"
Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm." So writes Ted Gioia, author of the Substack music/pop culture newsletter "
The Honest Broker". But it gets worse: "The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs. The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for
less than 5 percent of total streams. That rate was twice as high just three years ago....."
The signs are everywhere — including the fact that viewership for the music industry's Grammy awards plummeted 53% this year to just 8.8 million. "More people pay attention to streams of video games on Twitch (which now gets 30 million daily visitors)."
And even then, "When a new song overcomes these obstacles and actually becomes a hit, the risk of copyright lawsuits is greater than ever before.... Adding to the nightmare, dead musicians are now coming back to life in virtual form — via holograms and 'deepfake' music — making it all the harder for young, living artists to compete in the marketplace."
But in the end the real problem may ultimately be that "nothing is less interesting to music executives than a completely radical new kind of music."
Who can blame them for feeling this way? The radio stations will play only songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven't changed much in decades. The algorithms curating so much of our new music are even worse. Music algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That's actually how the current system has been designed to work.
Even the music genres famous for shaking up the world — rock or jazz or hip-hop — face this same deadening industry mindset. I love jazz, but many of the radio stations focused on that genre play songs that sound almost the same as what they featured 10 or 20 years ago. In many instances, they actually are the same songs.
This state of affairs is not inevitable. A lot of musicians around the world — especially in Los Angeles and London — are conducting a bold dialogue between jazz and other contemporary styles. They are even bringing jazz back as dance music. But the songs they release sound dangerously different from older jazz, and are thus excluded from many radio stations for that same reason. The very boldness with which they embrace the future becomes the reason they get rejected by the gatekeepers. A country record needs to sound a certain way to get played on most country radio stations or playlists, and the sound those DJs and algorithms are looking for dates back to the prior century. And don't even get me started on the classical-music industry, which works hard to avoid showcasing the creativity of the current generation. We are living in an amazing era of classical composition, with one tiny problem: The institutions controlling the genre don't want you to hear it.
The problem isn't a lack of good new music. It's an institutional failure to discover and nurture it.
So while the author acknowledges that "The fear of copyright lawsuits has made many in the industry deathly afraid of listening to unsolicited demo recordings," far deeper than that is the problem that, "The people running the music industry have lost confidence in new music."
Yet if there's any hope, the author argues, it's that people "crave something that sounds fresh and exciting and different.... Songs can go viral nowadays without the entertainment industry even noticing until it has already happened. That will be how this story ends: not with the marginalization of new music, but with something radical emerging from an unexpected place...."
"The CEOs are the last to know. That's what gives me solace.... The decision makers controlling our music institutions have lost the thread. We're lucky that the music is too powerful for them to kill."
