The State of New Music

Lately, I’ve noticed a spurt of thought-provoking articles on the current state of music and its corporate-sponsored nemesis, nostalgia, and I’m trying to wrap my arms around this multifaceted topic. Before I get started, I encourage you to read the following three articles I’ll refer to in this essay. They are:

1)  Is Old Music Killing New Music? By Ted Gioia of The Atlantic

2) Spotify backlash offers rare insight into reeling music industry — and struggles of working musicians
 by Travis M. Andrews of The Washington Post" 

3) Hindsight is 2022: The Psychology Behind Our Cultural Nostalgia by Kyle Chayka of Town & Country. 

This is complex stuff, and I’m not an expert in the business of music, but I’ve got a couple of key takeaways from the articles I’ve been reading:

1) Nostalgia is BIG BUSINESS, and it’s only going to get bigger as corporations seek to recoup their recent investments in the back catalogs of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, and the like. Expect more and more oldies gracing the airwaves, be it on radio, TV shows, film and commercials.  I imagine tribute bands will become an even bigger deal than they are currently, with exact recreations of specific tours from decades ago. According to The Atlantic essay referenced above, older songs now represent 70% of the U.S. market, and the market for new music is shrinking. This is a problem if you’re in the business of making music or are a lover of new music.

Nostalgia also comes in the form of books and documentaries about older artists. I should know, because I love this stuff! Books by Steven Hyden, David Hepworth and Rob Sheffield are among my favorites, and don’t get me started on movies like 20 Feet from Stardom, Summer of Soul, Searching for Sugar Man, etc. But where I differ from many of my peers is that I still seek out new music, which brings me to my next takeaway.

 2) The music market is fragmented like never before. I cry bullshit at the old geezers (or people my age who act like old geezers) who claim that there isn’t good music being produced today. I make the counter claim: there is as much good music out today than ever before, but it’s harder to FIND than ever before. Gone are the days when I could turn on the radio and hear a couple dozen new music selections of different genres that were making a significant cultural impact. Now I have to make an effort to find new music, and virtually none of it will have a significant following. Instead, it will have a small but dedicated group of fans that might be large enough to support a small tour in the country’s largest cities. If I live in a smaller city, I may never have an opportunity to see the band. It may also be true that the band I like can’t last beyond a couple of years due to the awful reality of today’s music industry, and the band I discover will likely be one that none of my friends are aware of, making the experience of listening to their music a very lonely endeavor. Sure, it’s cool that I found the artist Sammy Rae recently, but I can’t name any friends who have heard of her. I’m a fan on an island, at least in my demographic.

As Gioia states in The Atlantic article: “I know that plenty of exceptional young musicians are out there trying to make it. They exist. But the music industry has lost its ability to discover and nurture their talents.”

Instead, they devote resources to repackaging older music. And why shouldn’t they? They’re in the business of making money, and as long as we as consumers are willing to accept hearing “Piano Man” for the billionth time, these corporations will do more to sell old music and do less to sell new music. Until we as consumers demand better, we will get nothing better.

3) The ability for new artists to make money is largely limited to touring, and even this isn’t all that lucrative for most artists. Streaming services pay a pittance, and physical product sales – while climbing – are a shadow of what they were in the 90s. For bands to make money, they have to tour and sell merchandise, and it’s an awfully tough way to make a living. Studio bands like Steely Dan, The Alan Parsons Project or XTC would not be able to exist as new entities today – with no physical product to sell, the only way to survive would be to tour, and touring takes its toll, especially when you’re playing at small clubs that charge $30 for a ticket. 

I recently saw the aforementioned Sammy Rae in Milwaukee, and I tried to calculate how the heck she and her band were making a living. I concluded that they probably weren’t. Consider this:

The concert I saw was attended by about 200 people at around $35 a pop. That’s $7000. But the venue has to be paid, and Sammy had a four-piece band open for her, not to mention the 6-piece band supporting her, a roadie or two, plus a sound guy (maybe one person managed all of this?). Then there’s the van or bus to take them from show to show, food and gas, and I would hope an occasional stay at a hotel to freshen up. And I haven’t even mentioned the band manager, the promoter, the cost of making her recordings, the rehearsal space they probably had to pay for to get prepared for the tour, etc. I can guarantee you this: no one is getting rich off of this endeavor. So the question is, how long can Sammy Rae endure before
a) by some miracle she makes it big; or
b) she decides she actually wants to live comfortably and pursues a saner occupation?
I fear it will be the latter, and we as music lovers will be the worse for it.

4) Back to streaming services. According to the Washington Post article referenced above, for every dollar of revenue Spotify earns, a songwriter might earn as little as 12 cents of revenue (assuming there are no co-writers). “Not bad,” you might say, but it takes somewhere around 20,000 plays to generate a dollar, so if you’re lucky enough to be an artist who has a song that gets a million plays, congratulations, you may have earned approximately $6. I may have some of my math wrong here, but the truth holds: streaming isn’t really lucrative except for the upper echelon of artists. 

The Washington Post article states: “According to Spotify’s data, 13,400 artists generated more than $50,000 and 7,800 generated more than $100,000 in recording and publishing royalties in 2020. The musician would most likely receive a fraction of that amount.”

A fraction of $50K isn’t making a living. It’s barely surviving.

So where do we go from here? The pandemic made it all too clear just how important entertainment is. There are days when it’s the only thing taking me to the finish line. But aside from the biggest musical acts selling out shows at $150 a person, we don’t seem to put our money where our heart is. I used to spend all of my spare money on albums. Now I can pay $10 a month for immediate access to almost every song I’m inclined to hear. And when I see a new vinyl release for $30 I say to myself, “No thanks.” Never mind that when inflation is taken into account, this is actually cheaper than the $9 album I used to buy in the early 80s and that I have way more disposable income.

Bottom line: if you love an artist, buy their products. Buy a t-shirt, a CD, a record, and go and see them when they’re on tour, even if you have to stand among drunk 20-somethings in a crowded club. Better to spend $30 a piece on six new artists than $180 to see that aging rocker one more time at an arena show.

Be comfortable with urging streaming services to raise your fees for the purpose of paying artists better. I know that income levels vary, but for me personally, I would be happy to pay another $10 a month IF that money went to artists and not to the streaming service.

Seek out new music. Yes, nostalgia has its place, but as the Town & Country article suggests, it’s also keeping us from life-fulfilling experiences. And it’s making corporations rich instead of musicians.

I don’t know what else to say. But as Pete Townsend sang in 1978, “The music must change,” or maybe it should be rewritten as “The music business must change.” Either that, or we’ll all be singing the same damn songs for the rest of our lives. How many more times do you really need to hear “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” or “Can’t Buy Me Love”? Isn’t there something more out there?

An Ode to Compact Discs

Just a few weeks after I touted the benefits of owning physical LPs, author and journalist Rob Sheffield writes in Rolling Stone this week about the resurgence of one of the most assailed forms of music media: the compact disc. The redheaded stepchild of music formats, Neil Young has equated listening to digitized music to sensory deprivation and torture. Ouch!

But while I’ve never understood store-bought cassettes, even back in their hey-day and especially today as they make a perplexing comeback in used record stores, I totally get why CDs are still a thing, Neil Young’s assertions aside. As Sheffield writes: “Compact discs were never about romance — they were about function.”

I and most other music connoisseurs spent years in the 2000s converting their CDs to easily stored MP3 files for use in iPods and the like, but unlike many, I stopped short of actually removing the physical products from my home. Thank goodness, because I really do like having physical CDs to play, especially when I’m driving in my Mazda, which will unfortunately likely be the last car I’ll ever own that’s equipped with a CD player. I still own the 400 or so that I amassed over the years, including my first purchases from 1986, and I still kick myself for having sold or gotten rid of around fifty CDs back in the 2000s. There’s still something alluring about playing a CD in its entirety, uninterrupted. In terms of functionality coupled with pretty damn-good quality, CDs can’t be beat.

Unless you consider streaming, which – let’s face it – wins in the functionality department and can sound pretty great if you want it to, but Sheffield echoes (and states more eloquently) some of the same arguments I made last week about streaming. He writes:

“…streaming is not a ‘place,’ but a barrage of constant options that many fans find less optimal when you’re in the mood to actually concentrate and listen. You’re probably also streaming on a device that’s nagging you about messages you need to answer right now.”

It’s the same premise that people have made all along: that there may simply be something very human about the need for tactile interaction with one’s environment, and in a culture that’s downgraded music and other media to something disposable, it’s natural that the pendulum would slowly shift toward owning physical products. CDs aren’t perfect, but they at least include liner notes and cover art. As if that’s not enough enticement, I saw scores of them at a used furniture sale last week for 25 cents apiece!

And for all you vinyl purists who lean toward environmental causes, Sheffield notes that for all the hubbub people threw at record companies for housing CDs in grotesque longboxes back in the 80s and 90s, “…the tables have turned – now if you buy an LP online, it’s shipped in a package that’s basically six longboxes.” 

Well played.

For those who aren’t familiar with Sheffield, he’s a hell of a writer, and among music geeks is revered alongside other venerated music-themed artists such as author Nick Hornby (High Fidelity) and filmmaker John Carney (Once, Begin Again, Sing Street). Sheffield resonates to a certain type of person: often male, semi music-obsessed, a bit insecure, and one who occasionally likes to bathe luxuriously in his own heartache. His books Love is a Mix Tape, Talking to Girls about Duran Duran, and Turn Around Bright Eyes are mainstays for many music nerds. I highly recommend each of them.