Radio networks use the music they play to give them their identity. However lots of new music has splintered into increasingly smaller sub-genres of music. If you want to play lots of this music you have to take your station down various rabbit holes of niche records which will destroy your listening figures. Easier just to play REM’s Losing My Religion and count the dollars.
I’ll chip in a couple of anecdotes to this question. Keep in mind my daughter turns 17 in a month.
I was riding to a tournament with SunLass and a Journey song came on the radio. She sang along with it. It turns out that, from bingewatching Glee, she has a better grasp of the Journey songbook now than I, who grew up on arena rock, do.
I recently drove her and three of her friends to a concert by one of her favorite boy band alumni. It was a good show; the musical interlude between the opening and main acts was capped off by Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
I would estimate the average age of the concertgoers to be somewhere in the high teens, including old farts like me along for the ride. Most of them hadn’t been born yet when Mike Myers and Dana Carvey sang the song in the car in Wayne’s World, much less when the original was released. Yet, somehow, the entire hall was singing along at the tops of their lungs, and knew every word. I was so stunned I took a video with my phone.
Maybe the accessibility and… ubiquity?.. of old music has a lot to do with why it seems to be throttling new music in the crib?
Plus, if we apply Sturgeon’s (expanded) Law (“90% of everything is crap”) and couple it with selection effects, it means that a curated list of old music will have less dreck than you would have to wade through by listening to new music. And, of course, old and new are subjective; to someone who’s never heard “Born on a Bayou” before, Chronicle qualifies as new music to them.
Spotify and modern music platforms try to find music that a person will like. They don’t care how new or old that music is, just that the person likes it.
From there, it’s pretty easy to see why new music wouldn’t do well. It needs to compete with everyone, not just the other newest competitors.
That’s a good point. Should it be surprising that people prefer the best of the old music to the, um, not-so-best of the new?
Also a good point.
Yeah, it’s been everywhere in music, mostly hip-hop – though it extends to other genres – for at least a decade. If you go to Youtube and search for “trap beat examples” you’ll find a bunch of tutorials to make trap beats. Generally, you have a pretty slow-to-medium tempo, sparse kick and snare/claps/clicks on 2&4, and then the hi-hat doing a pattern that usually starts with straight eighth notes, but you’ll get little flurries of hats in there, or triplet patterns, that sort of thing to break things up, as well as other random percussion sounds in the back. The hats, for me, are among the most distinctive of trap beats. Like this for me would be a typical-ish trap beat. Note the electronic hi-hat fluries and general rhythmic interest therein:
(I would call that 70 bmp, but you can notate it as 140 bpm with a half-time feel.) There’s more to it than just the drums, but that gives you one thing to go on.
Not to argue your main point but Spotify does have a weekly “Release Radar” which is a curated list of new releases based on your listening preferences. This is versus its other generic new release by genre lists. I have plenty of newer music in my Like list though so I don’t know what happens if you only Like classic 70s rock aside from obvious choices like new albums by old artists (including remasters, Greatest Hits, etc). I’d guess it tries to find new artists/songs liked by other Steve Miller fans.
A&R people have always rejected unsolicited demos.
So, what are people proposing to do about this?
Is new music supposed to be inherently better than old music?
In regards to the Grammy Awards, haven’t award shows been experiencing diminishing audiences for the last few years?
I would argue new music ought to at least be more relatable to current living people than music from 40+ years ago. Some of the very angriest music surely is, but that’s scary and promotes change so those in charge of the airwaves feed us more innocuous medicine, and give awards to the most glamorous of the insipid bootlickers. And then they wonder why nobody gives a shit about the Grammys.
Younger folks don’t listen to the radio. At home. At work, a few places play music and some of these still play radio. One of my first summer jobs was washing dishes, and the boss liked hit songs from the 30s and 40s. It made a long day go by slower. Like a slow boat to China.
Man, that would be rough.
On the subject on the Grammys, a few years ago, I remember complaining to a co-worker that the songs that are winning best this and best that were just terrible. He said, they were always terrible! So, we looked up the Grammy winners from the 70s, and, sure enough, they were terrible.
Let me re-write the Atlantic’s headline: “Does the continued marketability of ‘old’ music make ‘new’ music less appealing to investors?”
The ‘problem’ identified in that article is a problem about the industry. There are thousands of people making new music all the time, in every corner of the globe. Is there some clearly defined cultural imperative to stop appreciating art after it’s 1.5 years old? What, ultimately, is the problem with people finding satisfaction in (and paying for) art created in the past?
The award show whine is ridiculous. Comparing the Grammys to the Super Bowl? My eyes can’t roll far enough back in my head. Sports generally operate around a fixed season-long competition. Watching that competition is literally the core of what that industry delivers. Awards shows for the arts? They’re like the ‘bonus content’ delivered with an album. Some small percentage of super-fans are really into it, and the rest of us just want to listen to the song. If what you’re selling is music, and I already have the music, what do I need an awards show for?
It really calls into question this author’s ability to see anything clearly if he is so deep in the business that he can’t understand that the Grammys are fundamentally a nothing-burger marketing event that has nothing to do with the state of music.
Bottom line, I can head into town in my ultra-tiny city on most nights of the week and be able to listen to any number of musicians playing new, original music in a variety of styles, as well as doing covers and new takes on old material. If the hangers-on people making money selling a music-adjacent product are having trouble earning money in the face of newer modalities, well, it’s time to retire that buggy whip!
It has never been more easy for folks to create art. It has never been more easy to experience new art. New music thrives in every corner.
I feel like the nostalgia and retro-hipster (depending on the age of the arguer) position here that goes unsaid is something like: “I want everybody in America to listen to the same set of new music like we did back in the 20th century, and the fact that we don’t all adopt the same new music en masse is a bad thing because the simplicity and directness of that more limited market makes me more comfortable. I can’t be an expert on modern music if the scope is as big and fragmented as it is these days, and self-identifying as an expert makes me feel good about myself. And, my new favorite band is X, and if other people aren’t listening to it, they won’t care that I know more about it then them!”
Don’t use past Grammy Award-winning songs as an indication of what popular music was like then (or now for that matter). In terms of music taste, the NARAS has always been conservative largely because its membership is older and whiter than the overall record-buying public. That’s why the awards that went to Best Record, Best Song, and Best Album often went to artists that were, at the time, dead-center middle-of-the-road. Occasionally, they threw a bone to someone “edgy” or “different” by nominating them for Best New Artist (e.g., Elvis Costello in 1978) but they never got the prize. On the whole, the old music that’s still listened to today was largely ignored by the Grammys. I could be wrong but the Rolling Stones didn’t win any Grammys until they’d been around for more than 20 years and Led Zeppelin was never even nominated. Also, unless you count his participation as an act on the “Concert for Bangladesh” album, I don’t think Bob Dylan won anything until he was in his “born again” phase. And I’m not even getting into the obvious snubs and awards resulting from laughable classifications (e.g., Jethro Tull for Best Heavy Metal performance).
Agreed – I’ve been a music fan for over four decades, and “the Grammys are out of touch with what’s really going on in music” has been a constant theme for as long as I can remember.
Another infamous example was when they introduced a “Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance” award in 1989, which Metallica was widely expected to win (for …And Justice For All), but the Grammy voters managed to select Jethro Tull’s Crest of a Knave, which many fans (and music journalists) believed didn’t belong in the category to start with.
Wait, are you telling me that Starland Vocal Band, Debby Boone, and A Taste of Honey weren’t really the best new artists of the late 70s?? 
Bohemian Rhapsody (the movie) was only a few years ago and a big hit. My 13 year old rewatches it quite a bit. Kids today are pretty familiar with Queen.
Not better, fresher.
There is more new music easily available now than ever before. Lots of it good to great.
Exactly.
If the average music lover only hears a miniscule amount of all the music available, how can he determine if something he’s never heard before is fresh or not?
I stay more current on movies and tv than I do on music so I find that discovering new music from other media works out nicely–it takes a few years for a popular song to get picked up in a movie so it’s usually something with some staying power. That will lead me into an exploration of an artist’s discography and potentially winkle out some good new stuff.
That being said, I’m not really a fan of most electronic music, it’s just not what I like. I like hearing people playing their instruments, catch side noise and mistakes and that rawness factor. I’m very much a fan of blues and electronica is kinda diametrically opposed to that. And autotune is fingernails on an endless chalkboard to me, literally sets my teeth on edge. So yeah, there’s a whole big swath of new music that is unlikely to pass my nope rope.