The demand for "old" music grew 14% in the first half of 2022 while the demand for new music dropped 1.4%. In the streaming world "old" music represents 72% of the market. Why does new music seem to be so bad compared to old/classic music?
I go though youtube sometimes and kids post videos of the first time they hear classics like the beatles, bob dylan, whatever and inevitable jaws drop. The music companies keep rereleasing old albums in new formats. Is it because todays artists just can’t "git er done"?
Now you can't release new music unless it goes viral on TikTok first:
With each passing month, record labels grow more attached to TikTok—but it now looks more like addiction. Some have reached the point where they won’t release an album until the music goes viral on TikTok.
Consider the strange case of Trevor Daniel, who had more than one billion streams for his breakout hit “Falling.” The song climbed the chart in more than 20 countries. But now his label requires TikTok success before releasing a new record.
“It’s just been pretty much impossible to put out music,” he recently told Rolling Stone.
That’s dumbfounding.
A 27-year-old with a billion streams can’t release new music? But he isn’t exaggerating. He keeps uploading snippets, waiting for one to go viral—but they don’t reach the threshold his label demands.
Music on the radio has aways mostly been awful as have most movies. Decade after decade. We only remember what we liked and (thankfully) forget the crappy stuff.
@ghdprentice, a lot in common but just a different order of distraction... *G*
While "...love, love me do..." (No...) was making the girls giddy, I was into Coltrane, Pentangle, and the Fugs. Overlaid with the Firesign Theatre to make some sort of sense of it all....
Older brother was listening to Mitch Miller and Herb Alpert. :- l
I go to the market of late and either marvel or grin at the latest in Muzak Muzic, aimed at the 'us', whoever we is and 'soap bubble' in the aisles....
Run Away to Mars -TALK came up when the 2B$ lotto was pending...which I thought would be a way to avoid the pending onslaught to the (un)lucky one, but not currently available as yet.
Drain Bamage....Audio Version: Love it, can't shake it.... ;)
The progress in music has been continuous since the cave man, although at a greater pace. Each generation identifies with stuff they grew up on. Each generation has some really great music to add.
I grew up, basically on The Beatles —-> rock of the early 70’s. I loved music. I became a Geologist… worked by myself and music was my companion. I found fussion jazz… then traditional jazz, then classical, then before I started traveling the globe extensively world, then electronic. I would dive into each and be overwhelmed with some of the best of their tine. After some thirty years or so, I rediscovered Rock. I found there were many great bands. I was later surprised to find some amazing and exceptional Hip-Hop and world fusion.
I now listen to streaming…. Which sounds as good as vinyl on my system. I find incredible new music from here and there all over the world. A great example is the Afro-Celt Sound System. While not recent… this kind of fusion goes on everywhere and with increasing frequency.
The increase in availability of great new music is unreal.
I think any indicators pointing to less great new music are flawed by looking at too narrow a selection of channels.
You can listen to the radio on your Mcintosh sound system in your Grand Wagoneer on 23 speakers in Dolby Atmos, now if you can only find a decent station on FM LOL
vs you could turn on the radio in your clunker in 1971 and more than half of the songs being played back then are still being played today:
It’s painfully obvious to me that people, at one time, got to live in a world where the simple act of turning on the radio, or going to any movie theater, yielded a far greater likelihood of experiencing something good than the people of today experience doing the same stuff.
Money. That’ll do it.
Whether it’s,
A) some particular thing (Auto-Tune, comic book movies) showing corporate executives an opportunity for massive profits, thusly causing said corporations to exploit that thing ad nauseam to the great detriment of prioritizing new/innovative/challenging ideas, or
B) a new/innovative/challenging idea that was funded ultimately yielding significant financial losses for a corporation, thusly causing corporations (the gatekeepers of the masses’ exposure to exciting popular art) to cease any further funding of new/innovative/challenging ideas and thusly reinforcing the purely-commercial motivations described in point A).
I’m fully aware that, in terms of popular music, there were inherent flaws in the system as far as artists were concerned in the past, and that, while streaming provides paltry remuneration for artists today, we are witnessing what may be a very positive change in how artists may gain exposure and commercial viability.
Nonetheless, a gross saturation of incredibly derivative and formulaic work is what defines mainstream popular music and film today, and I think it is obvious that this is of greater dominance in aggregate than ever before.
None of this means that there aren’t awesome artists out there representing the antithesis of everything stated above, merely that “rising to the top” seems to be harder than ever before.
"It would be unfair to say that there is no good new music. Just as it would be unfair to say that all music from the 60’s and 70’s was worth listening to."
I'm 67 and I started with this sentence with the hope that readers would understand that I wasn't making a blanket statement about all modern music, but merely my opinion of music as a whole.
Obviously you missed that point and felt the need to reiterate my opinion in different words.
"Good music is good music, regardless of the decade and today’s good music amply displays all of the attributes you list above."
Go see musicians in the "folkie" (acoustic generally) club nearby as that's where some great young talent is working. And note that most pop music has always mostly sucked as for every Joni or Beatles or Little Feat album there was plenty of stuff that was really. There are some talented pop musicians out there but I'm not likely to hear much as I'm a jazz geek...that's a scene that's packed with brilliant young players if anyone cares to notice which, sadly, most people don't.
It would be unfair to say that there is no good new music. Just as it would be unfair to say that all music from the 60's and 70's was worth listening to.
That being said, it is not a coincidence that most of what played on FM radio and streamed is older music.
The reason is simple. It is better music.
In general.
It is more emotionally engaging.
It has more to say about real life, love, and the human condition.
It has more dynamic range.
It is played my musicians playing actual instruments.
It has more variety. Less formulaic.
Case in point. The top albums of 1971. No two similar and all fabulous.
"Hunky Dory" David Bowie
"Led Zeppelin IV" Led Zeppelin
"Blue" Joni Mitchell
"Tapestry" Carole King
"What's Going On" Marvin Gaye
"Who's Next" The Who
"Sticky Fingers" Rolling Stones
"Meddle" Pink Floyd
"LA Woman" The Doors
"Fragile" Yes
"Ram" Paul McCartney
"Aqualung" Jethro Tull
"Live at the Fillmore East" Allman Brothers
"Santana III" Santana
"Every Picture Tells a Story" Rod Stewart
"Madman Across The Water" Elton John
"Songs of Love and Hate" Leonard Cohen
"Pearl" Janis Joplin
"There's a Riot Going On" Sly & The Family Stone
"Imagine" John Lennon
"Killer" Alice Cooper
"Master of Reality" Black Sabbath
This is just one year and it was all played on the radio.
It is a big reason why we are still listening and still buying gear and music.
My 23 year old cousin went with my family to see New Order & Pet Shop Boys a couple of months ago when they toured together. She was blown away! She loved every minute of it.
Back in the day we had FM, the 'underground' formats some had would play pretty wide variety, remember free form! This is how we discovered more interesting deep cuts, even more commercial stations played far more than top 40. Also had University stations in my area, classical, jazz and more heard here.
Forget FM today, with exception of University stations you won't hear anything new and interesting. One has to stream these days, and be open minded about genres, plenty wonderful music out there. If all one likes is rock, then yes, today's rock not nearly up to standards of the 'olden' days. I agree the 'commercial' music of today is pretty bad, between commercials on tv and music you hear blasting from cars and other's stereos pretty bad state of affairs. Plenty of criminally unheard and underpaid artists out there, just have to work to find them!
I think what we mean is the presence of good music in/around the mainstream.
Anyone can always say, “well, if you dig hard enough you’ll come up with something.” Not everyone is a music nerd like me who is interested in taking on excavation projects to unearth good music. Folks with a more causal relationship with music are provided with a notable dearth of options at the top. This wasn’t true 25 years ago, and it certainly wasn’t true in the preceding decades.
I am admittedly not the biggest rap guy around, but I consider good music to be good music, period. Plenty of music described as “rap” or “hip-hop” is good, some of it great. I’m very unimpressed with willfully-narrowminded, tired, stupid, cliched, disrespectful dismissals of rap music as a whole. Reggae’s the only sound I seem to be almost unable to enjoy as a matter of course. I even thought I might “check in” with reggae a couple nights ago and listened to some. Yeah, nuthin’. Whatever, just because it does nothing for me doesn’t mean it’s inherently devoid of value or worth as a thing. If there’s been any good stuff in the mainstream the last 25 years, a lot of it was rap.
I also hope when people say, “y’all never never good music so quit complaining as well!!” immediately after listing Frank Sinatra and the “Beetles” (as though liking that music denotes ignorance or poor taste) is merely a poorly executed attempt at humor.
Very basic for me. Contemporary “pop” music for me is shite. However, if one meanders from the “pop”, there is some fantastic music being made in numerous genres. Just saying
Research right channels and you will find overwhelming flow of great new music every day. New, new, new and more new just like that. New band, new album, new artist, new instrument, new orchestra, new album...
Mass media makes us all deaf and blind, but there’s GREAT music and it’s coming back to the streets as well so quit complaining!
What I finally see hear -- everyone mentioning Taylor Sfift, Beetles, Sinatra etcetra... Folks ya'll never heard good music so quit complaining as well!!!
What if I admitted I probably could not identify a single Taylor Swift song by name and possibly do not even recognize her when I hear her? It’s probably just me being an old guy.
I think music is spoonfed more now than ever. Everyone listens to music on their phones and everyone can be alerted instantly when there is a new hit on tik-tok or wherever.
Another difference between now and when the boomers were young is that there was a huge difference between what boomers and their parents listened to. Today, kids and their boomer parents (or grandparents) share music a lot, they all listen to rock to a greater or lesser extent, and that keeps older rock alive. Rock music killed what our parents listened to, as far as what sold anyway.
Why is that whenever I am in a store, I hear a lot of music from the 1960's and 1970's. Sometimes the 1980's. That music is 40, 50, 60 years old.
In the 1970's, when I was growing up, the music in the air was not from the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's. The boomer generation has been taking up a huge amount of air space for decades, and younger generations are way more crowded out than I was.
It's cultural capture and it's not fair to people after the Boomers.
There’s still a lot of new music being produced. From Ringo Star to Taylor Swift to My new favorite, Stone Rebel. I don’t know what genre of music you listen to, but even in Jazz there are current artists making new albums. Another favorite is Gregory Tardy. The guys 56 and has at least a dozen albums out. Blues has a bunch as well.
Remember there was a period of stagnation in pop music between the initial burst of rock n roll and the Beatles, so all is not lost. When the Beatles and the 60s in general hit, the people running the record labels had no idea what to think, so they signed everyone they could and allowed them 2 or 3 albums to develop.
That doesn’t happen anymore. The labels have been honing their "expertise" in what makes a hit record since the sixties and they are really not willing to take a chance on someone. So, creativity is stifled and most music becomes more formulaic, the music that is released by record labels anyway.
There is still a lot of good music being made by younger people, though. It’s just not getting the promotion it deserves from the labels or the rest of the industry. They prefer to go with their trusty formula. There is a lot of good music being made, you just have to look a little harder, although streaming can do a lot of the work for you.
The 60s and 70s were a period of exceptional creativity, though, and a lot of good music was made then. It will happen again, who knows when.
Sam Kinison used to say that they invented rock for people that can't sing but could play instruments and rap was for people that can't sing or play an instrument.
The Well is dry! Among the world-wide 15 - 25 year olds the most popular music is rap/hip hop - and has been so for several decades. All that’s needed is a beat box and a mike. No knowledge of music theory or instrumental skill required! The dominance of rap/hip hop coincides with the popularity of computer gaming.
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