What If This Is As Good As It Gets?
Pondering catalog and the latest round of Big Music Hail Mary passes...
The word of the day is catalog.
For the last week or so, our favorite social networks have been ablaze with reaction to recently released data indicating that in 2021, old music (defined by the industry as having been in the marketplace at least 18 months) overtook new release consumption.
Not by a whisker, either. According to the data analytics firm MRC (the parent company of Billboard magazine), in the last half of 2021, 82.1% of total music “consumption” was devoted to catalog. That’s up from catalog’s 66.4% share of total music consumption in 2020. And that’s during a period when Adele had a lavishly promoted and highly successful new release.
Just for fun, the website Music Business Worldwide ran some projections based on these numbers from the first half of 2021. They started with the catalog consumption increase (+44.1 million) and the current release increase (+7.7 million), and then estimated how things might look in 2030, if prevailing trends continue. The tally: Catalog shifted 685.5 million units while ‘current’ music accounted for just 215.4 million.
In that scenario, catalog music claims over 75% of the total music market. In less than a decade. You’d think that professionals in this industry might want to address this, and begin talking about how it might impact current creators – that is, the hardy few who manage to get by on those absurdly microslivered Spotify payments. Those discussions are not yet happening, at least not in public. Make no mistake: We need to think in meta terms about the ramifications, and soon, because while the art itself is abundant and healthy, the mechanisms that facilitate the art (and pay the artists and educate the public) are faltering. Behind these alarming statistics are flashing neon signs of distress for composers and players and listeners – everyone who cares about the interdependent ecosystem of music.
At least those stats help explain the big deals for publishing rights (and in some cases performance rights) of the creative works of superstars like Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Bob Dylan and others.
As each deal was announced, media attention focused on the sellers and the large paydays. We heard from baffled fans as well as finance journalists who explained the deals as bulletproof forever annuities that just happen to take advantage of arena-sized wrinkles in the tax code.
Very little was said about the buyers.
These are the bigwig music publishing and (to a lesser degree) record industry executives. Few of them are outsiders, though some work as consultants employed by venture-capital firms to develop large deals in the music space. Most are veterans of the format wars, and the Napster war; some participated in the negotiations that paved the way for streaming.
What did those data-armed executives know when they sat down at the table? They had to know, generally, about the increase in catalog consumption across all delivery systems – streaming, CD and vinyl purchase, etc. (Which one academic, Larry Miller from the music business program at NYU, described in sanguine terms in an interview with Variety: “I think the surprise across the board is the deep attachment to familiar music that all music lovers have, but especially during this unexpectedly long and persistent pandemic. I think older, familiar music makes people feel good.” Thanks professor.)
The executives also knew, probably too well, that music itself is thriving – largely outside of the major label system. Provocative work in sound circulates across the earth with dizzying speed, and meanwhile the big labels are still out there playing winner-take-all marketing games, betting the store on safe, ever-more-derivative pop sensations.
Having abandoned the fundamentals of the old record business – you know, quaint notions like “artist development” that led to so many of the classic (catalog!) albums of the 1960s and ‘70s – these well-paid executives now confront the endgame consequences of their shortterm thinking. If the cupboard of major-label coming attractions for 2022 is mostly bare, that’s not a surprise. It’s what happens when people who made one lucrative signing think they’re tastemaking geniuses forever. These people spent decades chasing data points, not artistry. They thinned the label ranks of people who understood music. Rather than do the unglamorous ground-game work of cultivating talent and experimenting and (yes) making mistakes, they leaned on data and manipulated it to save their butts at the annual meeting. They applied the techniques of selling widgets to art.
Now they’re desperate. Typically in this situation, the wily boardroom creature falls back on a familiar enduring gambit — the pivot to catalog. The dollar amounts being shifted in the recent transactions can be read as a massive collective industry Hail Mary: We don’t have a clue about contributing to the current musical conversation, so we’ll just double down, again, on stuff we inherited. Because hey, at least we know that stuff makes people feel good.
Why yes, we have a fancy digital suggestion box. Share your favorite Underloved/Overlooked records here: echolocatormusic@gmail.com.
Please consider subscribing (it’s free!). And…..please spread the word! (This only works via word of mouth!)
Thanks Tom Moon for such a great verbalization of the circumstances, as we’ve come to expect from you. Here’s my long wind.
Like any working musician I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot. We’re in a situation in which the chances of paying back recording costs for most artists has become near impossible when they have to rely on streaming royalties. I as a producer/studio owner can’t honesty encourage anyone to spend money making a recording unless they know it won’t get paid back.
So in this environment how does music keep evolving? Perhaps as ‘anonymous’ observed, through live music. But I think recorded music is huge in people’s lives.
I’ve got a teenage daughter and so I’ve listened a lot to pop radio. With a few exceptions (once last year a song had a 3 dominant chord I.e. E7 in key of C to move to F), every song is some order combination of I, IV, VII, V (in C major this would be the C, F, Aminor, and G chords), always in 4/8 bars phrases. The V dominant chord isn’t often used to resolve to 1, more often used as a axis to VII or IV.
Choruses and bridges have pretty much disappeared.
And every melody is V, III, II, I maybe VII (in C - G, E, D, C, maybe A).
So I think, why? It’s definitely a chicken and egg situation, musicians being the chickens I guess.
I think a simple major key melody is a very instinctive human preference. If you’re walking down the road and humming a tune, it won’t be 12 tone music. Musicians certainly will hum more complex tunes, but that’s because we know them and love them, not because that’s the natural thing to come out of our mouths.
On the simplest level, it’s harmonic or emotional gravity (and I mean weight, shifting). It’s like breathing - sing C, D, E, G and come back down again. Just feels good. The G always wants to come home to C in the end.
So all these endless empty songs use that premise for a melody, over top of another thing people like - periodicity. Repeating symmetrical shapes/phrases, the combinations of I, IV, VII, and V.
And that’s truly enough for some people, unfortunately for all of us who want to hear more. I’m just saying there are reasons for it.
This didn’t start recently. Most Dylan songs use that same melody, certainly most folkloric music does. Mozart and Beethoven could beat a major key melody on the head quite well, especially those endless V to I ‘last’ chords of Beethoven’s that would last 30 seconds, a minute? Shoot me please.
As a tangent, what happened between Bach and Mozart? Bach, whose understanding of the beauty of the diatonic melody is for me peerless, but who could pivot on a dime with his deep understanding of the diminished chord as a pivot hub and move seamlessly between keys, dominant chords as springboards, not reduced to mere stooges for the almighty 1 chord. Alright, a bit thick I know.
I’m someone who gets bored easily in music. My ears crave new sounds and constructions. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of electronic music, playing a lot with a module called a “Benjolin”. It uses a bit shift register to create somewhat controllable random, never repeating electronic music. I love it. Never gets boring to me, because it’s like nature - it’s so complex in it’s minutia. Have listened to it for hours.
I love lots of ‘new’ music, and there’s lots of it.
But the fact is there is no business for it. I understand that and why other people don’t like it (new sounds and structures, things out of the ordinary) - what I said above. New music is either done out of love by professionals, or by amateurs, skilled or otherwise.
I don’t think there’s any way around the basic fact that, if artists and composers can’t afford to do their work, they will at some point stop. There will always be people putting stuff out cause that’s the way of the world now. But excuse me if I sound elitist, the net result of this will be, already is, a decline in the quality of what’s out there.
DIY is great, but there’s a reason great records sounds like they do. A huge numbers of great studios have gone under because of all this, so it’s not just music, but the huge body of knowledge amassed in audio that is now being replaced by everyone who can do it in their living room but don’t know how a compressor works.
All of this is a very long way around to Tom’s question and his statistics. I’m not surprised catalog is such a high percentage for all the reasons we’re all talking about. I’m glad it’s all there. I listen to a lot of it. A huge amount of quality music. We’re so fortunate that it exists and we have such great archeologists as Tom Moon shining his flashlight around. Maybe when the electric grid finally goes out, we start again with sticks and logs.
Nice essay, Tom. It's something I've thought for a long time. Record companies stopped being visionary a long, long time ago. But relying on public performance now to pull musicians and audiences out of the musical doldrums is a bit too cheerful in our present pandemic situation. Oh, I know, I know, people say, the pandemic will end and we'll be back playing live again all the time. Nope. With the world not addressing climate change, the novel viruses will continue to buffet the population and keep listeners home enjoying music made in earlier times. The musicians I've talked to are afraid it's not just the death of their recording careers, but the death of new music itself.