New music is dying, killed by its own defenders
Ah, the sad, totally unsurprising irony.
Something is “killing new music”:
- Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market
- The new-music market is actually shrinking. The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5 percent of total streams, half of just three years ago
Why? It’s easy, really
Part of the answer to “What’s killing new music” is new forms of entertainment, that are not intrinsically bad: “More people pay attention to streams of video games on Twitch (which now gets 30 million daily visitors)."
But the main, real culprits for the death of new music are easy to guess: they are none other than the self-appointed, self-professed unique defenders of creativity.
They are the same people, and ideas, that are killing movies in the same way, by looting basements and calling it “creativity”, or leaving just one authorized source of fairy tales.
The specific killing of creativity in music that is going on just now, exactly in the name of creativity, by abusing exactly of a tool - copyright - meant to support creators, is clearly spelled out in these three quotes from Atlantic article (*):
- Dead musicians make the problem worse by returning as holograms and ‘deepfake’ music - making it all the harder for young, living artists to compete
- When a new song overcomes these obstacles and actually becomes a hit, the risk of copyright lawsuits is greater than ever before…. in the marketplace.
- And, finally… “In the end the real problem may ultimately be that nothing is less interesting to music executives than a completely radical new kind of music”
Of course. If you can make money by just laying a ridiculous monopoly on something that people already showed they like, why risk they bring their money elsewhere, even, no: especially if that “elsewhere” is truly new music, that could never considered copyright violation in a sane world?
New music, please. Possibly BEFORE we are all dead
Yes, in the LONG run we the human species are lucky, as the Atlantic writer concludes, that “the music is too powerful for them to kill." The problem is how to enjoy new good music, movies, novels before it’s too late for us living today.
(*) for many more sad examples of the idiocy that copyright is today, spend some minutes to browse these many examples