tour, many took the time to release new music. That music largely came out in 2021. Now in 2022 they are touring to promote the new music rather than releasing new content. (just an anecdotal hypothesis, no data)
• rapht 4y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree. I may add one thing though: it's probable that it is not only measurement bias for a simple reason: demographics. The generations that currently are the most numerous and have the highest purchasing power are baby-boomers and gen-Xers. That same generation witnessed the birth of pop-rock music as we know it and was the first to consume music en-masse. To a certain extent, it's no wonder that those 'old' (i.e. 60s-80s) recordings are those that get the most listened to. This is of course also true for movies and actors, for the very same reason: taste is widely known to be mostly formed by the time you're 25.
• quattrofan 4y ago