A couple of news items came up today that represent long expected but ignored cracks in the fable we call “the music industry”. This news is from Australia, but I don’t think it varies much in the rest of the world. Let’s pick a few articles and hope the links will stay active over the long term.
“The ARIA Top 50 Singles and Albums charts, as well as the Top 20 Australian Artist Singles and Albums charts, will focus exclusively on music released within the past two years.” Releases older than two years will be moved to a “Replay Chart”.
The reason being that for some time the Top 20 has been stuffed with memories for baby boomers, the outstanding example being Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours that’s charted here for 8 BLOODY YEARS. Some tracks from the 90’s are also hanging around like a bad smell, and of course there’s the endless clogged drain of Taylor Swift’s retreads. But none of this matters very much to the young, who buy albums as things to hang on the wall.
What is not said but is obvious is that the entire notion of a hit record is itself an Antique Roadshow – the clips on a TikTok video vastly outperforming any nostalgic format. When Kate Bush hit TikTok via Nettflix marketing we saw reality in full motion – a ‘hit record’ is the pat on the head for a race already won in the real world.
The same day an article in the Australian Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jun/26/everyone-was-completely-caught-off-guard-fbi-radios-future-unclear-as-station-launches-emergency-fundraising-campaign
FBi Radio in Sydney has admitted being at least 1 million dollars in debt, but needs 2 million dollars to completely function. That a youth-focussed service is operating as a radio station with streaming as an option places the management in some kind of alternate time warp where the Internet and social media never happened. There just aren’t that many young listeners in Sydney with an FM radio. There are a shitload of young people with phones. There are plenty of people operating music streams who have never had or needed the opportunity to lose that much money.
What is the purpose of the entity? What responsibilities does it bear? Should it not represent what is needed now, not what was needed a decade or more ago? Again it’s a love of the great, glorious, comforting past. And that past has all the relevance of Bob Dylan’s Bio Movie.
Now for some horror stories of the current world – anyone can upload a piece of music under a band name to an aggregator like AWAL or CDBaby. Why not upload as Taylor Swift? Or you could be The Beatles. That way at least a few thousand people will be fooled into listening to your AI version of one of her songs and you will get the cents!
Yep – no one is checking to see if you are the real thing. Move quickly and you can see how the actual, real, existing music industry operates. There is much work to be done here, hard work – yet we are wasting time emulating the past. If nothing else consider that AI is a big ugly mass of borrowed memory that can spew out replicas faster than you. But it can’t come up with the next thing. You can.
We can invent and come up with next things, but do people still listen?
When I occasionally look up my meager YT stats, I find they follow the average Youtube pattern, with people listening in for about a minute, after that audience drops down to a constant that listens to the whole track, more or less.
So people neither disengage immediately, nor listen through, but listen for a fraction.
The next thing, or rather the Tik Tok of today, is one minute shorts.
Like speed punk was.
Just imagine a young person listening to a stream on their phone.
What does the imaginary person do, while listening?
… … imagine it …
Person is poking on their phone… aparently: skipping to the next song.
So its no longer us who make the next thing. Its the audiences dopamine burst cycle that makes it.
I do not have good answers. But I can see some answers are not working. Possibly we start from the actions of the listener and then work back to what they are requesting.
You mention Speed Punk and that’s a great image – not comfortable but perhaps it illustrates an idea that can be improved. I’m keen on two fronts – the idea of music that goes with environments – walk in walk out as desired. Then there’s musical ‘posters’, quick, like a cartoon. Other people younger than me can think of more than that.
GenX guy here. I remember as a kid being pissed because the music on the radio was always interrupted by the DJ. “Can they just shut up?!” Today, as a wedding coordinator, I’ve noticed the way the DJ’s only play a minute of songs because people lose interest. Dance a moment the stop and talk.
I still play records from start to finish. I have a weird thing about lifting or dropping the stylus mid record.
Listening is such a gift!
Listening is definitely a gift. It’s not for me to say vinyl listening is *wrong*, it’s just (A) a question of the ritual versus the actual music and (B) could we do something else also fun. If the needledrop is more than the music then we have a church going on 🙂
Have you heard of Subvert?
seems a hopeful response to the madness called Streaming.
These are people dedicated to actually wanting to hear the artist because they are all co-owing an artist-owned internet. It happen later this year.
thanks btw for the interview years ago on our label WEATNU
subvert.fm is their website. Free to join, get a book if you pay the shipping.
I will look into this idea today thank you – there’s always new ways to explore!