Plain English with Derek Thompson - Is Old Music Killing New Music?

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

Why does it seem like the old is eating the new in pop culture? This year, the song of the summer is arguably Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill”—which was released in 1985. It was launched by the most-watched global TV show of the summer, 'Stranger Things'—an homage to the 1980s. In movies, the biggest hit of the season is 'Top Gun: Maverick'—a sequel to the 1986 film. The '80s was four decades ago! The triumph of nostalgia and familiarity in culture is deeper than one summer. The five biggest movies of this year are the second 'Top Gun,' the second 'Doctor Strange', the sixth 'Jurassic Park', the 14th Batman-related film, and the fifth 'Despicable Me'. Amazing original films, like 'Everything Everywhere All At Once', show up here and there, but as far as slam dunk blockbusters go, the last decade has suffered from a new movie curse. There's a new music curse, too. Total music consumption is rising across album sales, track purchases, and streaming. But consumption of new music is down. The entire growth in music is happening in so-called catalog music, or older songs. What's happening here? Today’s guest is Ted Gioia. We talk about his viral essay “Is old music killing new music?”, the dearth of young stars in Hollywood, and the rise of risk-aversion in American culture and business. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ted Gioia Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Matt Bellany, founding partner of Puck News, and I'm covering the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. With my new show, The Town, I'm going to take you inside Hollywood with exclusive insight on what people in show business are actually talking about. Multiple times a week, I'll talk to some of the smartest people I know, journalists, insiders, all of whom can break down the hottest topics in entertainment to tell you what's really going on. Listen now. Today, the deep story of a cultural mystery. Why does it seem like the old is eating the new in pop culture? So this year, the song of the summer is very arguably Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill, a deal with God.

It was launched by the most watched global TV show of the summer, Stranger Things. And in movies, the biggest hit of the season is clearly Top Gun Maverick. Something interesting about these three titles. Running Up That Hill was originally released in 1985. The original Top Gun came out in 1986. Stranger Things is an homage to the tokens of the 1980s. That's four decades ago. So the summer of 2022 has basically been a temple to the 1980s.

Now, maybe you're thinking, Derek, you know, don't build any grand theory from this. Beware of recency bias. It's just one summer. But if you keep digging a little bit, you realize the story is clearly deeper than one summer. The five biggest movies of this year are in order, the second Top Gun, the second Dr. Strange, the sixth Jurassic Park, the 14th Batman-related film, and the fifth, Despicable Me. There are obviously a lot of amazing original films being made all the time, but as far as slam-dunk blockbusters go, the last decade has suffered, you could say, from a new movie curse.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a review of the new Beyondfield. album with the headline, Can She Break the New Music Curse? The article pointed out that something truly strange is happening. Total consumption of music is up across album sales, track purchases, streaming, but listening to new music is down. The entire growth in listenership is happening in so-called catalog or older songs. Some data from Billboard. In 2017, catalog music was 61%.

of total listening. In the first half of this year, it's 73%. That's a tectonic shift. In a big and controversial article earlier this year, the music critic Ted Joya wrote that old music is killing new music. And this wasn't one of those sleepy, turgid, oh, kids these days with their hip-hop and their TikToks. This was a music fan, a music historian,

diving into the data to show that streaming patterns are rapidly, rapidly changing and that the music industry is making deliberate choices that might be squeezing the life out of new artists. Today's guest is Ted Joya. We talk about his viral essay

is old music, killing new music, the dearth of young stars in Hollywood, and the rise of a new kind of risk aversion in American culture and business. This is a topic I have thought a lot about recently because it's not just pop culture, where old is eating the new. The average CEO in America has never been older.

The average college president in America has never been older. The average age of a senator has never been older. The president of the United States is the oldest in American history. And yes, you could say it's an aging country. Yes, of course, people are living longer, and that's good. But something else is happening here. Something less benign and more interesting. than the mere passage of time.

And this episode, I hope, offers a key piece of the puzzle. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Ted, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. So you wrote this viral article, is old music killing new music? I want to start right there.

What was your argument? It's very interesting when you look at the numbers, because there's a clear trend going on there. I find it a very disturbing trend because over time, more and more of the music consumption in the United States is tilting towards what they call the catalog.

These are songs that are older than 18 months. But in fact, when you dig into it, it seems like in many ways these are songs that are older than 10, 20, 30 years. And everything seems to be converging here. The data now shows that more than 70% of the songs streamed our old songs. Just a few months ago, it was more like 65, 66%.

And so it's inching up. Adding on to that, you find that the biggest area of investment in music is publishing catalogs of older artists. And when I say older artists, I mean older artists, people older than me. Now, that's seriously old when you get that. But we're talking about musicians in their 80s. 70s you have Bob Dylan or Paul Simon. People are snatching up these catalogs.

In fact, they're investing much more in the rights to old music, the new music. That's never been true before in the history of song, unless you go back to the medieval era. You go back a thousand years, you might find something similar. But right now, it's just off the charts. That's what people want to invest in, are the old songs. And then finally, I'll just add anecdotally.

wherever I go, I hear old music. You know, I go into a store, and the people working in the store are all half my age, but they're listening to the songs I grew up with. I go into a restaurant, the same thing. I asked this server, I said, why are you listening to old songs like this? And she looked at me in surprise. She said, you know, I like these songs. I thought it was like the boss.

I thought there was some octogenarian boss in the back room that was ordering this. But this is just everywhere. And now you see, you know, recently with these old songs coming back on the charts, you can't deny it. The old music is squeezing out the new music. So listenership is tilting toward older music and investment is tilting toward older music. And I'm equally interested in both of these phenomena. Before we get into why this is happening, I'd love you to tell me how unique this moment is

because I think casual fans have always underrated the importance of old music to the music business. always been true that catalogs were incredibly lucrative for the labels. And the same is true for other media, by the way. On TV, reruns are lucrative. In the book industry, backlists are really lucrative. Like nine trillion copies of the Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rive been sold in high schools. Like the Bible for Pete's sake. So do we have data in music from like the heydays of CDs or vinyl where we can point to that data and we can say, wow, new music really used to be a bigger deal, but now old is eating new. The data is murky, and I've tried to dig into getting information that is consistent

over a period of decades. I have not been able to find that. But when you find the patches of information, you see it's crystal clear that the music industry was built all around new songs for decades, and you could measure it a number of ways. You could see what was on display in a record store. You could listen to what they were playing on the radio. You could see what your buddies had when you went to their homes and looked through their record collection. You could see whose concerts were selling out.

There were all this information out there. I wish I could synthesize it into some sort of chart of leading indicators. But that's hard to do. And in fact, the music industry numbers are more difficult to understand now than ever before. because there was a day when they measured sales, but there are no sales now. When they tell you these are the best-selling songs in the country, they're not actually talking about sales.

They're talking about people watching a video or whatever. So the data is getting harder to track. But I think it's inescapable, particularly when you see studies year after year now coming from the same market research groups using the same methodology. So for example, if old music was 67% of consumption, last year and this year it's up to 72, 73%. You can't really deny the numbers, but I'll be honest, you try to measure them, they're not good.

You know, the other thing I'd love to be able to measure is how much money teenagers spend on music. I have searched for this data everywhere, but I know there was a time, I mean, going back to my day, you spent a sizable amount of your budget or your allowance, I guess that was the word. You use your allowance. You might spend a third of your allowance on music. You're buying up albums or whatever. And now I find talking to teens, I'm asking them, do you pay for a streaming subscription? Usually they just piggyback on their parent's subscription.

And I'd love to be able to measure. But I think if you found the actual numbers, you would see per capita spending on music of all sorts by younger people has collapsed. So people who listen to this podcast know I'm obsessed with the idea that if you look at the U.S. box office, all the most popular movies have like a colon or a number in the title because they're essentially episodes in a franchise. I want to extend this idea of the superstar effect to music. I know music is more splintered, but I wonder if there's a similar dynamic. So I looked at best-selling albums of the last decade, or as you pointed out, album equivalence, which is basically streaming data that is turned into album sales numbers by year. Here are the last seven years of best-selling album equivalence. In 2015 and

2016, the best-selling album was by Adele. In 2017, 2019, and 2020, it was Taylor Swift. In 2021, again, it was Adele. So, yes, music has a very long tale. A gazillion people listen to Drake and Harry Styles. But this really is an unprecedented situation. If you go back to the 1990s, 80s, 70s, 60s, never before have two artists dominated like this ever. And I wonder, in addition to your old is eating the new dynamic, whether you also see a kind of superstar eats-all dynamic happening in music. I don't believe it's one superstar squeezing out the other, because we've seen that before.

In the 80s, everybody loved Michael Jackson and Madonna, but still there were room for other people. You know, I'm old enough to remember Beatlemania. I mean, I was a tiny little top when that happened. But it eclipsed everything, but still there was room for other folks. I think there's a different dynamic going on here. I think there are many factors. But what I'd like to highlight, and I think it's similar in movies and music,

is this extraordinary risk-averse behavior among the businesses involved. Because you point out that most films nowadays are reboots or sequels or prequels or spinoffs of various sorts. Just to be clear, it's the most popular movies that are sequels, adaptations, and reboots. I don't want my friends who report on the movie business to chide me on this point. There are a ton of movies being made that are not sequels, adaptations, and reboots. What's important and what's interesting is that if you look at the movies that tens of millions of people actually want to see, those don't tend to be originals. And I buy into that 100%. but I don't blame it all on the audience

because if you look at films, at films that have not yet been released, so you can't even tell right now what the audience is going to say, the ones in which the most money has been invested by the studios are sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, and spin-offs. So I will blame the audience a little bit, but I think really we are living in an environment, both in movies and music and other things as well

in which all the money is being pumped in these zombie projects, something that's from 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago were bringing back to life. So they're spending a fortune on 80-year-old Harrison Ford making a new Indiana Jones movie. They're spending a fortune to get Tom Cruise back into that bomber he hadn't been in since the 1980s. So I do think you should sniff out the money.

Follow the money. You know, before I got involved in writing about, music, I worked consulting to Fortune 500 companies doing this future as stuff. And the rule we always had is follow the money. If you want to understand what's going on, follow the money. And I would say in both movies and music now, the investment dollars are shaping the audience behavior. I'm really glad that you said that last point because I think that sometimes when I make descriptive statements about culture, like everyone is watching sequels, adaptations and reboots when it comes to box office returns, they say, oh, you're singing that original movies

aren't any good. And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm not saying that. I'm describing the outcome. I'm telling you what I'm seeing. I love original movies. I prefer original movies. I have seen Michael Clayton 17,000 times. I don't like Marvel that much. I'm just telling you what people are doing. You mentioned follow the money. So I think at this point, we should probably do just that and follow the money. There's something happening behind the scenes and music that I think a lot of of casual fans don't know about, which is that a new kind of company or a new kind of investment product is specializing today in buying the catalog to famous artists for millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars so that they can license those songs for ads and movies.

Bob Dylan sold, I believe, 100% of his catalog for about $300 million. Neil Young sold 50% of his career catalog to a company called Hypnosis for $150 million. Stevie Nix sold the majority stake in her songs to a company called Primary Wave for $100 million. Whitney Houston, David Crosby, Imagine Dragons, The Killers, all made these deals. What are these companies? Tell me a little about these new players and how they're changing music. Well, there are different kinds of players involved, and no matter which one you look at, it's bad news. You mention a fund called Hypnosis, and this is an investment fund that just buys up old songs. And they get investors to pump in money, and they will just buy up any old song they can see.

And they make promises that they're going to license these songs. They're going to show up in TV advertising and TV shows and in movies and elsewhere. And they promise these great returns. And we can ask in a moment whether these returns will actually happen. out that songs are a depleting asset and the copyright does expire at some point. And I've studied what happens to old songs. I went and looked at songs from 80 years ago. So I actually went back to the hit songs of 1942. And I asked myself, what licensing income can you get from any of these? The short answer is nothing. Nobody wants to hear a song that's

80 years old. Now, how about 70 years old or 60 years old? If you follow the money spent on Elvis memorabilia. Elvis Presley being a good surrogate of the late 50s, early 1960s. It's collapsing because the Elvis fans are dying. You know, pop culture people think last forever, but it doesn't. I think yesterday was Bob Hope's 100th birthday. Nobody knows who Bob Hope is, but he was the biggest comedian in the United States a few decades ago.

So hypnosis is making this grand claim that they'll get you enormous returns if you buy old songs. But there's another side of the story I want to focus on that disturbs me even more, because the other big buyers here are record labels. Universal Music, Sony, these are companies that a few years ago would have put that music in signing new artists and building their careers. They're not so interested in that anymore. And what are these numbers add up to? Well, if you look at last year, $5 billion was invested in buying up the rights to oil. old songs. That's enormous. Now, I'd love to be able to tell you how much they're spending on building careers of younger artists. They don't publish that number, but it's tiny. It's a tiny

fraction of that. Now, what will be the end result of this? What happens when everybody invests in the past, not the future? I can't tell you, but I will say we're going to find out. I think we're already finding out when you see these numbers I've been citing about people listening to the old songs. It's simply the obvious end point when that's where all the money's called. It's interesting because the headline to your original piece is that old music is eating new music. What's more true to me is that Boomer nostalgia is eating Gen Z. Because it's not the case that 1930s are eating the 2020s, right? Like the 1870s aren't eating 2020s music. No one's buying a bunch of Puccini and, you know, investing a billion dollars in, you know, Verdi operas rather

than spending it on the new hip-hop star, they're investing in a very particular generational slice of pop music, which is music that was popular between, just again glancing at my list, the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. I mean, to a certain extent, you have the killers in there as well, and imagine dragons, people are clearly investing in early 2010's hits as well. But would you agree with my edit there? I'm not suggesting that your headline was misleading because, you know, this music is older. But if we're trying to be as specific as possible about what's happening, it seems to me that the people with money, whether they are, you know, funds like hypnosis or, you know, music players like Universal and Sony, they are reorienting their investment toward

boomer nostalgia rather than planting the garden of the hitmakers of the next decade. Is that fair? I don't disagree with that. It's a puzzling phenomenon, though. You know, I'm a boomer. myself, but I spend most of my days listening to new music. So I listen in the course of any given year, I'll listen to more than a thousand newly released albums. So far this year,

I've listened to more than 900 albums released in the year 2022. So I'm very much tied in with new music. And actually, the music of my generation, I just peripherally know, because when I was coming up, I was a jazz musician. So I sort of blocked out pop culture for many

years. But I know all those songs. You could not know those songs growing up, all that, all that boomer music. So I won't deny that, but the question is, why is this the case? Now, you could make a, maybe you could make the case that boomers spend more money on music than younger people. And I do think that might be true in terms of actually buying physical albums or putting, they're the ones paying for the streaming subscriptions in many households or whatever. But still, that doesn't make sense because for decades, the music industry was driven by money spent by young people. That's why I get back to this issue of what are the kids doing with their allowance. And so the boomers are able to control the dialogue on music, but everyone else is letting them do that.

You know what I love is that you're a boomer who listens to a lot of new music, and I'm a millennial who just really listens to a lot of old music. You know, Bill Evans and Chet Baker and jazz, a lot of classical, a lot of weepy, Brit pop from the turn of the century. Like, that's my entire music diet. And because I'm a normie, and most people stop seeking out new music as they get older. Spotify did a study a few years ago, I think, where they found that the typical listener stops seeking out new music by, like, the age of 33, because we form our musical taste

in our teens and 20s, and then the sensitive period is over, and we enter our mid-30s, late-30s, which is where I am, and our taste are basically solidified. And by the way, that's one of the reasons why Spotify invented the program Discover Weekly. It was to stimulate the dying instinct of their aging consumer base because they wanted them to find new stuff to listen to. But you mentioned that it's harder to launch new stars these days, possibly because the music labels have shifted their investment toward older stars. Just wanted to point out, we're seeing exactly this effect in movies. Ben Lindberg and Rob Arthur of The Ringer wrote this amazing piece on the rise of older lead actors. in Blockbuster movies.

So in the year 2000, they found, the average age of one of the top two male actors in a Blockbuster film was 37 years old. Now, in 2022, it's 50 years old. Tom Cruise was 24 when the original Top Gun came out. He's still carrying the franchise at 60. And it's actually become really difficult to name, say, you know, 5, 10 star actors

under the age of 30. So tell me a little bit about the similarities that you see between the music, phenomenon that we've talked about and this movie phenomenon, which is that lead actors are getting older and older with every passing year. I think in both instances, there are many factors going on, but I want to highlight one. I think it's very important in both music and movies, and almost nobody talks about it. But the problem is originating in the distribution channel. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, let me tell you about music, then we'll look at movies in a second. But in music now,

everything is distributed through streaming platforms. And that's a big change because you go back two decades, things were distributed through record stores. Someone would walk into a record store and buy stack albums, or they would download later from the iTunes store, but they would pay money constantly. And then somebody got the bright idea that will allow folks to stream as much music as they want for $9.99 a month.

This was what we call collapsing the price umbrella. Say that one more time. It was collapsing the price umbrella. Collapsing the price umbrella. Because generally the umbrella is what holds up the pricing in an industry. I'm using NBA jargon here. The umbrella holds up the prices. Everybody's charging $50.

Somebody charges $30 and everything collapsed. All the competitors have to rush to match that. So in music, there was a collapse of the pricing. And the interesting thing is it was done without anyone knowing if it was going to work. The whole music industry jumped on this streaming thing before it proved it could be profitable. You know, Spotify was just saying, hey, play this game with us. We might make money, we might lose. And every label said, sure, you know, we'll roll the dice.

And what happened is that the profitability in music eroded enormously over the course of the few years. Now, why am I mentioning this now? Because what no one will tell you is to invest in a new artist does not present a good return anymore. In the old days, if I invested $5, $10 million in developing a new artist, I'd get a nice return. But after they collapsed the pricing in the distribution channel, you couldn't get a good enough return to justify the investment. Now, no one will say that to you because if you talk to you. to the CEO of Sony or Universal Music, the last thing they're going to say is, we can't break new artists anymore. We don't know how to do it. They won't tell you this because it's embarrassing.

You run a record label and you can't launch new artists, but that's the brutal truth they won't tell you. Now let's look at movies. Now let's look at movies. Is the same thing happening there? It's a very different dynamic because it was COVID here in the pandemic and they're shutting down the theaters. And then you have Netflix wanting to get movies out of the theaters and into streaming for the same one price, all you can eat buffet mentality. So I would suggest that in both instances, both in movies and music, it's hard to justify the financial investment of developing something new. So that's why in both cases they fall back on the old standby. We'll just live with what we got that's old. But, you know, Harrison Ford's going to die someday. Tom Cruise, I know these guys seem

more. I know Indy Jones seems immortal on the screen, but they will go. Bob Dylan will go. Paul Simon will go. Bruce Springs. I mean, and so we're in this vicious circle that they have forgotten how to build new artists, and now they're just building on the old, but that's going to have an unhappy ending. I don't see how it can't. I think I agree with you about the big picture. I agree that listeners are shifting toward older music. I agree that investment is shifting toward older music. I agree that risk aversion at the institutional level exists and that it is making it harder to launch new stars in music and in film.

Where I want to push back on, or at least investigate a little bit, is, well, what about all these newest stars that we see? Lizzo exists, and Bad Bunny exists, and Steve Lacey has the number one song in America, right now. And Dojikad is out there and Post Malone. And I'm looking at the top 20 most popular songs on Spotify right now. There are Kate Bush is there and Metallica's there, right? There are, you know, songs that are 30 years old. But there's also a lot of new artists. And clearly every year, new artists emerge that are the next big thing. So what explains that if you're saying it is

so-called impossible to launch new artists these days? Is it simply, is it stochastic? Is it just totally random or what? Well, let me tell you something that once again, the music industry will not tell you. But here again, I go to the numbers. And the numbers I'll point you to now is every year Forbes publishes a list of the highest earning musicians in the world. And if you go to that list, you see all the names you just mentioned. But here's the interesting part. If you read the details of the top 10, not one of them made the list from income from music.

They had a branding deal, or they sold cosmetics, or they endorsed a shoe, or they did this, that, or the other. But what does that say when the highest earning musicians in the world have to go outside of music to make their money. So there are still stars. There will always be stars.

There will always be big names. But what you find now is very different than from the past, and that even for a superstar musician who has reached the top rung, the side course is the main course. The side deal is what pays their bills. And this has many spinover effects, you see it all the time, musicians are looking for endorsement deals constantly. In the old days, you wouldn't take the endorsement deal because you would have sold out.

Just the idea of taking the endorsement deal was a negative, but nowadays you have no choice. You have no choice. You need to have your song on some TV commercial or you're not going to be able to live in the lavish style that a superstar requires. So yes, there are stars, but you need to once again dig into the numbers and it presents a very ominous picture. This is one of my favorite wrinkles about the modern history of the music business, which is that you look back at the 1980s, the concept of selling out was hugely stigmatized. Like Michael Jackson making a Pepsi commercial was absolutely anathema to what it meant to be a pop star. And people were furious. And today, you know, whatever, bad bunnies in a corona advertisement, no one cares.

It's actually kind of cool. You know, someone does a spot for something on TikTok or Instagram. Whatever. That's just them being an influencer. That's them making their bread. And it's so interesting to see how sometimes business realities can shape culture. When music was the main course of this industry, then selling outside of that main course seemed unnecessary and therefore stigmatized.

But once the main course shrinks, once that 20-ounce steak becomes a two-ounce steak, and people have to pull together a lot of other vegetables to make the plate full, it's not selling out. It's getting the necessary Caesar salad in order to be full, right? You have to get that Corona deal. You have to get that Instagram deal. You have to get that partnership with Ford. That's how you make it to the top of Forbes.

And so I think, again, the cultural attitude that we have to selling out, just so interestingly shaped by the economic reality of the music business itself. So I want to lift up here and alert listeners that we are moving from the what the hell is happening portion of this conversation to the why the hell is it happening portion of the conversation. We've already circled a few potential explanations for why music listening is shifting toward older music. At the same time, that movie stardom is shifting toward older stars. And I just want to lay out some of these reasons.

So, number one, let's just say the obvious. America is getting older. In the 1970s, the median age was 28. Now it's 38. Fewer babies, more old people with money. That's a blunt fact. And I think it's gravitationally pulling culture toward oldness and nostalgia. Number two, the risk aversion doom loop.

company sense that it's getting harder to launch new stars. They spend more money on old stars and franchises, but that has the effect of making it harder to launch new stars. You could argue that that creates sort of a situation like a number three explanation, which is that new stars are just getting harder to launch. Explanation number four is where I want to bring you back in. And it deals with technological change. So in the days of vinyl and cassettes and CD sales, the business of music was all new sales, right? But with streaming, it's not about new sales. It's about recurring revenue for Spotify or Apple music.

It's about subscriptions. And so this business model isn't geared around novelty. It's geared around something else, something like stickiness. It's geared around keeping people attached to the ecosystem. And that ecosystem, like Spotify, for example, will always have more old music than new music. So naturally, we should maybe expect that a streaming takes over, it will orient new listening toward music that already exists. How does that explanation wash with you? I think there's a lot of truth in it, but I want to point out a dynamic that's easy to miss.

If you look at Spotify or Apple Music and you ask a question, who is their most profitable customer? What you learn is interesting because it's very different than in the past. I used to be involved in all sorts of business studies and businesses always wanted to know more about their customers. And what you find is that they always rely on heavy users, heavy users. These were the most devoted music fans.

These were people like me, maybe you. I would buy stacks of albums every week. I spent a huge amount of my allowance on music, and I continued, even when I was a poor college student, if I had to choose between a meal and buying a new album, I often bought the album, you know. But things have changed because streaming, you pay one amount per month,

and the heavy users are actually the least profitable. Because Spotify has to pay royalties for all these. The most profitable customers, for Spotify or Apple Music is someone just below or above the level of indifference. They care enough to buy the subscription, but they hardly ever use it. Spotify, Apple Music, they actually flourish more on apathy. And that's because the business model no longer rewards them for appealing to heavy users. It rewards them for getting some apathetic person to sign up for a subscription they're hardly going to use.

Do not minimize the importance of that in a culture. in which there's so little interest in new things, innovation, and fresh takes on things. That's such an interesting point. And the way that I'm going to try to remember it is the music industry used to be a bar, and now it's a gym, right? At a bar. That is a great analogy. We want you to sign up for the membership, and we don't want to see you on January 1st. You have a New Year's resolution. You're going to work out. You sign up for the year, and you don't come back. So, you know, it's funny.

I listen to you to talk about the history of the music industry and how the music labels have tried to learn what people want to listen to. It leads me to my final explanation, explanation number five, which is that as the music industry has become more algorithmic and more data-driven, entertainment itself has moved toward deep familiarity. That is to say somewhat differently, the more we've learned about individual tastes, the more we realize that individual tastes

are extremely predisposed toward just re-consuming the same thing over and over and over again. So a quick story, if you'll indulge me, it's an anecdote from this book that I wrote a couple years ago called Hitmakers, which is a book about the science of hits. And this is probably my favorite story

that I learned about the music industry. I hope it's not apocryphal. I hope you don't tell me that it's fake. But when the Billboard Hot 100 came out in the late 1950s, it was kind of a lie because Billboard didn't have hard data on the albums that were being sold or the songs that were being played moment for moment on the radio. They had to rely on record store owners and radio stations to report the most bought and most played songs.

But both parties often lied because the labels would nudge them or even bribe them in many cases to plug new songs. The store owners often had this relationship with Billboard where, If they had run out of Bruce Springsteen, but they had a high stack of ACDC, they'd say ACDC was selling really well because they wanted that to enter the billboard charts at number one. They could sell out of their inventory. So this all biased the industry toward churn. But in 1991, two things happened. Number one, Billboard replaced its honor system with hard numbers. They started using point of sales data from cash registers.

And number two, also in 1991, Billboard switched to monitoring radio airplay through Nielsen. So now, suddenly, this system is data-driven. Billboard is data-driven. And overnight, like literally overnight, Billboard charts changed very, very dramatically. Number one, in two ways. Number one, hip-hop and country surged in the rankings, and old-fashioned rock solely began to fade.

And it suggests that an industry dominated by white guys on the coast hadn't paid a lot of attention to the music interests of urban minorities or southern whites. And so when they started registering actual data, it was like, holy shit, hip hop is way more popular than most people thought. But number two, and this gets to most directly to the points we've been talking about, songs stayed on the charts much longer because the record store owners couldn't lie anymore to promote churn. In fact, the 10 songs that have spent the most time on the Billboard Hot 100 were all released

after 1991. It's not because the music got better suddenly in 1992. it's because the system changed, the methodology changed. So that's the end of that story. And the lesson of the story to me is that, again, as these systems, as the feedback loops for the radio stations and the labels and Billboard have gotten more reflective as it held up a more perfect mirror to audience tastes,

the reflection in the mirror just says, play the same old it's over and over and over. And in this way, familiarity can eat out novelty, and old can replace new. That's a great story, and it's very accurate. But let me add just a little more flavor to it. Because this is one of the classic examples where you don't know where you'd rather be in the frying pan or in the fire. Because if you go back to the old days, as you rightly pointed out,

the music industry was not data-driven, not at all. in fact, I remember, you know, I got out of Stanford Business School with an MBA, and I started getting very closely involved all through Silicon Valley, back at the point when Silicon Valley was taking off. And I dealt with some of the smartest people there. And in general, when you talk to them about the entertainment industry, which was down Southern California, they mocked it. And what they would tell you is that the quality of,

of people in Silicon Valley, they were five times smarter than the people at the record labels or the movie studios in Hollywood. And there's a little story I like to use. I call it the idiot nephew phenomenon. Whereas if you went to Apple or Facebook or Google or these Silicon Valley companies, they would always hire the best people they could get. If you go down to the movie studios or the record labels, whenever there was an opening, the boss hired the idiot nephew.

Okay. Nepotism, Hollywood runs on nepotism. But you pay a price for this. You pay a price for not having good people. And what was the price? Well, in the old days, the price was no one did any data research in the music industry. And you talk to people and they say, I got a gut feel for the music. I can just feel, I can feel when it's a hit.

And basically, they were justifying their own lack of intellectual rigor. And then things switched to completely feel. flip-plop. Now it's all data-driven to the ridiculous point that algorithms are going to cheers our music, which, as you point out, is going to kill everything because an algorithm is just a feedback clue. Algorithm only looks at what you liked last week, last month, last year. And if they start doing that entertainment, nothing's ever going to change. We're going to be locked in time. Now, why did that change happen? This is why. This is the story, once again, that hasn't been told, is decision-making and music was

once done in Hollywood or by record studios, but now it's all done by tech companies. The two most powerful people in music are the CEO of Apple and the CEO of Google. I know that's painful for people to hear, but tech companies in Silicon Valley ate their lunch, and they are imposing their data-driven approach on the industry. If you'd left the music industry alone, they would still be saying, I've got a gut feel for it, So now we've moved to this completely data-driven approach run by technocrats. The bottom line is I don't think it's any better for our musical culture. In many ways, I would rather go back to the idiot.

I'm almost ready to say the idiot nephew. At least the idiot nephew needed to sell out of music to go out on that expense account dinner. This portion of the podcast will be known as, in defense of idiot, nephew. Yes. I'm going to write about the idiot nephew at some point. I haven't gotten around it. The case for the idiot nephew. I want to end with your predictions about the future of music. You published an absolutely fascinating, somewhat dystopian list of predictions about the future of music at the end of last year. A couple of them I found just sort of spooky and interesting. You said a particular phenomenon will emerge where listeners will have new favorite songs,

but not even care about the name of the artist because those songs will break in modes like, I don't know, TikTok maybe, where it will be associated with a meme rather than associated with an individual artist. You also said that you think a lot of new artistry is going to get its big break, not from the record labels that are losing their will and desire to develop new artists,

but rather from these web platforms. In this case, you mentioned that the Too Much Powerful People in music or the CEO of Apple and Google, might argue the most powerful person in music right now is whoever's holding the lever on the TikTok algorithm. Because it's just extraordinary the degree to which artists and different artistic movements can be launched by TikTok. Give me your favorite prediction about the future of music that's related to the themes we've talked about today. I have a lot of unpleasant, unhappy predictions about what takes place when you stop investing in new sounds. and audiences begin to lose their grasp of up-and-coming artists.

And you've mentioned a number of them. I really think that you are going to see more and more of situations of people saying, hey, I love this song. Well, who is it? Well, I don't know. It's on my workout playlist. Or it was accompanying a TikTok mean. It was in the background of a TV show.

But I'm going to give you a happy upbeat prediction of it. I have studied musical innovation over the long haul. My last book was called Music, A Subversible. of history. And literally, I dug into the causes of musical innovation over the course of 4,000 years. And what I saw is when you got to points in history where everything seemed static and predictable and nothing changed, something came out of the blow to shake matters up. I could give you dozens of examples. In the 1930s, the early 1930s music was very tepid. People wanted happy songs because the Great Depression was around

and there were these sentimental songs and music really wasn't as as hip and cool as it could be and then the swing era happened with hot jazz in 1936 everyone switched to this really energetic music that completely changed all the rules the same thing happened in the 1950s the early 1950s the record labels were churning out mood music albums

these bachelor pad albums, pop singers singing sweet tunes. And they thought they had found the end point. But then rock and roll came out and just disrupted everything. I think that means there's going to be something bold that's going to blow our minds just two, three, four years from now. And it's going to totally energize audiences. And here's the crazy prediction. I think it's going to be a return to some of the things from the past

that many people think have disappeared completely, like musicianship, or sophisticated songs with harmonic changes, or actual virtuosos playing honest-to-god instruments. I know people tend to think this has disappeared and will never come back, but this is the most radical thing you could do now. Put people on a stage you haven't play real instruments.

What could be more radical than that? A song with more chord changes than composers. And I'm not sure if that's going to be it or something else. But let me tell you, this idea that the music industry is going to get into this run and just stay there won't happen. Not because of the music industry, because it is the idiot nephews that are running it. But something's going to happen outside of their control, maybe even coming from overseas, maybe out of Africa or Indonesia or wherever. And there will be something new, exciting, different. And, hey, we'll all benefit from that.

I have one last thesis statement to throw at you, which is that when I think about everything we've talked about and think about the reasons why in various ways, I'm not quite as energized or offended as you are about some of the trends in music. I think the way to tie it all together for me is the double-edged sword of technological abundance. Technology has made it easier to make new music. And as a result, it's made it easier to experiment with new kinds of new music. Individual artists can release entire albums without having to find someone to play bass and drums and lead guitar. But as a result, there's just so much more of it. And because there's so much more of it, the economic returns aren't as high to the next marginal person who decides to

put their stuff on SoundCloud or Spotify. There's just a super abundance of stuff chasing a fine amount of money. That means that per artist returns are naturally going to decline. The second thing about in technological abundance is that we can listen to anything now. I mean, it's just remarkable that because of, you know, not just Spotify, I don't want to be in the business of, you know, plugging this company, but YouTube, Apple Music, there's so many different ways to essentially get a portal to 40 million different songs where you don't have to pay any additional cost for any one song. When you have that kind of abundant opportunity, when you can

listen to literally everything, most people are going to default to listen to songs they've already heard because most of us spend most of our time listening to songs we've already heard. The Ohio State musicologist David Huron, I think at one point said 90% of the time we listen to music. We're listening to a song that we've already heard. And so when I think about these two aspects of technological abundance, way more artists chasing a finite amount of money means fewer returns per artist. Way more opportunities to listen to whatever song means that we're going to default ever so slightly to the familiar.

That somewhat creates the scenario we're in now. It doesn't excuse, you know, the super investment in back catalogs in a way that squeezes out investment in new artists. It doesn't excuse everything that's happening, but it does somewhat explain it. I think that's true, but I'm not quite as well. pessimistic because I see exactly what you're saying. There's music everywhere. Thousands of new songs are uploaded online every day. Nobody could even begin to tap into it. Even though I'm a music critic and I listen to new music all the time, even I am not completely

on top of what's happening, despite devoting enormous amounts of hours into it. And people are confused. And what do people do when they're confused? Well, there are two things. One is they go back to the old and familiar, and we see that happening. But I also think this creates an opportunity for trusted guides. You know, I have a substact call, and I call it the honest broker. And the basic proposition I have with my readers is I'm going to try to be an honest, trusted guide, telling you the truth and pointing you to the way to something that you can support and feel good about. And I see this everywhere.

These trusted guides are emerging, not in the mainstream media, but they'll have a podcast, they'll have a YouTube channel. Some of them have enormous followings now. You'll have people with YouTube channels with 100 million subscribers. And so what's going on here? And I think what's going on is because it's so confusing, people seek out individuals they can trust. Now, what does this mean for music? a prediction here. I think it's interesting, but I think it's

absolutely true. In the future, individuals will do what record labels did in the past. So I, for example, I go on YouTube. If I have a YouTube channel with 30 million subscribers, I'm a record label at that point.

I can identify new artists. I can promote them. I can get their music out. I can cut side needles to get vinyl albums printed if I have to. But literally, someone with a YouTube channel can do everything as a one-person shop that previously took an entire corporation, an entire record label to do.

Now, this hasn't started happening yet in any meaningful way, but it's beginning to. So I think you're going to find that trusted individuals or trusted groups of individuals are going to move to the forefront of the culture, they're going to cut through the noise, and they're going to tell people, hey, you don't have to listen to the same songs, you listened to five, ten years ago. I'm going to guide you through this maze

and take you to the good stuff. I love it, the democratization of the label. I love ending on an optimistic note. Ted, thank you so much. We covered so much ground. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you. This was lots of fun.

Let's do it again sometime. I'm Derek Thompson. That was plain English. Thanks very much to our producer, Devin Manzi. If you have any questions, comments, ideas for future episodes, please shoot us an email

at plain English at Spotify.com. That's plain, no space English at Spotify.com. And don't forget to check out our new, beautiful TikTok page. You can find us at plain English underscore. Yes, that's at plain English underscore. And we'll see you on the TikToks. Thanks very much.