I'm surprised to see this getting upvoted. I find it rather unconvicing. There are many problems with it.
> The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police.
Well yeah, younger generations, who are much more likely to listen to newer music, have moved on to streaming, for the most part.
> Just consider these facts: the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams.
It's easier then ever for people to find different music to listen to now. Not everyone listens to the same hits anymore. It doesn't mean people are listening to less new music. Their listening is likely just more distributed across more new music.
> Just consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack of reaction—because the response was little more than a yawn.
As the article showed, people don't watch the Grammy's anymore. This doesn't mean people don't listen to new music anymore. People look more towards things like The Needle Drop[0] or streaming playlists then the Grammy's for music recommendations. Honestly, the Needle Drop's channel growth alone, should be enough to show that new music isn't going anywhere.
Overall, the vast majority of the points here can be attributed to the lower barrier to entry of making music, and to the new ease at which people can find the niche they like in new music.
In addition to all these good points, I was surprised a couple other issues weren't discussed at all in the article.
- Playing live shows is a huge part of how bands and artists grow their following and get discovered. COVID has had a pretty significant impact on people's ability to do that.
- The amount of high-fidelity music in circulation is continually growing. I would say the "modern era" of music (when record labels figured out how produce and distribute decent-quality songs at scale*) didn't start until the late 60's. All that music is still in circulation, and each subsequent decade there is another decade of "modern era" music to compete with.
* To clarify this point, I mean there is a huge gap in the sound-quality between the early 60's and the late 60's. Compare the difference in sound quality between the Beatle's first album and the Beatle's last album. Earlier music (like big band stuff) is even worse-quality, and there is much, much less of it
Yeah this strikes me as someone who is vastly out of touch with how the music market has developed over the past decade or 2. Are we really using "album consumption" as a metric for how much people are listening to music?
The increase in investments in old music catalogues strikes true to me, but this is more a reflection of who is willing and able to pay for music, rather than who's consuming it.
I think these metrics are all indicative of real trends in music, but "the death of new music" is absolutely not one of them.
I basically never watched the Grammy’s. It always looked and felt like record labels putting on a show to sell more albums.
Just like what radio turned in to.
In the meantime I listened to more and more music from friends, the library, the internet, and all sorts of live venues. Great music is flowing like water it’s crazy.
instagram and tiktok are full of zoomers lip syncing to songs, with links to the songs in the post
for starters: https://www.tiktokforbusinesseurope.com/resources/how-to-ele...
one wonders if a 20 second clip of a song nets more royalties than a play count on spotify
Yeah, some of the evidence he presented is concerning if true, but it was only backed by weak data or anecdotes.
If the absolute number of new streams really is dropping year over year, that is concerning, but a single year's worth of data - a year with massive confounding factors to boot - isn't enough to convince me, and the full report is behind a paywall.
Having the market share of new streams drop as a percentage is completely expected, and nothing to be concerned about. The early adopters of streaming services were younger, listening to what was new at the time. Now as they get older, even if they add new music at the same rate, the are still listening to the streams the created earlier, so the mean age increases. In addition, as the services become more mainstream, wider segments of the population sign up, and bring their listening habits with them. So you would expect a general shift towards older music. And as that occurs you would expect the music industry to invest more in older music portfolios.
That doesn't mean that newer music is in decline, just that the industry has a new way to monetize older music that it didn't have before. Musical preferences and purchasing have always peaked in ones teens and 20s, and as you get older you tend to buy less music and listen to more radio, or the music you already have. Maybe rebuy a tape or CD or MP3 version of the album you already had. But as consumption moves away from radio and towards streaming, the long term revenue for a hit doesn't drop off as quickly as it used to. This isn't a zero-sum game, and increases in revenue for old music doesn't necessarily imply a decrease in revenue for new music.
Likewise, for some of his other supporting evidence. I concur that the rock radio stations around here have pretty much completely stopped playing new music (country stations aren't so stale, can't speak for hip-hop), but that is largely because young people don't listen to radio much anymore, so why cater to them?
And yes there is risk that music industry could focus too much on the old music that is making them lots of money now, and not invest enough in new music that will make them money in the future - but his own testimony is that they are still pushing new music hard.
There might be something here, but the article didn't convince me.
Yeah, whenever I got to my countries "Top streaming" list on Spotify I have no idea who any of the artists are, I did see that new Elton John rework in there but that was the only "old music" in there. Maybe they, the bands and artists, creating the new music aren't paid and doesn't bring in money like their old counter parts and well end up being less important for the music industry as a whole?
Their definition of "new music" is to blame. Most of this "new music" is cookie-cutter junk that is artificial, derivative, simplistic, on-the-grid, auto-tuned, four-chord (or less) drivel. The labels intentionally manipulate the "top 200 tracks" so that this is nearly the only thing that makes it to the charts.
The young audience has had enough of it. They have streaming. They don't listen to the "top 200" anymore. Their tastes have broadened not only into new music which is not being tracked by the "top 200" but they are mining the music of older eras which is, by almost any measure, superior. It's not auto-tuned. It has a dynamic tempo because it's not beat-matched in a DAW. It often has complex chord progressions and key changes. This is also true of a lot of the "new music" the charts don't track.
And this is why the Grammys are also irrelevant. No one cares. We don't listen to that crap.
I love classic rock, but it's hard to argue that it is musically more complex than modern pop. Also if musical complexity was the same as merit then we would all just be listening to jazz and classical
There is always lots of good new music in any generation if you look underground. If your tastes are open to the experimental and unconventional, you'll find an endless supply of great new sounds. But most people's tastes are strongly shaped by the older music they grew up with, so naturally they'll use that as their reference point for "good" music.
I listen to old music because it bangs and it’s real. I feel like this article posits a perceived problem and then makes no attempt to read between the lines to understand why no one is listening to a garbage product.
I agree man, the lame banality of pop music is deafening. Songs are produced the same way, use the same build and drop structure and sound the same. Triplets and shitty bass.
Forget complexity or originality, just use the same patterns as the last 10 years.
Modern production can be good some people pull it off, but not without singers who sing in a similar cadence and timbre. People who want to sound like someone else rather than being influenced by other people's sounds.
I tend to agree, but this is exactly addressed in the article:
> Some people—especially baby boomers—tell me that this decline in music is simply the result of lousy new songs. Music used to be better, or so they say. The old songs had better melodies, more interesting harmonies, and demonstrated genuine musicianship, not just software loops, Auto-Tuned vocals, and regurgitated samples.
In fact the second part of the article (after that paragraph) is much more interesting than the first. It argues that the music industry tries very hard to bury and hide genuinely new music (and ways of making it), by fear of cannibalizing the old (?), and that it is killing itself in the process.
You lost me when you complained about the number of chords. What a ridiculous argument. I guess Van Morrison, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan etc better go back to the drawing board.
I'd go one little step further: Recorded music has killed new music.
Thanks for the fact that the sieve of time has basically left us with only the best of the best of the past we have become so pretentious regarding new artists. Also the fact that music can be injected 24/7 into our brains everywhere we are with a simple internet connection has totally separated us from the reality of music making.
Why go outside and listen to some guy in the street or go at a concert in an abandoned factory if you can just lazily put on a pair of headphones and have hundreds of years worth of genius compositions impeccably recorded ready at your fingertips?
Some of you may say that taking inspiration from other artists is a big part of making new music, so the fact that any young lad can access such a catalog must mean he can get creative right away, right? Nope, because before recorded sounds if you took inspiration (and maybe lessons) from a matured and acclaimed musician you would then go back to your town and do your own thing. Few people would have known the original artist and after his death maybe a few sheets of music would be all that remained of him. Having learned from him you would have killed it after his death and your creative endeavor wouldn't get buried just because people have a better record playing at home
An interesting aside is that I was looking through a music history textbook belonging to one of my kids. The book chose the invention of movable type for printing sheet music, as the beginning of music as an "industry." I've also read that as early as the 19th century, sheet music was a huge industry, and had many of the characteristics that we associate with recorded music, such as "stars," musicians getting ripped off by publishers, and so forth.
It was reasonably common for people to have a piano in the parlor (if you were affluent enough to have a parlor), or some other instrument, and to entertain yourself by playing the latest "hits" from sheet music.
I don't know, I don't think I'm listening to a lot of "genius music" and the things I like most are usually not played by some guy on the street. (Metal and EBM, or electronic).
Also in my experience the correlation between "likes music" and "likes to go to concerts" for people is not direct.
One more point, I'm one of those people who are not heavily into improv, so if the band is performing a version of a song I like that is very different from the album version there's a good chance I might dislike it. I'm not proud of that and of course they're free to do what they wnat with their music, but I like "a live version of the song" and not "a live reinterpretation with everything different", maybe that's also why I dislike jazz.
Maybe, but recorded music became widespread 50 years ago, and what you're describing has been true for the last 20 years at least. Yet something feels different now.
My theory about "old" music: the 60's were essentially the golden age of Western culture, with brand new technology (synths, the electric guitar), and the sheer amount of absolutely new never heard before sounds coming out was insane. The wave kept going for a few decades, and now we're in a place where music is over-commercialized, perfectly produced, and there doesn't seem to be many new places to go with it.
There's a lot of good new music nowadays, but you have to look for it, and it doesn't have the same impact as, for example, hearing White Rabbit for the first time. It's nearly all acquired taste.
So, I think the problem here is that we lack impactful music because of a decaying culture, over-commercialization of the industry, and a lack of technical innovation.
What can we do about it? That's the same question everyone is asking about nearly everything else these days.
I’m an amateur musician (29years old, for reference). I can play the piano and the guitar and sing, but ever since I was a child my most innate musical talent was whistling.
Something I have noticed about the old radio hits from the 50s-70s is how fun many of them are to whistle. Most contemporary pop, rock, r&b, country can’t hold a candle to the popular songwriters of that era in terms of whistle-ability.
What I take away is that the popular songwriting style in that time was very “melody-forward” like in the days of tin-pan alley. Today I can tell that many songs are written in a more “mood-forward” way, and artists are more interested in exploring tambre than to make an absolute ear-worm of a melody. The result IMO is that those mid-century songs will have a lot more staying power.
I couldn't tell you the date, though I sort of feel like it was somewhere in the late 90s, music shifted from music to entertainment. Sure there had been boy bands prior, there had been musicians that were more schtick than music, but something palpably changed. Yes, many will call out "autotune" but it feels more like that was a symptom than the disease.
My gut feeling is it came down to money - music producers / distributors realized they could separate the working musicians from the pretty face. As far as I'm concerned, this is the basic problem with movies too - the majority of movies are just a vehicle for whatever flavor-of-the-month pretty face they need to splash on a billboard. There's very little artistic about either music or movies, they are just "new" and industry expects us to eat what they feed us.
That isn't to say there isn't great music out there, and I'd argue it is the golden age if you are someone who wants to produce anything creative and take it directly to an audience. It just means that there's a breakdown between the "mainstream" and the "good".
There's a great 2004 documentary called Kill Yer Idols that explains it all.
It follows the bands that inherited the mantle of seminal New York bands such as Sonic Youth. For the most part it's what you expect, with some great historical cuts, interviews, the new bands reflecting on and praising their predecessors, etc.
*SPOILER*
But it has a surprise ending. Suddenly there's a different tone from the old bands. They disparage the newcomers: The older bands completely rejected what their predecessors did; they destroyed it. The new bands that copy their music completely miss the point; what they are doing is antithetical to the art.
And I agree: We still have people playing rock'n'roll and hip-hop generations later. Are you kidding me? How shameful! How boring! Heck, someone play big band at least. Rock and hip-hop were revolutionary artforms; they didn't try to sound like Frank Sinatra or (for hip-hop) the Beatles - in fact, they tried to sound completely different, to demonstrate their rejection of the prior generation, to throw it in everyone's faces. Until I hear someone completely reject rock and hip-hop, burn them down to ashes (artistically), and piss me off, it's all bullsh-t. (And I mean it; I haven't listed to this crap in years.)
Correct.
There are millions and millions of old music made throughout many many decades. Thousands and tens of thousands stood the test of time and people like to listen to those regardless what the calendar shows. Others got mostly forgotten. New songs are from a much shorter period and so those are in the thousands and tens of thousands only. And perhaps hundreds or more will stand the test of times and will be listened to many many years from now too.
This is how it is when people can pick their music more freely instead of fed by the industry and from a seemingly endless list not just from those stamped as 'new'.
No killing is going on here. Music that people like will be listened to still, regardless of their age. It is just much much more out there from earlier than now, due to longer period and more people throughout the history.
I'm not sure how big a factor it is, but I have for a long time wondered if music produced in the 70s (perhaps late 60s) and later would have more staying power than earlier music. That was about the time that really high quality masters could be made which sound good even today. Used to be that old music sounded as old as it was, but now you can listen to music from the 70s with the same quality as if it were recorded today.
I choose to read this as a ever more pressing need to explore music beyond 12-tet. and not just in a niche microtonal fashion.
computers can take us there but not so long as MIDI is the standard. the 'problem' (which is really more of an opportunity to improve and go beyond) is not MIDI but the conceptual theoretical framework of the 12-notes keyboard underlying all 'western' traditions.
but don't get me wrong, it's no coincidence that this 12 notes system is so widespread, it really is very well made. anything that attempts to take music beyond it needs to be even better, which ain't easy as it's quite something already.
in summary, computer technology has so far just made cheaper and easier to do the same things that were already possible. no new things have been tried yet regarding the choice of notes to use.
So there is a lot of cool music being produced today; much of it is not mass market/chart topping/etc and so it doesn’t just get dumped in one’s lap like pop music did in the era of radio.
That said, a lot of music today is over produced- levels set too high, etc.
Also, a lot of pop and r&b music today doesn’t seem very creative to me- pounding bass line, trivially simple melody, chanted, simple, explicit lyrics, and then depend on production to try to make it interesting. This obviously appeals to a lot of people but maybe not so much to others.
Mass market music is intentionally formulaic; search the web for “Doctor Hook”.
On the other hand, there are some super creative things out there. I like genre-bending remixes personally like Pentatonix’ cover of Fleet Foxes’ “White Winter Hymnal”, or Steven Seagulls cover of “Thunderstruck”.
Point is, that the stuff that will fall in your lap is mass market and not as creative IMO as pop was in earlier generations. However there’s great stuff out there; you just have to look for it.
Also the tools to find music you might like are better than ever, eg you can hum or sing into Shazam or Siri a snippet of a song you liked, online you have lyric searches. And all the music services have ML to find songs you might like based on songs you like.
all those years spending $17.99 just to have ten songs I can play, the chickens have come home to roost.
if there's not as much money to be made selling new music I think it's mostly because there is so much new music. anyone can record an album now, or whatever, release it, do the whole nine yards, without having to go through that ridiculous hurdle so many years ago of "getting a deal with a label". if you're into a whole genre of music, that's great, but there's like 18 thousand other genres that are all just as valid now, unlike in the 1980s when there were something like five. All the bands that you think are great and have changed your life listening to are not anyone else's in your town. it's as though the music industry has spread across the whole galaxy to millions of planets and it would be impossible for there to ever be some artists that are as important as names like the Police or Madonna were in the 80s.
It was widely understood that even then, while "getting a record deal" was the only way you'd have a career, the publishing companies were generally in it to rip the musicians through a shredder and extract as much cash as they can before discarding the talent, except in the very unlikely case that said talent did well enough to still be viable for more albums.
I'm sort of amazed that industry hasn't just thrown in the towel at this point, they were basically gatekeepers on recording and distribution technology.
There's no Moore's Law for music. Why should new music displace old? Baroque music is still great. So is Bebop.
I have a thought, which is that modern music production and distribution have blurred the lines between "recorded" and "live" music.
I'm a musician. The only way to hear my band is to attend one of our concerts. There's no reason for us to even attempt to commercialize our music. It doesn't need to have any lasting or widespread appeal. If we get an audience of 100 people, that's huge for us. Because of the novelty of our performances (never the same mistake twice), we don't have to be perfect in order to interest the audience. Nothing we play is "produced."
Prior to online music distribution, there was a sharp distinction between live and recorded music. If you wanted to reach beyond those 100 people, it cost an arm and a leg to get your music into commercial distribution, so it had to be targeted to a mass audience, or at least a big enough audience of enthusiasts to cover your costs. There was an economic reason to be good in the sense of having that widespread and lasting value.
Today, it costs no more to stream your music than to play it live. Maybe less. So it may just be that the financial incentives weigh towards creating throw-away recordings that last long enough to replace them with the next one. Just like with live music, your job isn't so much "the performance of a lifetime," as it is, "get them to come back next time."
Today, if you move outside of mass commercial music, there is plenty of great new music just like there always was. That's because, while the economics of popular music have changed, the economics of great new music really haven't.
Disclaimer: When I'm not playing jazz, I'm accompanying fiddlers and folk musicians. I've opted out of the popular music scene.
I think this is due to the relationship with music changing. I'm in my early 40s now, but when I was in my teen/early 20s, I would buy a 1 or 2 CDs a month and I would listen to those CDs over and over again. I would study the linear notes and the cover.
Music is too disposable now. With my spotify subscription, I can still listen to those albums from the 90s/early 2000s over and over again, but there's just so much new music. Even new albums that I really enjoy, I'll listen to them a handful of times and forget about them.
I find new music I love on bandcamp, perhaps that's outside the data used for this analysis?
Anyway, I spend thousands of dollars on amazing music on bandcamp, and the artists get a higher percentage from bandcamp than a studio, so I'm making the best choice for me and the future of my music.
I get the worst resistance when I say it but I think music died when autotune became ubiquitous. Curiously this happened at the same time that Napster hit so piracy got a lot of the blame.
Personally I think autotune sucks all the emotional connection out of music. It is one thing that Miku Hatsune sings like that, it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)
Autotune music just washes over people without having any effect.
When there is autotune music on at the gas station people can't tell you who the artists is sometimes they aren't even sure if it is rap or country music. Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I'm almost tempted to say that "Kanye West doesnt't exist or that he's just famous because his wife is famous."
Are you talking about Antares Auto-Tune? Or are you talking about pitch correction with Melodyne or in-DAW pitch tools? Or do you mean finer-grained pitching with vocal track slicing and pitching? Or do you mean splicing together tons of different takes to create the perfect vocal track?
As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial". That's not how it works. Plus, people don't just throw a vocal track through some magical automatic tuner and get a perfect result. There is an unbelievable amount of manual work involved to produce a high quality vocal track.
This stuff has been going on since the beginning of pop music. Most pop hits since the 70s have had spliced vocals where ideal takes are combined. Since advanced sampling began in the 80s, we've had manual pitching and adjustment of tiny vocal clips. That became easier in the 90s with computers. In the 2000s, when full-featured DAWs and plugins became practical, we've had more automatic pitch correction, like the auto-tune vocal effect you heard from T-Pain and others. But there's always something manual involved, and there's a lot of work from the vocalist to make this happen.
Max Martin, the producer of countless pop hits starting in the 90s, has detailed many times that he combines dozens of vocal takes and corrects pitch throughout the entire vocal tracks. This is normal. People actually want this.
Regarding Kanye West, I think that might just be your social bubble. I know multiple people who seem to randomly start talking about Kanye West songs totally unprompted.
And similarly, your dislike of auto tune likely reflects your cultural upbringing more than anything else.
You're talking about mainstream music, which is essentially mcdonald's and starbuck's. There are millions of other coffee shops and burger stands out there that are only serving thousands of people instead of billions.
Personally I became alienated from the music industry and don't know how to find new music.
I care about privacy, so I opted out from having a youtube/instagram/facebook account. I never used streaming because I listen to albums and want to own my music.
The result is that I don't even get notified when my favourite musicians recommend a band or even release a new album.
Where is the product for me? I am not in any of their data and just sit here listening to an offline library I built more than 10 years ago, desperate but struggling to find new stuff
In the very late 80's to early 90's is when I feel music as a monolithic cultural force started diverging. You had major veins of music that were able to stay in their own lanes to develop and had the music industry/radio support to do so - rap/hip-hop, pop, and alt-rock.
Early 90's is also when various underground styles and genres--house, techno, rave, jungle, industrial, were a thing enough to be easily discoverable even without the Internet. It was also then when 70's music was old enough to be called classic rock.
Then:
- Rap, techno, and other electronic-based styles of music showed that one-person music groups could be a thing.
- Music production technology started a trend of getting cheaper and cheaper as PCs became capable of real-time audio processing and non-band genres proved themselves viable.
Combine that with the Internet and it's not surprising we have an oversupply problem.
Then you have the Internet's effects on any type of media - almost costless to distribute, streaming and mp3 players enabling people to listen to exactly what they want anywhere they want, and social media's bubble effects. So it's not surprising we have a problem with things attaining cultural significance.
It wasn't like this in the past so music from the time when it wasn't has a special nostalgia.
It has never been a better time to get new music if you are willing to escape your bubbles and look, though.
> So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it.
It really looks like the music industry as an institution is failing, and I'm fine with that. It's not needed anymore.
> So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it.
I read Gioia's book, and respect his opinions on music. I think he is missing at least one point:
This finding makes complete sense if you assume there is nothing fundamentally better about new music than old music, but that there is much more old music, and that it is better curated.
There are many more of what we could call "great songs" from the last 100 years than in the last 18 months, not because music was better in the past, but because there was so much more of it. It's also really easy to find this old music now, because everybody knows about it, has written about it, has put it in lists, has included it in soundtracks, and so on. So, if you only cared about quality, and you picked your playlist more or less at random from a collection of "great music", you would expect the vast majority of what you listened to to have come from the past. Which is what we see.
That's even setting aside recommendation algorithms, which give you more of what it thinks you want. How many songs from the last few months are there that are similar to the one I said liked? A few, probably. But, compared to the number of songs from the last 50 years, it's probably a small number. So, if you catch me randomly listening to music Spotify thinks I like, it's going to be mostly older music, even if I have no preference regarding the age of what I listen to.
The relative prevalence of new music makes sense in the past, when you got all your music from a few sources, and those sources were incentivized to push your toward the latest products. MTV, radio stations, record stores, current bands: all these people want you to listen to new stuff, so as gatekeepers, they're going to push you toward it. Now, those pressures aren't as strong, so we're seeing more like a "fair" distribution of listening behavior.
To be clear: I don't think people listen to music at random, but I think recommendation algorithms tend to unlock more of music history as a side effect of needing to keep giving you more things to listen to.
I'm really sad to see this thread just shitting on new music because you all are nuts. We are legit in a god damn golden age of music right now. There is so much amazing new music dropping constantly I can't even keep up. It's never been easier to put music out into the universe, and incredible small bands that never made it out of their local venues waiting for a record label recruiter are able to find their audience on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, YT, TikTok, and Spotify.
[+] [-] Miner49er|4 years ago|reply
> The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police.
Well yeah, younger generations, who are much more likely to listen to newer music, have moved on to streaming, for the most part.
> Just consider these facts: the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams.
It's easier then ever for people to find different music to listen to now. Not everyone listens to the same hits anymore. It doesn't mean people are listening to less new music. Their listening is likely just more distributed across more new music.
> Just consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack of reaction—because the response was little more than a yawn.
As the article showed, people don't watch the Grammy's anymore. This doesn't mean people don't listen to new music anymore. People look more towards things like The Needle Drop[0] or streaming playlists then the Grammy's for music recommendations. Honestly, the Needle Drop's channel growth alone, should be enough to show that new music isn't going anywhere.
Overall, the vast majority of the points here can be attributed to the lower barrier to entry of making music, and to the new ease at which people can find the niche they like in new music.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/theneedledrop
[+] [-] nfw2|4 years ago|reply
- Playing live shows is a huge part of how bands and artists grow their following and get discovered. COVID has had a pretty significant impact on people's ability to do that.
- The amount of high-fidelity music in circulation is continually growing. I would say the "modern era" of music (when record labels figured out how produce and distribute decent-quality songs at scale*) didn't start until the late 60's. All that music is still in circulation, and each subsequent decade there is another decade of "modern era" music to compete with.
* To clarify this point, I mean there is a huge gap in the sound-quality between the early 60's and the late 60's. Compare the difference in sound quality between the Beatle's first album and the Beatle's last album. Earlier music (like big band stuff) is even worse-quality, and there is much, much less of it
[+] [-] yunwal|4 years ago|reply
The increase in investments in old music catalogues strikes true to me, but this is more a reflection of who is willing and able to pay for music, rather than who's consuming it.
I think these metrics are all indicative of real trends in music, but "the death of new music" is absolutely not one of them.
[+] [-] joshspankit|4 years ago|reply
Just like what radio turned in to.
In the meantime I listened to more and more music from friends, the library, the internet, and all sorts of live venues. Great music is flowing like water it’s crazy.
[+] [-] eddyfromtheblok|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavon|4 years ago|reply
If the absolute number of new streams really is dropping year over year, that is concerning, but a single year's worth of data - a year with massive confounding factors to boot - isn't enough to convince me, and the full report is behind a paywall.
Having the market share of new streams drop as a percentage is completely expected, and nothing to be concerned about. The early adopters of streaming services were younger, listening to what was new at the time. Now as they get older, even if they add new music at the same rate, the are still listening to the streams the created earlier, so the mean age increases. In addition, as the services become more mainstream, wider segments of the population sign up, and bring their listening habits with them. So you would expect a general shift towards older music. And as that occurs you would expect the music industry to invest more in older music portfolios.
That doesn't mean that newer music is in decline, just that the industry has a new way to monetize older music that it didn't have before. Musical preferences and purchasing have always peaked in ones teens and 20s, and as you get older you tend to buy less music and listen to more radio, or the music you already have. Maybe rebuy a tape or CD or MP3 version of the album you already had. But as consumption moves away from radio and towards streaming, the long term revenue for a hit doesn't drop off as quickly as it used to. This isn't a zero-sum game, and increases in revenue for old music doesn't necessarily imply a decrease in revenue for new music.
Likewise, for some of his other supporting evidence. I concur that the rock radio stations around here have pretty much completely stopped playing new music (country stations aren't so stale, can't speak for hip-hop), but that is largely because young people don't listen to radio much anymore, so why cater to them?
And yes there is risk that music industry could focus too much on the old music that is making them lots of money now, and not invest enough in new music that will make them money in the future - but his own testimony is that they are still pushing new music hard.
There might be something here, but the article didn't convince me.
[+] [-] PokemonNoGo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teilo|4 years ago|reply
Their definition of "new music" is to blame. Most of this "new music" is cookie-cutter junk that is artificial, derivative, simplistic, on-the-grid, auto-tuned, four-chord (or less) drivel. The labels intentionally manipulate the "top 200 tracks" so that this is nearly the only thing that makes it to the charts.
The young audience has had enough of it. They have streaming. They don't listen to the "top 200" anymore. Their tastes have broadened not only into new music which is not being tracked by the "top 200" but they are mining the music of older eras which is, by almost any measure, superior. It's not auto-tuned. It has a dynamic tempo because it's not beat-matched in a DAW. It often has complex chord progressions and key changes. This is also true of a lot of the "new music" the charts don't track.
And this is why the Grammys are also irrelevant. No one cares. We don't listen to that crap.
[+] [-] nfw2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeformed|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] computershit|4 years ago|reply
I listen to old music because it bangs and it’s real. I feel like this article posits a perceived problem and then makes no attempt to read between the lines to understand why no one is listening to a garbage product.
[+] [-] Guessnotgauss|4 years ago|reply
Forget complexity or originality, just use the same patterns as the last 10 years.
Modern production can be good some people pull it off, but not without singers who sing in a similar cadence and timbre. People who want to sound like someone else rather than being influenced by other people's sounds.
Out with the new back to tye new-old?
[+] [-] bambax|4 years ago|reply
> Some people—especially baby boomers—tell me that this decline in music is simply the result of lousy new songs. Music used to be better, or so they say. The old songs had better melodies, more interesting harmonies, and demonstrated genuine musicianship, not just software loops, Auto-Tuned vocals, and regurgitated samples.
In fact the second part of the article (after that paragraph) is much more interesting than the first. It argues that the music industry tries very hard to bury and hide genuinely new music (and ways of making it), by fear of cannibalizing the old (?), and that it is killing itself in the process.
[+] [-] basisword|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Crastlon|4 years ago|reply
Why go outside and listen to some guy in the street or go at a concert in an abandoned factory if you can just lazily put on a pair of headphones and have hundreds of years worth of genius compositions impeccably recorded ready at your fingertips?
Some of you may say that taking inspiration from other artists is a big part of making new music, so the fact that any young lad can access such a catalog must mean he can get creative right away, right? Nope, because before recorded sounds if you took inspiration (and maybe lessons) from a matured and acclaimed musician you would then go back to your town and do your own thing. Few people would have known the original artist and after his death maybe a few sheets of music would be all that remained of him. Having learned from him you would have killed it after his death and your creative endeavor wouldn't get buried just because people have a better record playing at home
[+] [-] analog31|4 years ago|reply
It was reasonably common for people to have a piano in the parlor (if you were affluent enough to have a parlor), or some other instrument, and to entertain yourself by playing the latest "hits" from sheet music.
[+] [-] nkingsy|4 years ago|reply
Recorded music is one of the very first automations, and it has slowly automated 99% of professional musicians out of a job.
[+] [-] wink|4 years ago|reply
Also in my experience the correlation between "likes music" and "likes to go to concerts" for people is not direct.
One more point, I'm one of those people who are not heavily into improv, so if the band is performing a version of a song I like that is very different from the album version there's a good chance I might dislike it. I'm not proud of that and of course they're free to do what they wnat with their music, but I like "a live version of the song" and not "a live reinterpretation with everything different", maybe that's also why I dislike jazz.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prohobo|4 years ago|reply
There's a lot of good new music nowadays, but you have to look for it, and it doesn't have the same impact as, for example, hearing White Rabbit for the first time. It's nearly all acquired taste.
So, I think the problem here is that we lack impactful music because of a decaying culture, over-commercialization of the industry, and a lack of technical innovation.
What can we do about it? That's the same question everyone is asking about nearly everything else these days.
[+] [-] zwkrt|4 years ago|reply
Something I have noticed about the old radio hits from the 50s-70s is how fun many of them are to whistle. Most contemporary pop, rock, r&b, country can’t hold a candle to the popular songwriters of that era in terms of whistle-ability.
What I take away is that the popular songwriting style in that time was very “melody-forward” like in the days of tin-pan alley. Today I can tell that many songs are written in a more “mood-forward” way, and artists are more interested in exploring tambre than to make an absolute ear-worm of a melody. The result IMO is that those mid-century songs will have a lot more staying power.
[+] [-] Saint_Genet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poulsbohemian|4 years ago|reply
My gut feeling is it came down to money - music producers / distributors realized they could separate the working musicians from the pretty face. As far as I'm concerned, this is the basic problem with movies too - the majority of movies are just a vehicle for whatever flavor-of-the-month pretty face they need to splash on a billboard. There's very little artistic about either music or movies, they are just "new" and industry expects us to eat what they feed us.
That isn't to say there isn't great music out there, and I'd argue it is the golden age if you are someone who wants to produce anything creative and take it directly to an audience. It just means that there's a breakdown between the "mainstream" and the "good".
[+] [-] mellavora|4 years ago|reply
When suddenly it wasn't about the music any more, it was about the video showing the music?
[+] [-] redisman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wolverine876|4 years ago|reply
It follows the bands that inherited the mantle of seminal New York bands such as Sonic Youth. For the most part it's what you expect, with some great historical cuts, interviews, the new bands reflecting on and praising their predecessors, etc.
*SPOILER*
But it has a surprise ending. Suddenly there's a different tone from the old bands. They disparage the newcomers: The older bands completely rejected what their predecessors did; they destroyed it. The new bands that copy their music completely miss the point; what they are doing is antithetical to the art.
And I agree: We still have people playing rock'n'roll and hip-hop generations later. Are you kidding me? How shameful! How boring! Heck, someone play big band at least. Rock and hip-hop were revolutionary artforms; they didn't try to sound like Frank Sinatra or (for hip-hop) the Beatles - in fact, they tried to sound completely different, to demonstrate their rejection of the prior generation, to throw it in everyone's faces. Until I hear someone completely reject rock and hip-hop, burn them down to ashes (artistically), and piss me off, it's all bullsh-t. (And I mean it; I haven't listed to this crap in years.)
[+] [-] listenallyall|4 years ago|reply
Isn't that electronic music? No recognizable instruments, often no lyrics or song structure.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] madsbuch|4 years ago|reply
Music is not like a new phone. There are no "upgrades".
Maybe it is futile to conceptualize old / new music? We have music, and then just an expansion of the catalog.
[+] [-] mihaaly|4 years ago|reply
This is how it is when people can pick their music more freely instead of fed by the industry and from a seemingly endless list not just from those stamped as 'new'.
No killing is going on here. Music that people like will be listened to still, regardless of their age. It is just much much more out there from earlier than now, due to longer period and more people throughout the history.
[+] [-] dehrmann|4 years ago|reply
Disagree. Listen to "I'll Be" by Edwin McCain, then "You and Me" by Lifehouse.
Ed Sheeran upgraded "Thinking Out Loud" with "Perfect."
"Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne is an improved "Hey Mickey."
[+] [-] rootusrootus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsedlm|4 years ago|reply
computers can take us there but not so long as MIDI is the standard. the 'problem' (which is really more of an opportunity to improve and go beyond) is not MIDI but the conceptual theoretical framework of the 12-notes keyboard underlying all 'western' traditions.
but don't get me wrong, it's no coincidence that this 12 notes system is so widespread, it really is very well made. anything that attempts to take music beyond it needs to be even better, which ain't easy as it's quite something already.
in summary, computer technology has so far just made cheaper and easier to do the same things that were already possible. no new things have been tried yet regarding the choice of notes to use.
[+] [-] efitz|4 years ago|reply
That said, a lot of music today is over produced- levels set too high, etc.
Also, a lot of pop and r&b music today doesn’t seem very creative to me- pounding bass line, trivially simple melody, chanted, simple, explicit lyrics, and then depend on production to try to make it interesting. This obviously appeals to a lot of people but maybe not so much to others.
Mass market music is intentionally formulaic; search the web for “Doctor Hook”.
On the other hand, there are some super creative things out there. I like genre-bending remixes personally like Pentatonix’ cover of Fleet Foxes’ “White Winter Hymnal”, or Steven Seagulls cover of “Thunderstruck”.
Point is, that the stuff that will fall in your lap is mass market and not as creative IMO as pop was in earlier generations. However there’s great stuff out there; you just have to look for it.
Also the tools to find music you might like are better than ever, eg you can hum or sing into Shazam or Siri a snippet of a song you liked, online you have lyric searches. And all the music services have ML to find songs you might like based on songs you like.
[+] [-] zzzeek|4 years ago|reply
if there's not as much money to be made selling new music I think it's mostly because there is so much new music. anyone can record an album now, or whatever, release it, do the whole nine yards, without having to go through that ridiculous hurdle so many years ago of "getting a deal with a label". if you're into a whole genre of music, that's great, but there's like 18 thousand other genres that are all just as valid now, unlike in the 1980s when there were something like five. All the bands that you think are great and have changed your life listening to are not anyone else's in your town. it's as though the music industry has spread across the whole galaxy to millions of planets and it would be impossible for there to ever be some artists that are as important as names like the Police or Madonna were in the 80s.
It was widely understood that even then, while "getting a record deal" was the only way you'd have a career, the publishing companies were generally in it to rip the musicians through a shredder and extract as much cash as they can before discarding the talent, except in the very unlikely case that said talent did well enough to still be viable for more albums.
I'm sort of amazed that industry hasn't just thrown in the towel at this point, they were basically gatekeepers on recording and distribution technology.
[+] [-] analog31|4 years ago|reply
I have a thought, which is that modern music production and distribution have blurred the lines between "recorded" and "live" music.
I'm a musician. The only way to hear my band is to attend one of our concerts. There's no reason for us to even attempt to commercialize our music. It doesn't need to have any lasting or widespread appeal. If we get an audience of 100 people, that's huge for us. Because of the novelty of our performances (never the same mistake twice), we don't have to be perfect in order to interest the audience. Nothing we play is "produced."
Prior to online music distribution, there was a sharp distinction between live and recorded music. If you wanted to reach beyond those 100 people, it cost an arm and a leg to get your music into commercial distribution, so it had to be targeted to a mass audience, or at least a big enough audience of enthusiasts to cover your costs. There was an economic reason to be good in the sense of having that widespread and lasting value.
Today, it costs no more to stream your music than to play it live. Maybe less. So it may just be that the financial incentives weigh towards creating throw-away recordings that last long enough to replace them with the next one. Just like with live music, your job isn't so much "the performance of a lifetime," as it is, "get them to come back next time."
Today, if you move outside of mass commercial music, there is plenty of great new music just like there always was. That's because, while the economics of popular music have changed, the economics of great new music really haven't.
Disclaimer: When I'm not playing jazz, I'm accompanying fiddlers and folk musicians. I've opted out of the popular music scene.
[+] [-] les_diabolique|4 years ago|reply
Music is too disposable now. With my spotify subscription, I can still listen to those albums from the 90s/early 2000s over and over again, but there's just so much new music. Even new albums that I really enjoy, I'll listen to them a handful of times and forget about them.
[+] [-] shae|4 years ago|reply
Anyway, I spend thousands of dollars on amazing music on bandcamp, and the artists get a higher percentage from bandcamp than a studio, so I'm making the best choice for me and the future of my music.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|4 years ago|reply
Personally I think autotune sucks all the emotional connection out of music. It is one thing that Miku Hatsune sings like that, it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)
Autotune music just washes over people without having any effect.
When there is autotune music on at the gas station people can't tell you who the artists is sometimes they aren't even sure if it is rap or country music. Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I'm almost tempted to say that "Kanye West doesnt't exist or that he's just famous because his wife is famous."
[+] [-] rogerclark|4 years ago|reply
As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial". That's not how it works. Plus, people don't just throw a vocal track through some magical automatic tuner and get a perfect result. There is an unbelievable amount of manual work involved to produce a high quality vocal track.
This stuff has been going on since the beginning of pop music. Most pop hits since the 70s have had spliced vocals where ideal takes are combined. Since advanced sampling began in the 80s, we've had manual pitching and adjustment of tiny vocal clips. That became easier in the 90s with computers. In the 2000s, when full-featured DAWs and plugins became practical, we've had more automatic pitch correction, like the auto-tune vocal effect you heard from T-Pain and others. But there's always something manual involved, and there's a lot of work from the vocalist to make this happen.
Max Martin, the producer of countless pop hits starting in the 90s, has detailed many times that he combines dozens of vocal takes and corrects pitch throughout the entire vocal tracks. This is normal. People actually want this.
[+] [-] halpert|4 years ago|reply
And similarly, your dislike of auto tune likely reflects your cultural upbringing more than anything else.
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajkdhcb2|4 years ago|reply
I care about privacy, so I opted out from having a youtube/instagram/facebook account. I never used streaming because I listen to albums and want to own my music.
The result is that I don't even get notified when my favourite musicians recommend a band or even release a new album.
Where is the product for me? I am not in any of their data and just sit here listening to an offline library I built more than 10 years ago, desperate but struggling to find new stuff
[+] [-] mellavora|4 years ago|reply
for just one of many examples, may I present Dark Side of the Moonshine by Poor Man's Whisky?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF_nYQE1K3I&ab_channel=PoorM...
or Time/Breath by Greensky Bluegrass?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw1bJrFdCjY
New music is reviving old music. Makes the original Floyd recordings sound slow, ponderous, pretentious, and boring, even to the ears of this old fan.
[+] [-] tenebrisalietum|4 years ago|reply
Early 90's is also when various underground styles and genres--house, techno, rave, jungle, industrial, were a thing enough to be easily discoverable even without the Internet. It was also then when 70's music was old enough to be called classic rock.
Then:
- Rap, techno, and other electronic-based styles of music showed that one-person music groups could be a thing.
- Music production technology started a trend of getting cheaper and cheaper as PCs became capable of real-time audio processing and non-band genres proved themselves viable.
Combine that with the Internet and it's not surprising we have an oversupply problem.
Then you have the Internet's effects on any type of media - almost costless to distribute, streaming and mp3 players enabling people to listen to exactly what they want anywhere they want, and social media's bubble effects. So it's not surprising we have a problem with things attaining cultural significance.
It wasn't like this in the past so music from the time when it wasn't has a special nostalgia.
It has never been a better time to get new music if you are willing to escape your bubbles and look, though.
> So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it.
It really looks like the music industry as an institution is failing, and I'm fine with that. It's not needed anymore.
[+] [-] karaterobot|4 years ago|reply
I read Gioia's book, and respect his opinions on music. I think he is missing at least one point:
This finding makes complete sense if you assume there is nothing fundamentally better about new music than old music, but that there is much more old music, and that it is better curated.
There are many more of what we could call "great songs" from the last 100 years than in the last 18 months, not because music was better in the past, but because there was so much more of it. It's also really easy to find this old music now, because everybody knows about it, has written about it, has put it in lists, has included it in soundtracks, and so on. So, if you only cared about quality, and you picked your playlist more or less at random from a collection of "great music", you would expect the vast majority of what you listened to to have come from the past. Which is what we see.
That's even setting aside recommendation algorithms, which give you more of what it thinks you want. How many songs from the last few months are there that are similar to the one I said liked? A few, probably. But, compared to the number of songs from the last 50 years, it's probably a small number. So, if you catch me randomly listening to music Spotify thinks I like, it's going to be mostly older music, even if I have no preference regarding the age of what I listen to.
The relative prevalence of new music makes sense in the past, when you got all your music from a few sources, and those sources were incentivized to push your toward the latest products. MTV, radio stations, record stores, current bands: all these people want you to listen to new stuff, so as gatekeepers, they're going to push you toward it. Now, those pressures aren't as strong, so we're seeing more like a "fair" distribution of listening behavior.
To be clear: I don't think people listen to music at random, but I think recommendation algorithms tend to unlock more of music history as a side effect of needing to keep giving you more things to listen to.
[+] [-] Spivak|4 years ago|reply
The future of music is bright folks.