The world's playlist today is mostly music that was composed decades ago. Yesterday, so to speak. We can all argue about whether my generation's music is better than yours, but there's little doubt that corporations have stifled creativity.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
I’ve always believed that good music has a magic all its own. It can
inspire and excite. It can bridge gaps and unite. And it can comfort and console. In a matter of minutes,
music quickly takes us somewhere else for a moment in time and it can stay with
us for a lifetime. Magical music never leaves the memory.
Music is a mystical form of transportation, whether you are
cruising in a car, sitting in your bedroom, or up on the roof and, much earlier
in my life, it was inescapable. Virtually every week, there’d be a new song or
album, a new singer or group, or a new movie with a killer soundtrack featuring
tunes that we couldn’t stop singing. The music factories in New York, L.A.,
Nashville and Motown were constantly cranking out hits and A&R guys were
prowling the country in an unending search for new talent.
But that was then. Now there’s less and less new music being
funded and produced commercially and, more importantly, the world seems to be
mainly interested in listening to “oldies but goodies.” The streaming services
and cloud-connected listening devices have given us levels of detail and
precision never available before, which has revealed that most of the music
that matters these days -- more than 70% of what’s being streamed for example
-- is “old” stuff. Whether that reflects some nostalgic search for comfort and
security or just a desire to have lyrics that are meaningful, intelligible, and
not obscene, the fact is that a constantly growing number of consumers of all
ages are listening almost exclusively to old music (catalog, in the
parlance) rather than current material.
One reason for sure is that so much of the “new” music is just
more of the same “hit it and forget it” junk, which is both a disappointing and
a frightening phenomenon. These aren’t the instant classics of our youth. As
Bob Seger would say, the music today just doesn’t have the same old soul. Screaming and swearing
about booty and bling, guns and gangbangers, isn’t quite the same level of
storytelling that we still love to listen to from James Taylor, Stevie Wonder,
Jackson Browne, Otis Redding, or the Eagles.
Creative is certainly one of main reasons that most of today’s
tunes don’t have the same staying power as earlier hits. Paul McCartney’s solo
masterpiece, Yesterday has been offered in more than 3,000 cover
versions since its release in 1965 and performed well over seven million times.
Gotta wonder how many folks will be covering WAP,
especially once all the stupid liberal suburban parents figure out what kind of
lyrics their teenage kids are TikTok-ing and twerking to.
You can usually tell pretty easily what sounds suck, but no one
really knows (apologies to Clive Davis) what makes a lifelong hit until the
customers decide. As we used to say at Tunes.com, there’s a fine line between a
single and a jingle and there’s no accounting for taste. We know for sure that
the song doesn’t have to be fancy, flawless, or fashionable. It doesn’t have to
be sung by a star, be the theme of a great movie, or be the 11 p.m. highlight
of a Broadway play. And the fact that a song was initially immensely popular
for a fleeting moment and readily available and accessible (i.e., commercial,
and “right” for radio) doesn’t mean that its staying power is either assured or
diminished. Carole King’s great chart topper “It’s Too Late” started out as the
B side of “I Feel the Earth Move,” which never even charted.
Music industry old timers like to blame technology for their
problems. Digital music files (MP3s) did drastically lower the bar of what
passed for acceptable sound. Consumers sacrificed audio quality for compression
and portability and have never really looked back. No one is whining for vinyl
these days, so people stopped paying attention to, and paying for, the costly
niceties of quality production. Other technologies like the old Napster made the music “free” - albeit
stolen - and provided digital or pirated versions of the most popular hits that
you could readily share with your friends-- even if listening to a song on
computer speakers was a lot like taking a bath with your socks on.
The reality today is that the music industry makes money off of
everything other than the music, if it makes money at all. Concert tickets,
tour revenues, product tie-ins and licenses and swag at all the events are the
real money makers. The corporate suits and conglomerate clowns who came to own
and operate the major music businesses were not only musically deaf and dumb,
but they were also greedy, lazy and unwilling to change.
The music business has always been about the business first and
the music as an afterthought, but the industry didn’t really take care of
either one for many years. The music execs made three main mistakes, which are
just as likely to cause problems in your business if you’re not careful.
First, much like the movie business - with its franchises and
tentpole films - the labels constantly pushed the talent for more and more of
the same. Looking to build off of, and repeat, their past successes and sales,
they didn’t want to see anything edgy, challenging, or different because they
were perfectly content to rest on their past laurels and glories and sell
merch, concert tickets, and fancy boxed sets of the same old material. They
were stuck in a short-term, prosperous past, but by failing to develop and
invest in new formats, styles or talent, they were mortgaging their future
prospects. The moral of this story is simple - the world never waits for you
and if you aren’t willing to change, it will pass you by. Change before you
have no choice.
Second, the head honchos were completely risk averse and unwilling
to invest in anything other than the very sure thing that their current catalog
of music represented. New delivery methods, new production technologies, new
channels to reach their users were all available, but none of the old-line
traditional players stepped up. Instead, they left the field wide open for
Apple and other tech companies to develop innovative and attractive new
solutions. The demands and desires of every consumer in every field have a
single defining characteristic: they are progressive, and the customer is
always looking for more. Standing still is the best way to be left behind. You
can change or you can die.
And finally, with the emergence of streaming and fixed
algorithmic systems for radio play, the industry bean counters discovered a
fundamental truth - they were being paid exactly the same amount per song
whether the song was brand new or 50 years old. They quickly concluded that if
their customers (stations and streamers) were indifferent to the age of the
content and the end users were actually looking for the older music, there was
little or no reason to rock the boat and push for new material. Investing in
new talent turned out to be an incremental cost which they chose to avoid.
But even best and oldest wines age out eventually and - at the
moment - there’s not much new growth to fill the pipeline. What new music
activity there is - interestingly enough - is happening away from,
independently of, and frankly trying to avoid having anything to do with the
big labels. Things aren’t going to get better any time soon.
Change is always expensive - whether you pay upfront to make the
necessary changes - or you pay later for not having made the changes in a
timely fashion. But it’s also inevitable and a certainty. Music itself is never
going to disappear - but I wouldn’t bet a nickel on the likely long-term
survival of the major record labels.
Contentment is the smother of invention.
JUL 5, 2022
