Comment by volkl48 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by volkl48 | Hacker News Reader

I don't feel like 18 months and not currently on the Billboard charts is a particularly reasonable cutoff for "new vs old" music.

I listen to tons of new music - current, young artists, who've released all or nearly all of their music the past 5-10 years, that's most of my listening.

In spite of that, I expect that 70%+ of my listening is over this arbitrary cutoff and would count as "catalog" . Even if I find a new band opening at a show - probably they've been around a couple years and if I dive into them the majority of their music is >18 months.

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The other aspect is I'd like to see age demographic data for the music stats. Older people have largely only gotten into Spotify and the like more recently. Are young people listening to less new music, or is this just a reflection of now having a wider age range in streaming stats?

Yep, besides, by the definition on the graph their own examples of Kate Bush's "Running up that hill" and Metallica's "Master of Puppets" would not count as "catalog" and counts as 'new music' while The Weekend's "Blinding Lights" counts as 'catalogue' music (i.e. 'old' music in the context of this article).

Seems overly simplistic to me!

It's also worth accounting for how music is consumed and how this is accounted for - i.e. I assume the shift to streaming platforms would naturally cause reporting of old-listens to increase (i.e. if you buy a CD once in 2015 and listen to it every year, this would be recorded as a single 'non-catalogue' sale, while in the streaming world it would be classified as 'two non-catalogue listens and then five catalogue listens'), so I assume more people streaming would drive more 'recorded' catalogue listens unless this is carefully adjusted for.

Yeah I see a lot of complaints but this is the salient one.

18 months is not that old. Even mainstream pop radio stations are still going to be playing a stuff that’s 3 years old regularly.

Maybe it’s not brand new but it doesn’t fit their rhetoric later on.

The NYT ram an article a while back on Spotify listening by age; they found that people tend to latch on to what was popular when they were in their early teens.[1]

So yes, on the music side this is probably dominated by demographics. Old people listen to old music.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/favorite-s...

Deezer made a study that evaluated peak music discovery at around 25 years old.

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/people-stop-discoveri...

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