Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market

There's more good old songs. That's because history is longer than present.

The total catalog of good music continues to grow; decades from now, an even higher percentage of good music will be old.

Based on the data cited by the article, it looks like streaming services are now drawing in a wider age range of listeners than in the past. http://www.insideradio.com/free/mrc-data-top-hits-have-less-...

While it's certainly not true of every older person, many of the older people I know do not seek out new music at all. Previously, many of them were basically no longer in the "music market" aside from tours and some terrestrial radio in the car. They owned all the albums they liked and they listened to them, and that was that.

All of which is to say that I'm not sure that young people are listening to drastically less new music than before.

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The decline of the Grammys largely mirrors the decline of awards shows for other media. I'm not sure it's a proxy for how much less interested in new music people are, rather than a lack of interest in the industry anointing meaningless winners to itself in an age where there's plenty of people who's opinions that are more relevant to me that I can look at.

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Some other critique:

- Half the article is about streaming (a new service/technology/business model), then we're complaining about not enough new technology/R&D....

- Vinyl is having a resurgence as a physical format because physical formats are completely unnecessary now to listen to music, so the most tactile, interesting one is surviving. It's arguably the exact opposite of stagnation, given that the image and market for it has completely changed.

- I don't agree that record stores are particularly caught up in the same time warp. Extremely limited vinyl pressing capacity that hasn't kept up with demand is the primary issue limiting new vinyl releases and crowding out smaller acts, not a lack of willingness to stock newer artists on shelves. They're selling every record they can get produced, to be blunt. Additionally, the Apollo Masters fire in 2020 caused major and ongoing disruption to vinyl record production.

- Extremely few people care about musical holograms, these are certainly not any significant % of the market or doing anything for "making it harder for young, living artists to compete in the marketplace".

> Consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack of reaction, because the cultural response was little more than a yawn.

Never actually watched the grammies... but would think the decline in cultural significance is similar macro factors to TV. Streaming has allowed for audience to be fragmented across content, so mega-hit culturally shared songs everyone knows are less common. Whenever I look at US Top 50 on Spotify I pretty much only recognize the mega artists who have been around for 10 years & the rest are Hip Hop artists who I might have heard of but am not interested in. These 'popular' songs are just the most popular of the largest sub-culture, you aren't going to be hearing many of them in bars, clubs or the gym.

Is this also partly a “measurement artifact” of looking at streaming activity instead of physical media or download purchases?

If you were just looking at physical media purchases or downloads, those would be overweighted toward new music vs. what you actually listen to. Streaming picks up the stuff that’s already on your shelf, so to speak.

With the rise of online streaming and satellite radio, plus the demise of physical record shops, magazines, MTV, and local radio, everything is way more fragmented. The 80s & 90s were probably the last decades of 'common' songs based on shared media.

How old must a song be to be considered and "old song"?