Is Old Music Killing New Music?


I ran across this Atlantic magazine article on another music forum. It asks the question if old music is killing new music. I didn't realize that older music represents 70% of the music market according to this article. I know I use Qobuz and Tidal to find new music and new artists for my collection, but I don't know how common that actually is for most people. I think that a lot of people that listen to services like Spotify and Apple Music probably don't keep track of what the algorithms are queuing up in their playlists. Perhaps it's all becoming elevator music. 

Is Old Music Killing New Music? - The Atlantic

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How much current music will be around in half a century?

 

@berner99  define "current music"...?

I find that a lot of young people are pretty genre agnostic. Back when I was a youngster--which was the prime demographic for buying records after the "youth explosion" in the later '60s (when record companies got on board after Monterrey Pop '67), there was much siloing and rigidity among my peers about "what was cool" and who to listen to. Today, I don't think it is strange for someone in their teens to shift from soul to heavy early psych to whatever. 

I do think having Big Data as the gateway does change things in terms of curation. But, the reality as I knew it was, with rare exceptions, the stuff that the record companies pushed and marketed might sell for a while at the expense of other, now forgotten artists on their roster. Now, a fair number of these lesser known artists from the day can be accessed via the Internet (lesser in the sense of commercial impact, not necessarily artistry). Some of that stuff is old but it is good. 

My experience as an audiophile also changed my listening habits and not always for the better- looking for sonic spectaculars rather than musically interesting or challenging stuff. And there was a similar "peer" influenced -"oh, you have to get this."  Once I dropped out of the audiophile approved stuff, I started to have fun, and that's where the real learning began.

That's why, for me, I'm constantly challenging myself to find new to me, different music of a lot of different types. The genre and marketing classifications often don't hold up-- yeah, there is a difference between classical and rap, but in the pop/jazz/blues/rock arena, there's a lot of good stuff, along with psych folk and variations on all of the above. I mentioned a relatively new artist to @Tomic601 the other day-- Lady Blackbird, who isn't just channeling Nina Simone, but creating a blend of a lot of jazz, psych and blues that is well arranged, performed and produced. 

Despite the availability of streaming services as a source for finding music, I still think the onus is on us to seek out and find "new to us" music, whether recently made or dug out from the vast archive of the past. In my case, a lot of those "finds" are older--is it because of my age and interest? Probably. My limited experience with Qobuz was that their catalog of deep groove jazz from the '70s is pretty shallow. I suspect other streaming services are similar. 

At the end music like audio is not about "taste" but about education of our own listening habits...

I am not interested by people audio gear taste at all....Nor by their musical taste in itself but by the journey of people, their reason why they like such musician and such other one...

For the gear i dont give a damn..... 😁😊

There is too much basic good gear to chose only one....What i called embeddings working dimensions control in mechanical,electrical ans especially acoustical dimensions is the key...

The problem is how to use and implement the chosen gear in a room with acoustic....

And how to improve my inner working by music....

 

 

Of course it's about tastes. The same music may be hated by one person and loved by another, and that says nothing about the music but rather about the tastes of the people involved. I'm 70 years old - I do not need 'education about my own listening habits'.