I admit that I am old and, maybe, my life and generation (and the generations I’m most familiar with) might not be relevant to our offspring. However, this is my observation, buying music seems to be an overt act of conspicuous consumption and, often, pretty much a pity purchase. The existence of oldies radio stations and radio playlists indicates that our appetite for new music is pretty small. The fact that anyone can argue that there was or is a “golden age of pop” simply because that music coincided when that person was entering puberty, first got laid, or experienced some other childish moment that the music commemorates in their mind is a pretty good indication that it doesn’t take much for most of us to get a belly full of all the music we will ever need to hear.
The only people that sometimes isn’t true for are musicians. And I do mean sometimes. There certainly are a lot of musicians, especially old guys, who are still playing the same damn Beatles’ songs they played when they were 15 and there are similar characters in every generation from before Boomers to Gen-Zs. Some people are just tied to the moment when they discovered their genitals, musically and otherwise. But many musicians “collect” all sorts of music over a broad band of periods because of a variety of good reasons.
All of that, though, mostly proves my point and explains why so many unheard musicians and songwriters are likely to remain unheard. According to Music Business Worldwide, 60,000 tracks are added to Spotify alone EVERY DAY. Or one-song-per-second, approximately. The chances that a measurable fraction of that output will ever be heard by 5 people at the same time are next-to-nil. This is nothing like the early FM radio days when odd, original, non-mainstream, inventive music was played late at night when most everyone was fast asleep. This is a brave new world of tossing your pearls into the ocean and hoping to not just hit a scuba diver but to hit Bill Gates scuba diving and have the pearl be large enough that he notices it.
Musicians regularly pat themselves on the head claiming that “music is not a luxury,” and while that might be true for the musician it is clearly in the commodity territory for everyone else. We don’t need the latest, newest, most trendy version of what we’ve had our whole lives. Mostly, we want (not need) to hear the same old songs, sung the same old way. That means whatever you might hope, as a musician, nobody needs what you’re doing right now . . . except you.
