An Artist Who Makes Me Excited About the Future of Music
Apparently one of the most exciting stories in music this year is a lack of excitement about music. In January, the question “Is old music killing new music?” went viral when a newsletter by the jazz historian Ted Gioia (republished by The Atlantic) highlighted data showing that, from 2020 to 2021, listenership for freshly released songs—in comparison with listenership for older songs—decreased. Gioia argued that the music industry had “lost confidence” in the new, and he shared anecdotes suggesting that kids today are strangely enamored with past generations’ hits. Many people who shared his post on social media used it as an opportunity to declare that listeners were stuck in a retro rut, that today’s music was bad, and that the internet had killed off the very concept of newness.
The conversation generally brushed past the fact that. But the theory of the old killing the new clearly has broad appeal right now. As we enter the third year of a pandemic, the passage of time feels broken. More than a decade into the Spotify era, culture has fractured in a way that makes it harder to talk about the latest hot thing. The internet’s endless archives have put the past in direct competition with the present. Record labels, as Gioia pointed out, are recalibrating around this reality. Is our culture? Are our artists? When the past is endlessly available, does it shape how the future sounds?
