This is a postscript to my post the other day on music and business. Somewhere I was saying I wish we had some hard data and lo and behold Ted Gioia shared this table on his blog that a reader sent:
You probably have to click on it to see the numbers. But what knocks me over is that classical is up pretty substantially while pop contemporary is way down. Of course I imagine classical is coming up from a pretty low share, but still...
10 comments:
would not have guessed CCM would have such a spike in the last ten years!
If Gioia wanted evidence of a counter-spike to pop songs being sexualized maybe a burst of contemporary Christian could prove his theory! ;) I'm sure people aren't all listening to Keith Green and Michael Card, eh?
and surely not Doris Akers or Mahalia! IF they were, though ,that'd be great
Wow, I don't think I even know a single Contemporary Christian artist!
Bryan, I am no statistician, but when I look at the gainers as a group and the losers as a group, I see the possibility of an age factor at play. The loser genres are what I would classify as "young folks music". The gainers are "old folks music". Is it possible that what the chart shows is that radio itself is losing the young listeners which has the effect of skewing the genre analysis to the "old stuff"?
Perhaps what we are seeing is a dying medium (radio) playing dying music to a smaller, more concentrated audience. All of which can be traced to the choice of streaming as the delivery method for the younger generations.
That's a very good point, David. I guess we need some stats from the streaming services.
I think the idea that streaming is the province of the young is becoming less true over the past decade as subscription service streaming becomes the norm. I believe in 2018 the over 45 crowd already constituted about 40% of the people streaming music. It might be higher now. My guess is that Bryan has successfully alerted the younger crowd that the top of the pops is all committee written garbage and so the youngsters are branching out to more authentic genres. If you notice the Hits categories suffered the biggest drops.
Thanks, Maury, but I suspect that I am not only a non-commercial musician, but also a non-influential blogger!
Always take credit when your view is adopted! To be analytical if the percentage of older adults increases in the streaming population then there would be expected shifts in what is listened to. I think another issue is that older music was better recorded by and large. Along with the committee writing, you have the use of low fidelity digital sampling, auto-tuning and extreme dynamic range restrictions as norms for contemporary music. Even much post 2000 non top 40 pop rock /hip hop and rap material is mixed and mastered poorly. So I think that is another factor pushing people to prefer earlier music. It's part of the reason vinyl has surged in the last 15 years because you can't use extreme digital mastering on it for technical reasons. I would note in this connection I see more people on music forums talking about how the vinyl mix sounds much better than the CD mix.
Thanks, Maury, that's probably a good idea (taking credit)!
Good points about the technical aspects making music certainly with less individual character which is ultimately what I think attracts listeners. The sheer quantity of technical devices might also be leading people astray. There are so many things you can mess with! I remember when i was a bass player they came out with an electric bass that had all sorts of ways of adjusting the intonation, which had the unfortunate result of never quite getting it properly in tune! Now, ironically, it is autotune that is the cause of the loss of a lot of character.
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