And you think change is limited to living in an all-populist world? Friends, you haven't factored in the hologram and robot musicians yet!
Not that many Swifties were paying attention in the summer of 2023 when several leading economic analysts reckoned that Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour and film could have been the primary factor keeping the U.S. out of recession in 2023. Fans and parents certainly knew, when the “waiting room” model of ticket access led to ticket prices as high as $5,000. Similar high demand led to four-figure ticket prices for Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen, and even prices approaching $1000 for artists like rapper J. Cole. Several national and global tours in 2023 turned into “happenings” not that different from Swift’s – tours by The Cure, Peter Gabriel, boygenius, and the duo of Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service, generated buzz that surprised everyone, particularly when a “legacy” rock act was involved. And in case the music industry picked up too much hubris, particularly during the 2023 Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, it was humbling to remember that both the music and film industries were dwarfed by the gaming industry, which felt smaller impacts from lockdown than any of its cultural brethren.
New album releases continued
to drive a lot of streaming traffic, but the exhaustion many had expected to
hit during pandemic seemed to finally become a reality in 2023-24, as releases
from the biggest names in rap, indie, and pop seemed a bit lethargic. Marketing
seemed to make up for ennui, though, because releases from virtually every second-tier
pop newcomer – Bonzie, Clairo, Suki Waterhouse, Beabadoobee, and dozens of others – generated
almost as much hype as new studio offerings from Halsey, Billie Eilish, The
Cure, and Post Malone. In extreme cases, like the launch of Charli XCX’s brat, the album defined the season in more domains than music.
The sheer number of new releases escalated
significantly by the second half of 2024, but many releases seemed somewhat
forced and uninteresting. The world needed Wet Leg and the British “mania”
bands (black midi, Dry Cleaning, Black Country New Road, Sports Team, English
Teacher, Yard Act, Squid) to kick the music world from its torpor. One of the
few bright spots in Trump’s return to office at the end of the year is that pop
music became its own secret society, bringing back hints of the late
1960s/early 1970s underground ambience, because many fans lived by the
assumption that few Trump voters understood good music.
The pop world could thank a huge wave of women
newcomers in 2023-24 who spoke primarily to teens, but won over many adults,
including Chappell Roan, Lizzy McAlpine, Tartie, Renee Rapp, Sabrina Carpenter,
Samia, and many others. The gender
one-sidedness was no accident. Men under 40 were playing less and less of a
role in music, literature, visual arts, and performing arts in the 2020s.
Studies from The Economist and other
sources consistently showed that young adults worldwide were becoming more
bifurcated from 2010 to 2025 – women grew more intelligent, empathetic, and
creative, while young men grew more conservative and insular. It was no
accident that the knuckleheaded “manoverse” represented one of Trump’s major
electoral bases in late 2024.
Another 2024 music trend yet to be deciphered is the shift to country
experiments by many pop artists during the course of the year – Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter spurred a flurry of y’all efforts from Lana Del
Rey, Post Malone, Jelly Roll, Orville Peck, Hurray for the Riff Raff, and the
unlikely duo of Julien Baker and Torres. At the end of 2024, Chappell Roan even
extended this to fierce country parody, courtesy of the new “The Giver (She
Gets the Job Done)” which debuted on SNL. A bigger buzz also was generated by
new releases from legacy acts like Peter Gabriel, Rolling Stones, and
Blink-182, if only because the new works from geezers seemed to show more
energy than those from some of the newer artists.
In 2023, a slight dip in
music offered for streaming services was noted, and savvy analysts realized it could
be accounted for, at least in part, by musicians writing solely for the TikTok
platform. TikTok initially had strict parameters for minute-long lengths of
tunes, a necessary riff in the first 20 seconds, riffs ranked according to
viral spread, etc. In 2024, the constraints were lifted slightly and
songwriters were offered better compensation. Nevertheless, the move to one
platform seen as superficial by many sparked a torrent of criticism. One session
musician said “I used to be startled by a musician whose portfolio consisted
entirely of streaming links. Now I’ve run into musicians whose entire portfolio
consists of TikTok songs, and I’m left sort of speechless.”
Still, the focus on “TikTok
first” led to a discernible drop in music aimed at large streaming platforms. Some
composers just found reels-based platforms like TikTok more fun than the vast
giga-forest of Spotify, where even great works could get lost in endless fields
of chaff. Within the TikTok-verse, there
was a lot of rapid viral sharing of riffs that took advantage of mutual
placement in films and video games, but that could lead to a restriction in
originality as much as a new creative dimension. Ideal algorithms call for
optimizing riffs in the first two seconds of a song, repeating known memes in a
new work, and similarly playing the meme field for what is fast and attractive.
This also means that the viral speed of up-then-down is many times faster than
a typical streaming community. The first couple years of the 2020s gave us only
a taste of TikTok’s potential level of influence – provided it is not banned in
U.S. markets.
There’s something important
to remember when discerning TikTok’s supposed central role in 2020s pop music:
vast dimensions of music take place under the radar of even the most avid music
lover. Music industry analyst Bob Lefsetz fell in love with the British Victorian-baroque
women’s band The Last Dinner Party in the summer of 2024, and lamented that if
it was 1985, MTV would make sure everyone knew their name. The point is,
everyone the band cares about does know
their name. Many of their U.S. tour cities sold out within minutes of the ticket
sales first being announced. Such fans in high school, college, and their
mid-20s not only know the name of The Last Dinner Party, but also the names of many
of the British mania bands mentioned above. The fans use a mix of TikTok,
Spotify, YouTube, and social media sites to learn of new artists, and no one
cares about the lack of a central unifier like MTV, AM radio, AOR radio, etc.
Lefsetz is just upset that more boomers remain in the dark, just as many music
fans in their 40s and 50s remain in the dark, but that’s their problem for not
paying stricter attention.
Music critic Marc Hogan points
to another factor not often recognized when legacy artists or their estates sell
music catalogs – a roster that included Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Neil
Young, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, Katy Perry, and Shakira. Hogan points
out that the back catalogs are quietly being bought up by private equity firms,
who spent $12 billion on music catalogs in 2021 alone. Some private equity firms work with companies
like Primary Wave to “dress up” old hits for forced re-entry into the Top Ten,
but Hogan reminds us that merely by listening to old favorites like “Firework”
or “Born to Run,” we are lining the pockets of Carlyle or Blackstone – in
essence, replacing the former dominance of big record labels with the new
dominance of hedge funds and private equity. Blackstone made the biggest such
move late in the summer of 2024, when the fund acquired Hipgnosis, the biggest
of the songbook consolidators, for $1.6 billion.
There is also a more active version of back-catalog buyouts, with an intent to cash in on tribute markets by offering something even closer to the O.G. artist. This is exemplified by the ABBA founders’ acquisition of the KISS back catalog and image rights in the spring of 2024. To be more precise, the catalog and image rights were purchased for $300 million by ABBA founder Bjorn Ulvaeus’s company Pophouse, the same company responsible for the ABBA Voyage hologram tour. The interesting issue isn’t how quickly Pophouse can take KISS holograms on tour. More to the point is whether the investor owners of music catalogs create dozens of virtual-reality performers showing us immortal images of Katy Perry and Stevie Nicks.
Just as many of us never
dreamed how popular the tribute-band market could be over time, one must be
careful about dismissing the prospect of going to concerts of holographic clones
dating from the 1960s through the 2020s. For a certain kind of music consumer,
the hologram may be better than the living musician.
Something else was driving
new music, though only as a future troublemaker. The first public platforms of
large-language-model A.I., like ChatGPT, arrived in early 2023 and immediately
led to fears that human creativity would be replaced by apparently-sentient
A.I. The concern arose first in the image-generation A.I. platforms. Visual art
made by A.I. certainly was more impressive than anticipated, but was unlikely
to be mistaken for human art. Before the impact could truly be felt in music,
artists in all fields raised two fundamental challenges that could slow A.I.
development as much as the self-imposed guardrails set up by A.I. startups in
the summer of 2023: First, the training of the core neural networks at the
heart of LLM A.I. required millions upon millions of data sets, which A.I.
companies acquired by “scraping” public databases as well as databases that may
not have been so public. Comedian Sarah Silverman was the first in a long line
of artists to sue the LLM companies, saying that using training sets with some
of her material constituted copyright violation. Second, music critics
suggested that music created by machine sentience would be perceived as
automatically inferior to that based on human creativity.
The first of the challenges
was sure to be fought out in multiple courtroom domains through the 2020s and
beyond. The latter was more troublesome, as the typical music fan might not be
depended upon to prefer the real human. Remember how the “craptastic” argument
played out in MP3 lossy compression, after all. Since so many humans were not
necessarily adventurous in seeking out new sounds, and preferred their music
served up as wallpaper, if an A.I. platform (or a hologram of a familiar
artist) combined just the right mix from multiple decades of riffs and emotional
triggers, it’s possible many fans would prefer the machine product.
There might be many steps in
the A.I. world on the road to reaching true machine-generated music. ChatGPT might
perform a more advanced version of the Pandora/Spotify playlist development, to
tailor each playlist specifically to one person. While that sounds harmless on
its own, the A.I. platform might create a hermetically-sealed “silo” far more
effective than the hundreds of niche stations offered by Sirius XM. In effect,
each playlist is curated for precisely one listener, and the notion of sharing
music or using music in a collective environment fades away.
Many musicians are beginning
to realize that a ChatGPT music creator might not be a competitor, but a collaborator.
Electronic composer Reiner Kramer, at a 2024 electronic music conference, said
the training of a neural network might some day be considered “a performative
act.”
At this point in 2024, the
A.I. platform could introduce its own machine-generated music as the ultimate personalization
step in audio experience – and all too many fans would think it was just great.
Remember, Spotify already was offering playlists of music generated entirely by
machines in the mid-2010s. Placing ChatGPT into the music-to-consumer pipeline
does not represent a giant step at all. And here is where we return to the
issue of the “populist” playlist created by stream-based voting, and what it
has to say about mass democracy vs. elitism – there are similar problems in politics,
culture, and in music itself.
The positive aspect of new
populism is the ability of bands to remain as divorced as possible from the
corporate music environment, while trying to game the system so that more
people can appreciate their music. The trick is in trying to preserve a way to
make money, at least enough to survive as a musician. A classic case is the
personal/band project of Canadian queer activist Patrick Flegel, who released
an acclaimed debut as Cindy Lee in 2020, then a two-hour album, Diamond Jubilee, which arrived to rave reviews in April 2024.
Cindy Lee only streams on YouTube and GeoCities. There were no LPs or CDs to
support the album until a promised double-LP at the end of 2024. The one
download link for FLAC files makes it challenging to donate money. And the
Cindy Lee tour of North America was cancelled after a single date, leaving
Flegel with no way to make operating funds for an album that many placed among
the year’s best. And since Flegel grants almost no interviews, the overall
media presence brings to mind Nick Drake.
Populism can be expensive for
fans, as well. When many musicians open Patreon accounts or launch Kickstarter
projects, fans can go from one to the next with wallets open. The decentralized
concept of house concerts, which took a giant leap up both before and even
during the pandemic, has become so popular in some cities, there might be three
to five house concerts per week in summer months, at least in some metro areas
(not counting the free concerts many municipalities sponsor).
The common thread in new
populist political movements around the world is the disdain for experts and
elitism, an understandable prejudice given the way elitist circles have hurt
common interests under globalized capitalism. Yet, as Laurie Anderson pointed
out in her “Only An Expert” song, experts are experts for a reason. They have
gained a working knowledge of domains others grasp in only an opaque way. The
most nihilist of the populists within the U.S. right now would like to go back
to the pre-1880 days prior to the Civil Service, when all governing structures
were handled face to face. Anyone who thinks about this for half a minute will
realize that no air traffic control could take place, nor large energy grids,
nor global shipping networks. Populists fail to understand that virtually every
labor domain requires an immense support cast, including many managers who
would be deemed elitist. Merely mailing a letter, completing a cellular call,
or buying a loaf of bread, requires a support staff of thousands.
The new “democratic” Top 40,
in which fans gain access to an artist’s entire tracklist for an album, then
vote by number of streams as to which rises to the top, sounds like the
ultimate experiment in democracy. Yet every December, the top streams are the
same Mariah Carey “All I Want for Christmas” and Wham! “Last Christmas” as
topped the charts the year before. Every month, the same artists with new
tracks dominate the charts, with less chance than ever that a newcomer could
break the trend. This is because only a small minority of music lovers are
truly adventurous, exploring the Spotify gigaverse for something new and
exciting. Most music lovers prefer the familiar. If a certain amount of
elitists and experts aren’t out there to give form to an evolving musical
universe, the content of that universe will devolve to a lowest common
denominator. This is how populism in any domain works.
I’m still hunting down the
new and unusual every day, though my brain cells and aural subsystems are
getting old and tired. I don’t have a natural prejudice that prevents me from
saying a machine intelligence could ever be sentient, but I will listen to A.I.
works with both interest and skepticism. It may be true that we are living on
the precipice of dangerous times from a climate and social-justice perspective,
but I don’t anticipate the same thing to be true, at least necessarily, for
music. As long as there are clubs where live music is performed, or even
informal social gatherings where people can play music for each other, we will
not fall victim to either A.I., or even the false democracy of hyper-streamed
mass-audience music. But we have to be explorers and life-long students, as
much as we are with general education topics, with books, with films. Every art and political artifice surrounding
us deserves our full attention. Music does not deserve to be wallpaper, and
neither does anything else. The ultimate legacy I would like to leave from
decades immersed in recorded music is Arthur Miller's description of Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman, “Attention must be paid.” To everything, and
constantly.
