Is Old Music Killing New Music?


I ran across this Atlantic magazine article on another music forum. It asks the question if old music is killing new music. I didn't realize that older music represents 70% of the music market according to this article. I know I use Qobuz and Tidal to find new music and new artists for my collection, but I don't know how common that actually is for most people. I think that a lot of people that listen to services like Spotify and Apple Music probably don't keep track of what the algorithms are queuing up in their playlists. Perhaps it's all becoming elevator music. 

Is Old Music Killing New Music? - The Atlantic

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As the parent of a 20-something year old musician, my son says if there is a music industry, it's nothing like it was when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s.  FM radio was king.  If your music was played on the radio, people went out and bought the physical media.  That meant that a few executives decided what new music people heard.  There are tens of thousands of hours of new music uploaded to the internet every week.  How do you listen to all that and say there are "no good musicians" anymore?  That's not true.  There are so many who never get championed by someone already famous to promote them. If you want your music heard, you pay big money for your music to get promoted.  Also, young people rarely listen to the FM radio.  My son doesn't listen to FM radio.

I’m a boomer that grew up in New York and was a fan of WNEW FM and got to see all the great concerts.   I got interested in Jazz while still in High School. 
Fast forward to 2002, I started taking my daughters to the Baker Street concerts every Friday night in Atlanta. 
it gave me a whole new appreciation for Alternative Rock so I’ve managed to maintain an appreciation for many eras. 

Bottom line for me is that I enjoy several genres of music and try to keep current using Sirrus XM. 

Man, finding new artist and music has never been easier. And such a huge variety. While I fondly remember sifting through album bins for half a day in my younger years the fact is, and while I still enjoy it, I just don't have that kind of time anymore. So I find having a few minutes to read through threads like this makes it easy to find new artist and music...read post, select highlight, Command C, Qobuz, search bar, Command V, enter, new artist, click the Heart and my next listening session is set.

@yyzsantabarbara

I just have to laugh at that thread title, yes I remember the album bins too, and the 8 tracks, cassettes and reel to reels, but thats equipment.

First remembered listening to older jazz and 16 2/3 records, and 78's and of course 45's as well. especially Buck Owens doing Truck Driven Man on an old RCA with tubes.

One thing I also remember in High School was a class called Music Appreciation, lots of different kinds of music and something that today I guess is a bit of a dinosaur like me.

 Albums are different, you listened to one song after another by the same artist, one song might actually blend right into another.

Now we have streaming, pick and choose anything you want. But there's something missing, its called patience. Taking long enough to appreciate what an artist has to say musically. But its not about them, its about us. What we want to hear , not what they want us to hear.

Isn't it easier to skip around streaming all sorts of different music, than to actually sitting down and listening to an entire album ?

 In that Music Appreciation class, the teacher thought that classical music would get listened to less and less, and it came true, I really don't think its really appreciated as much as it used to be.

 But most classical pieces tend to be longer and you need that patience again to really listen to them.

Maybe all it really takes is time, something that most of us today, just don't have enough of.