on 'is old music killing new music?'
taking a closer look at Ted Gioia's 'Is Old Music Killing New Music?'
A friend sent me Ted Gioia’s piece from last week, Is Old Music Killing New Music?’ knowing that I have a lot of thoughts on the state of the music industry, listening trends, and the cultural relevance of music today. And sure enough, my friend was right – Gioia’s piece made me think quite a bit, and I did have a number of reactions.
The piece has been on my mind since, and it centers around data from the MRC Data report1 that shows people listened to less new music in 2021 than the year prior2, and all the growth in listening can be attributed to older music, released >18 months ago, called Catalog music.
Catalog is up, new is down, and so the question arises: is old music killing new music? I’m going to go through a few points: why I believe Catalog Consumption surged, a few examples cited in Gioia’s piece that I’d argue have confounding variables, and the effect the ecosystem trends have on musicians today. And finally, why I think new music listening declined in 2021, and why it’s not indicative of old music killing it.
The Surge in Catalog Consumption in 2021
Setting aside Current music’s slip for a moment, Catalog music soared in 2021 – so what’s behind this 20% YoY growth? A few things:
🧑🦳 Boomers Have Entered the Chat
As with most consumer technology shifts, the early adopters tend to be young, and as things become mainstream, older generations join to complete the transition. Spotify and other streaming services are seeing this demographic shift, and with an older generation becoming a growing percentage of the user base, it stands to reason that their tastes will be reflected in music consumption and bump the Catalog numbers up.
🧮 Calculating Consumption
In the pre-streaming days, we calculated music’s popularity by album sales, which was our best sense of what people were listening to. Remember that first album you bought that you couldn’t get enough of? Nas’s Illmatic was that album for me: I’d never skip a track, play it again as soon as the record finished, and I’ve now probably heard it hundreds of times. I also bought Crazytown’s The Gift of Game, and despite being really into Butterfly – in my defense, I was in 7th grade – the dozen other rap-rock tracks didn’t get much play, and the CD fell out of rotation quickly.
In the physical media world, both albums are counted as one sale. With streaming, every time a single track is played, it goes into the consumption calculation - which is great! However, it also means it’s difficult to really look at historical trends pre-streaming and compare them apples to apples. As streaming becomes by far the largest form of music consumption, classic records that get frequent play will be more fairly attributed to consumption, whereas in a physical media era they weren’t.
Confounding Variables
Gioia offers a few reasons as evidence of the waning interest in new music: Catalog sales of old artists, Grammy viewership decline, and increased interest in vinyl over CDs. While these trends are interesting and clearly happening, I don’t think they portend the demise of new music.
🧾 The Big Business of Older Musicians’ Catalogs
“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.).” -Ted Gioia, Is Old Music Killing New Music?
There’s been a run on back catalogs over the last few years, and it’s been fascinating to see whose catalogs are selling (old musicians) and for how much (often 100s of millions). Michael Jackson famously bought the Beatles catalog (along with other artists’ tracks) for $47m in 1985, then flipped 50% of it for $100m in 1995 and his estate sold the other half for $750m in 2016.
Catalogs are big business, and we’re seeing most sales coming from older or already deceased musicians, so this must be indicative of a lack of interest in the catalogs of current musicians, right? Well, not exactly, and for two reasons: the structure of the music industry in the last 20 years is different than it was in the decades before, and the value in owning a complete set.
Many top artists today signed deals that gave labels their masters and catalog rights, and aren’t in the same boat as a Springsteen, Dylan, or Paul Simon – they can’t sell what they don’t own. Further, even an active artist who owns their catalog (take Jay-Z, for instance), that’s their life’s work, so why sell it now? Their tracks could appear in any commercial for any product, and while they’d see a lump sum payday, they’d lose control of their life’s work. Besides their own deep emotional connection, most artists likely imagine their catalog will only appreciate in value over time.
From a buyer’s perspective, the appeal of a current artist’s catalog, in the rare instance that it is for sale, is murky. There’s value in being a completionist: when you buy Bowie’s catalog, you know you’re getting the complete set. With older living musicians, it’s likely you’ll get all of Dylan or Springsteen’s most valuable work. Even if you could, buying a current artist’s catalog wouldn’t make nearly as much sense – paying up for Billie Eilish’s catalog in 2022 would be making a bet that the music will continue to hold value over decades, which is a huge uncertainty when compared to music that’s held up for decades. Besides that, you wouldn’t even own her full catalog as she releases new music – not to mention that depending on the terms, a current artist could go the Taylor Swift route, re-record her old albums, and deflate your catalog value.
Catalogs of old artists are more likely to be for sale and on the whole tend to be more valuable, but this isn’t particularly new, and it’s not a fair comparison to use the disparity as evidence of declining interest in new music.
🏆 The Grammy Awards Declining Viewership
“The declining TV audience for the Grammy show underscores this shift. In 2021, viewership for the Grammy Awards collapsed 53% from the previous year—from 18.7 million to 8.8 million. It was the least-watched Grammy broadcast of all time.”
The Grammys viewership has fallen off a cliff, and the article shows a downhill curve of viewership cut in half (40m to 18.7m) from 2012 to 2020, and then in half again in 2021 to 8.8m. This would seem to be evidence that people aren’t interested in new music, right? Well, not exactly – what this fails to account for is the massive shift in TV viewing behaviors, and the waning interest in awards shows overall.
In comparison with other award shows, there’s nothing exceptional about the trend of Grammy viewership to suggest this is anything more than shifting viewing habits3.
What’s more, the Grammys have struggled with critiques of being out of touch for years – The Weeknd’s After Hours, despite being one of the biggest albums of 2020, was curiously snubbed from nominations when he elected to perform at the Super Bowl after allegedly receiving an ultimatum, leading him to cease submitting his music for consideration4. Drake followed suit, withdrawing from nominations5, and Tyler, the Creator made clear his feelings towards the awards and committee when he lamented:
“It sucks that whenever we — and I mean guys that look like me — do anything that's genre-bending or that's anything they always put it in a rap or urban category. I don't like that 'urban' word — it's just a politically correct way to say the n-word to me.”6 -Tyler, the Creator
The Grammys have been criticized for years for being out of touch. While they’ve made attempts to course correct, using them as a proxy for cultural relevancy and their viewership as indicative of new music’s impact doesn’t capture the full story.
💿 CDs vs vinyl
“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.”
Growing up, CDs felt magical to me: I could skip to individual tracks, they had cool album art, and CDs made music portable and opened up on-demand listening on the go. Napster, mp3s, and streaming came along, and now CDs are more or less a dying format.
Looking at this chart, it’s pretty clear that CDs didn’t lose this battle to vinyl, they lost to streaming7 – all those benefits that CDs conferred (minus album art, sadly), streaming does better, cheaper, and completely on-demand.
The rise of vinyl isn’t the death knell of CDs, but rather, I believe it’s fulfilling a different need for a subset of music fans: a physical embodiment of their music taste. Records aren’t portable, they’re delicate, and are frankly a bit inconvenient when you need to flip them over and switch sides or records every 15 minutes. But they come with great album art and liner notes, and they bring a pang of nostalgia when the vinyl pops as you start one up. The same way bibliophiles love their bookshelves as a tangible representation of their taste, so too do vinyl collectors love their record collections.
CD sales would likely be cratering regardless of vinyl’s rise, they were for years. I’d posit that the growing appeal of vinyl isn’t a technological advantage over CDs, it’s the fulfillment of a different need than streaming can provide.
Making New Music Today
In his piece, Gioia observes today’s landscape from the musician’s perspective and lays out two trends that he suggests have had sweeping negative impacts on musicians: listeners not clustering around the top 200 like they used to and a litigious environment following the Blurred Lines lawsuit cultivating an atmosphere of fear in musicians trying to make music today.
🧑🎤 The Outlook for Working Musicians
“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… Just consider these facts: the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It was twice that rate just three years ago.”
I believe the exact opposite is true: there’s never been a better time to be a musician. Twenty years ago, if you started a band or were a producer or rapper, you faced two major hurdles: the cost of recording and distribution. Most laptops today are powerful enough and software tools are cheap enough that with a mic, preamp, and instruments (physical or virtual), people are recording music at home for a fraction of the cost. What’s more, distribution no longer means hoping for the lottery ticket of being signed to a major label or hawking CDs individually at shows: today, a bedroom artist can share their work immediately on Spotify, Soundcloud, or TikTok.
While it’s true that music is crowded, with 60,000 tracks uploaded to Spotify every day, it’s much better than it was 20 years ago. The fact that the 200 most popular tracks account for a dwindling percentage of total streams is a good thing for working musicians – the Drakes, Weeknds, and Adeles of the world are doing just fine, but the increased visibility and distribution of listenership is a positive thing for most musicians. Chance the Rapper, Thundercat, and Russ are all examples of artists who have been able to attain incredible success, in some instances pulling in $100k a week from streaming while staying independent8.
Of course, this doesn’t happen for everyone and the system is far from perfect, but it’s a lot better than it was before - at least they have a fighting chance today.
🎼 Copyright Lawsuits Stifling Musicians
“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”
It’s been over a decade since I worked in the music industry, but this feels like a stretch. A&R and label reps who typically listen to demos aren’t the ones writing the songs, and if someone is still mailing a demo to a label in 2022, it’s being returned unopened because no one’s listening to music on physical media anymore.
“When a new song overcomes these obstacles and actually becomes a hit, the risk of copyright lawsuits is greater than ever before. The risks have increased enormously since the ‘Blurred Lines’ jury decision of 2015”
I haven’t personally heard this fear expressed from musicians today, and the Blurred Lines case doesn’t stand out to me as such a landmark ruling. In 1999, The Verve famously had to give up all songwriting and publishing royalties for Bitter Sweet Symphony to the Rolling Stones and their manager Allen Klein's record company ABKCO, and this was after they’d reached an agreement with the label who owned the recording they borrowed9. Before that, Vanilla Ice used the riff (minus one note) from Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure,” and they were subsequently added as songwriters to the track.
Sampling and copyright have been issues in music for decades, and if anything, artists today appear more willing to sample and interpolate than ever – just look at the liner notes for a Kanye, Drake, or Weeknd album. Services like Splice, where artists can upload vocal packs and samples, have created further opportunities for producers to sample and artists to monetize – Fousheé’s Deep End came about from a vocal pack, a producer’s version gaining steam, and then Fousheé’s building a full track around it that today has over 400m streams10.
New technologies in web3 and Blockchain also have interesting implications for music. We’ve already seen projects that allow fans to more directly invest in artists and share revenues, as seen with Royal’s launch with Nas11. These new technologies can also streamline attribution and compensation, providing further artist revenue streams and creative opportunities, and clears some of the red tape for artists who collaborate with and sample each other.
Independent artists’ liberal use of samples and interpolations has become its own art form, with mixtapes full of borrowed beats, lyrics, and melodies being an integral part of the culture. If this fear of copyright lawsuits following Blurred Lines was so prevalent, you’d expect to see a corollary decrease in samples in music.
Why Old Music Isn’t Killing New Music
I’ve explained how the changing demographics and our consumption calculations have contributed to the massive growth of Catalog music, I’ve pointed out a few false clues pointing to new music’s demise, and offered a couple counterpoints to the notion that musicians themselves are in increasingly dire straits today. And yet still, the fact remains that current music consumption is down: why?
📱 The TikTokification of Music Discovery
In the last few years, as the degree to which we live our lives online has accelerated, both due to the pandemic and better-designed hooks, short-form video is an increasingly popular breeding ground for shared cultural touchstones. As TikTok bubbled up the most personally interesting videos to the top and provided the tools to easily duet and respond, suddenly a 15-second clip of a song was seemingly everywhere.
While we saw resurgences of old classics like Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams and Run DMC’s Tricky, more notably we saw tracks previously only recognized in subcultures suddenly enter the mainstream, achieving far higher chart positions than they ever had previously because they’re the soundtrack to viral trends. Saint Jhn’s Roses (Imanbek remix), Simple Plan’s I’m Just a Kid, Roddy Ricch’s The Box, and All Time Low’s Dear Maria, Count Me In all hit peak popularity following their inclusion in TikTok trends.
What’s interesting about the above examples is that for the majority of people listening, it was likely the first time they’d heard the song. Whether the song was recorded yesterday or in 2015, the fact that it’s new to nearly its entire audience and serves as a shared cultural touchstone for that group is an important distinction.
Traditional thinking in the music industry has been that if a song doesn’t land with the audience upon release, there’s next to 0 chance that it ever will. The one exception has been if it somehow gets massive, fast distribution, likely through placement in a movie or ad. Radio DJ’s, MTV, and the former powers that be would never be incentivized to dig up a song from 2016 that never meaningfully charted. But TikTok, in its own way, is the equivalent of this massive, fast distribution, and this is exactly what happens frequently there when a challenge or trend catches on. In turn, those tracks turn up on Spotify’s Viral Hits and occasionally on the top 200. It’s not so much that people don’t like any new music so they just revert to old music, it’s that the mechanisms for exposing us to music have changed. Things that become popular can be new to listeners despite being released more than 18 months earlier and still be part of a new shared cultural touchstone.
📉 Why Current Music Consumption is Down, and What it Means
We collectively listened to fewer hours of new music in 2021 than we did in 2020. Does this mean that old music is killing new music? I don’t think so. This would imply the start of a trend towards the death of new music’s cultural import. I’d posit this is a blip that’s nearly wholly a product of the world we’ve lived in the last two years.
Living in a pandemic and socially isolating for two years has created a massive spike in loneliness, and it’s hit young adults the hardest12. This demographic, typically responsible for consuming the lion’s share of new music, has turned to nostalgic music for comfort. Once considered a mental illness, nostalgia provides comfort in the form of soothing, can physically warm us, and provides an important centering in times of uncertainty by connecting who we are now with who once were.
People tend to most love the music that came out during their early teenage years (13 for women, 14 for men), and so when the demographic hit hardest by loneliness during the pandemic sought comfort from their music, it makes sense that they increased their consumption of music from a prior era. As early as April 2020, Spotify researchers saw a 54% increase in listeners making nostalgia-themed playlists13.
Lockdowns and social isolation have limited our experiential variety, both for listeners and musicians. Where we listened to music changed–we lost both commute listening time and listening with friends, at parties or on nights out. Not to mention the near-complete halt of live music performances over the last two years: we’ve been denied that visceral connection that comes with feeling a crowd and hearing your favorite music performed live, further limiting our ability to form connections with new music.
This flattening of experiential variety makes it difficult to create unique associations with new music, since we’re effectively in the same place and unable to tie a song to the positive memories and friends with whom we listened to it. On the musician’s side, while there’s less measurable direct evidence, I would imagine that being trapped at home with limited new experiences from which to draw inspiration created a dry creative spell for a number of musicians.
While the music industry certainly has its share of problems, I’m actually very optimistic about the future and eagerly look forward to what comes next. Looking at the data from the report and the larger musical landscape, I see a lot of reasons for optimism:
Tons of people are joining streaming and able to instantly access catalogs of 10s of millions of tracks
We have more accurate ways to measure music consumption beyond just people buying physical media - now we can see how people actually engage with it ongoing
Even with the convenience of streaming, vinyl sales are rising, and LPs are able to meet a need for music fans that streaming can’t
Musicians can create and distribute more easily than ever, and aren’t beholden to gatekeeping labels anymore
New technologies, notably web3 and Blockchain, have the potential to both connect artists and fans in new ways and streamline collaboration, attribution, and compensation amongst artists who sample or collaborate.
Distribution of listenership is declustering from around the top, and the middle of the distribution curve is gaining volume due to recommendation engines being personalized versus the one-size-fits-all of terrestrial radio
We’re in the midst of a pandemic, and in it, people found that music can serve an incredibly vital purpose and provide them with soothing during a time of lots of uncertainty and loneliness
“Musical revolutions come from the bottom up, not the top down.
That’s what gives me solace. New music always arises in the least expected place, and when the power brokers aren’t even paying attention. And it will happen again just like that. It certainly needs to. Because the decision-makers controlling our music institutions have lost the thread. We’re lucky that the music is too powerful for them to kill.”
On these points, I’m in complete agreement: music revolutions come from the bottom up, and music is certainly too powerful to kill. Even in the midst of the last two years, we’ve seen how powerful music still is – perhaps even more so – and how it can be used to satisfy myriad emotional needs. I’m incredibly excited about the future of music – it’s changed a lot, that change is no doubt accelerating, but I think for all of us as listeners and musicians, that’s a good thing, and I can’t wait to hear what comes next.
