Pop music fans – change your music consumption patterns to save the music industry

Many of us (especially those of us whose foundational musical experiences in the realm of pop/rock music were over 25 years ago) look at the halcyon years of pop music with fond nostalgia combined with a thinly veiled disappointment in the current pop music scene. The vast number of comments on Youtube of music videos from distant yesteryear brim with a sense of hopelessness and resignation – suggesting that pop music’s best might be far behind and getting even more distant in the rearview mirror of pop culture history. That being  said, there is power in numbers and if pop music aficionados banded together and worked in unison towards reversing the destructive tide that has  swept the pop music industry, there is a real chance of changing this unsavory reality. It is amazing what we can collectively do with small modifications to our music consumption behaviors to bring about the much desired change that our modern pop music industry desperately needs. The goal with this article is to outline the path to that change. For clarification, this article is being written from the lens of pop/rock music and NOT from that of all genres of music – although some of these ideas could apply to other genres of music too. More importantly, our viewpoint revolves primarily around the sonically Anglophone world of music and musicians.

Even before diving into the various tools in our arsenal that we ought to employ, we need to understand what specifically we are solving for. The entertainment industry (especially for musicians and performance artists) has ALWAYS been a high-risk industry but until about 25 years ago, it was also a high-reward industry for a WIDER spectrum of artists/bands than it is today (especially in the context of artists/bands that emerged and rose to prominence in the last two and a half decades). The breadth of a ubiquitous mainstream that crosses generational and geographic boundaries as it applies to pop music has undoubtedly narrowed while the fewer artists that define this newer mainstream have become bigger commercially and far richer. In fact, in his book titled “Rockonomics“, the late author Alan Krueger (former US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy) highlights that “Over the past thirty years, the share of concert revenue takes home by the top 1 percent of performers has more than doubled from 26 percent in 1982 to 60 percent today. The top 5 percent take home 85 percent of all concert revenues”. Given that most of the money that artists/bands earn today is via concert touring, this observation by Krueger is an indicative of the inequity of distribution of artists’ fortunes. I believe that this dynamic also stems from over-exposure of a few artists/bands and that has led to the mainstream being dominated by far fewer artists/bands. This is a broad characterization of the state of the music industry but here are some defining elements of the problem of the music industry.

1. The economics of the music business make it financially untenable for artists/bands outside the limited and increasingly narrowing “mainstream”.
2. The centralization of mass musical curation has led to a dramatic decrease in the breadth of the pop music mainstream.
3. Music has largely become a solitary experience as opposed to the community experience that it once was.

I will delve into each point separately and do my best to prescribe solutions to each of the above.

A] Shaky economics of the music business:

As of the year 2024, we have an entire generation of music listeners for whom the concept of paying for music (outside of paying for a live performance/concert) is a largely alien concept. Most music is consumed via on-demand streaming platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify. The payouts from these streams/plays are paltry and the number of plays required for an artist just to earn minimum wage is astronomically high. Hence, recorded music has essentially become an advertisement for a live concert. This feeds into the widespread and faulty notion that music has no significant intrinsic value outside of a live concert. This is deeply problematic and it dramatically dilutes the monetary potential of a creator looking to make a living as a musician. In his book “The World is flat”, author Thomas Friedman indicates that the profit motive element of capitalism is what drives innovation. We can interpret this innovation to be both technological or artistic. When the profit potential has been heavily diluted for artists, the desire and willingness of a large pool of creators to pursue a career in the increasingly high risk (combined with far LOWER reward relative to that of the past) pop music industry is undoubtedly depleted. Creators lie at the heart of the music industry. There is no art without the artists. Driving them away (by engaging in music consumption patterns that do not reward artists) is the worst thing a music aficionado can do if he or she wants to preserve the musical ecosystem that gave us hits that we still listen to over 40 or 50 years later.

We can argue that the old and prevalent model of buying physical media (Vinyl records, CDs, Cassettes) was a flawed one – in that it incentivized a lot of musical mediocrity on pop music albums. The albums sold on the strength of 2-3 radio-worthy singles largely mixed in with unremarkable filler. In countries (especially in developing countries) that did not enjoy the purchasing power of the relatively affluent west, piracy was rampant. The recording industry was blissfully unaware of how large the market was for their artists/bands in countries where piracy in the form of mixtapes (in the pre-internet era) was more the norm than the exception. It did not matter since sales from the west (especially in the Anglophone world) were high enough to sustain the industry through its dizzying excesses. The reckoning for this broken model arrived at the dawn of the internet when platforms such as Napster (which made its debut in 1999) removed any incentive for music listeners to pay for music. Why pay for music when you can download it for free? It was not until 2004 that services such as iTunes emerged. They facilitated the unbundling of an album thus allowing music fans to LEGALLY buy music on a per-song basis. I did not have to fork out $17 for three songs. I could legally purchase three songs for $3. We can argue that Apple takes a far larger cut of the sales than it deserves from these paid digital downloads but an artist is compensated far higher through these purchases than he/she is via streams through on-demand platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify. For context, according to sources such as DittoMusic  and SoundCampaign, Spotify pays out $0.004 per stream (assuming at least 30 seconds of the song has been played). For the sake of argument, let us assume the artist takes all of the earnings from the sale of digital download (currently priced at $1.29 via iTunes in the US), he/she requires 325 streams of a song to earn the same amount as he/she would via the sale of a digital download.

Not only does the ability to purchase single songs as digital downloads incentivize artists to up their game in terms of putting better music on a pop album, but it also allows us to distribute our limited discretionary finances across a larger selection of musicians and songs. More importantly, it rewards music outside of a live concert and gives back a key element of music monetization to the artists/bands (that are the sonic backbone of the music industry) while NOT rewarding the type of mediocrity that might have been commonplace on pop albums of the 80s and the 90s (despite these decades being FANTASTIC decades for pop/rock music output).

Using services such as Spotify and Apple Music as a discovery avenue is perfectly reasonable but consuming music solely within those platforms as a proxy for actual ownership of either a physical or digital (economically far more viable) product is destructive to the music scene because it essentially commoditizes recorded music. We have the avenues in place to buy digital downloads via services such as iTunes and Amazon Music. Leveraging those avenues is a conscious choice that we ought to make if we want to invite creators to restore the high standards set by pop music of yesteryear. Are you willing to buy digital downloads for a $1.29 per song (this is a US price – this price varies in different countries) to save the music industry? If you genuinely care for pop music, at a bare minimum, start by doing this. This alone will reduce the incentive for a talented artist to throw in the towel and give up on a career in pop music. If you can buy physical products, that is even better – but I understand that this is financially more prohibitive than the former option is. If you can, even before reading the rest of this article, go purchase a single song that you find yourself listening to a lot but do NOT own. That’s a start!

B] The centralization of music curation:

Art and patrons (i.e. gatekeepers with a large and influential platform) of art share an age-old symbiotic relationship that dates back to the years of the Renaissance – when rich families of Florence (Italy) such as the Pittis and Medicis brought artists/sculptors such as Michaelangelo Buonarotti to the forefront with their financial patronage and promotional heft. In pop music, both record labels (that invest in musicians) and mass-medium curators (e.g. music radio, MTV until it became a reality TV channel) together largely served this purpose. The curatorial responsibility of bringing formerly unknown music to the forefront was shared among a vast network of independent tastemakers or curators – especially on terrestrial radio and MTV (from its birth in the early 80s to its demise as a 24-hour music channel by the end of the 90s). Pop music is an industry of hit records. Hence, the multiple references to the word “mainstream” that I made earlier in the article. The hit can be major or minor but hits matter. The largest obstacle to a pop hit is obscurity. It does not matter how good a song is if people do not know it exists. Awareness of a song or artist AT SCALE is an unambiguous pre-requisite for its success (although it does NOT guarantee success) and timeless ubiquity. To think otherwise is to be naïve. In the last five or six decades, terrestrial radio has played a pivotal role in bringing music to the masses through its vast network of music radio stations buoyed by the independent curatorial ethic of a diverse array of tastemakers (who are essentially gatekeepers). To be a gatekeeper is incredibly powerful and with great power, comes great responsibility. Diversity is a key tenet of responsible media and any actions or series of business decisions that undermine that spirit is an abuse of that immense power. Pre 1996, the success or failure of a music artist did not hinge on the tastes of a single gatekeeper or kingmaker – since the reach of a single independent curator was large enough to give a song the critical mass it needed to reach its tipping point of ubiquity and there was a large number of them. In the US (the world’s single largest consumer market for recorded pop music), all of this changed after the passing of the Telecommunications Deregulation Act in the US in 1996. In a nutshell, the act allowed media conglomerates to buy as many radio stations as they could afford – which in itself, is not necessarily problematic. It is what followed (unbeknownst to music radio listeners) that was devastating to the American music scene. Radio DJs were stripped of their curatorial autonomy and were handed “song playlists derived from market research” from a central authority at the media conglomerates (noteworthy examples include ClearChannel and Cumulus Radio). Ever wondered why every radio station in the US for a given genre of music played the same music post 1996? A formerly decentralized structure of bringing music to the public had now become centralized. From here on, there were now only a few gatekeepers as opposed to there being a vast array of them. The opinion-shaping power as it applies to music had become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people. The fortunes of artists/bands were in the hands of these newly coronated kingmakers. It is tempting to write this off as an American (more specifically the US) reality and hence not relevant to the rest of the world. Here is why the US matters. As I had mentioned earlier, the US is the single largest market for recorded pop music. Hence, “making it” in America matters. More importantly, the US shares immense “soft power” (a term I am shamelessly stealing from The Economist) by virtue of its relatively unmatched ability to market its artistic endeavors to the world. In her rather eloquent speech at her Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame induction in late 2023, pop/rock artist Sheryl Crow highlighted how enthusiastic audiences sang along to her songs at her live concerts – and this was in countries where English was NOT a primary language (many in the audience did not even have a conversational grasp of the language). In an interview from over a decade ago, Aussie pop queen Kylie Minogue indicated that a hit in America guarantees a global hit.  There are several British/European artists with huge global fanbases despite large sections of their catalog being relegated to obscurity in the US – but they are more the exception than the norm. Two essential pieces of content worth checking out to get a deeper understanding of this broken radio dynamic are as follows:

1. Our article from 2019 titled “Why we are slaves to terrestrial radio in the US”
2. Youtube and music producer Rick Beato’s interview with Jim Barber.

I hope you enjoy both of the above. Together, they add a lot more color to the summary I have provided with regards to the centralization of music curation and how it has accelerated the demise of the music scene.

Why does the above matter? It matters because the less curators of consequence shaping mass opinion on pop music, the less the diversity of the musical mainstream. This also leads to the overexposure of a select few artists/bands (hello Taylor Swift and Beyonce!). So now, not only do we have a monetization problem (as I had outlined in the previous section on shaky monetization fundamentals of the music business) but now we have a scenario of a significantly larger hurdle to ubiquity for artists/bands since they are at the mercy of the whims and fancies of a few gatekeepers that share outsized influence over mass opinion. This further reduces the incentive for talented creators to be a part of this music ecosystem. It also breeds a homogeneity of sound that is the absolute antithesis to what the music scene of yesteryear was and the opposite of what it should be.

Furthermore, a lot of music listeners have fallen into the trap of equating scale of terrestrial radio to curatorial credibility. It is almost like the scale of terrestrial radio makes its playlist programmers the ultimate arbiters of quality.  Despite the well-documented impact of the Telecommunications Deregulation Act of 1996 and illegal phenomena such as Payola on playlist programming, there are still people that believe that terrestrial radio is playing “what the people want”. What is worse is that these same people look down on independent broadcast music radio stations (especially those that only broadcast online) because their scale pales in comparison to that of terrestrial radio. In fact, I recently stumbled on to a somewhat condescending comment (laced with an iota of truth about some of the broader trends in the music consumption) about our pop/rock music radio broadcast (NOTE: In case, you have not figured this out yet, this blog is tied to a global online pop/rock music radio broadcast titled Radio Crème Brulee that can be accessed via THIS LINK). Here is the sarcastic comment in response to a fan that is enthusiastic about our radio programming:

Make what you will of the above. The section of the comment above about fans not contacting radio stations to listen to a specific artist/band these days is undoubtedly true. That being said, I am tempted to deconstruct the comment above and address each aspect of it but that would warrant its own article. The commenter on this forum would rather poke fun at Radio Crème Brulee (which routinely features newer music from one of his favorite bands) for not being large enough of a medium while lamenting the fact that terrestrial radio continues to perpetuate this narrative that his favorite band is a legacy act that has nothing new to offer by not playing any of their new music. Maybe if he (I am guessing it is a “he” based on the snarkiness of the comment) rewarded us with his ears (we are a FREE radio station), provided us with feedback, and was curious to see what else we had to offer musically, he might actually have a renewed faith in the potential of modern pop music and alternative avenues of music discovery that are NOT on-demand streaming. My Consumer Insights professor at the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University) Robert Schieffer once said that powerful insights emerge from recognizing the contradiction between a consumer’s interests and actions. Innovating around these insights is key to success. I am still trying to figure out this challenge so if anyone reading this has ideas for us, feel free to reach out and share them with us – even if it takes the form of constructive criticism.

Today, most people respond to the mentions of terrestrial radio by saying things such as “who listens to the radio? I only listen to Spotify”. Once again, we have traded one concentrated power structure for another. Instead of a precious few gatekeepers on radio shaping public opinion, we now have a handful of curators on Spotify/Apple Music and algorithms (whose success hinges on generating a playlist where the songs sound similar) shaping our musical spectrum. While the latter is not an issue, in isolation, it can be in that it makes us believe that our musical spectrum is far narrower than it actually is. For recommendation engines, the measure of success is familiarity and sonic uniformity and NOT diversity. Furthermore, the skippable nature of these on-demand platforms also means that we don’t really give a song more than 10 seconds to grab our attention. Imagine if “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen was released today? Would it enjoy the level of popularity that it does today if the song could be skipped 10 seconds in? Once again, this is not meant to be a criticism of platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. They are great discovery platforms but they should NOT be the only source of music discovery for music listeners.

So what can music fans do to counteract the above?

My recommendation is two-fold. At the risk of sounding self-serving, give INDEPENDENTLY-run broadcast radio stations such as ours a chance. That being said, we do not want to be your single source of music discovery. We would like to be a part of your music journey along with other music discovery avenues. I am confident that there are radio stations that embrace a curatorial ethic similar to ours in their endeavor to widen the notion of the term “mainstream” in the eyes/ears of their listeners. Like ours, these other radio stations should be broadcast radio stations. The un-skippable nature of broadcast radio playlists leaves the door open for musical surprises and serendipity  – something we ought to leave room for in our lives. The closest analogy to this is in the realm of dating. Not getting out of your house to seek experiences that lead to an organic collision with a potential romantic partner and ONLY swiping on a dating app to find romance can be incredibly limiting and beyond a certain point, frustrating too. The skip of a track via an on-demand streaming service is analogous to the swipe-left action on a dating app. Obviously, if these radio stations do not cater to your sonic palette even after having given them a few hours of your ear-time, feel free to move on BUT relay your feedback to the DJs of the station before you move on. Your feedback, however harsh, will be valuable fodder for the station owners as they recalibrate their playlist strategy. If this move towards independently-run broadcast radio stations happens at scale and is derived from an exodus away from conglomerate-owned terrestrial radio (something that is far easier now that people can tune into online broadcasts via their phones and plug their phones into their car stereo systems), maybe this would force some integrity back into conglomerate-owned terrestrial radio AND curators on on-demand music streaming platforms.

In a nutshell, give smaller radio curators a chance. You might be surprised what you discover. They are also more likely to engage with you. Here are  snippets of e-mails we received from some of our listeners.

– A listener from New Jersey (USA)

– A listener from Maryland (USA)

The second option is to follow playlists curated by independent music bloggers on platforms such as Spotify or Apple music. Once again, to the extent that a listener can see these playlists in their entirety in advance, there is no room for sonic serendipity in the way that there is on a broadcast radio medium. The consolation here is that these playlists are human-curated and are hence far less likely to be plagued with the musical homogeneity that characterizes algorithmically curated playlists –  something we have delved into in our article titled “Should Spotify be the single destination for music discovery”.

C] Music has largely become a solitary experience as opposed to the community experience that it once was.

Up until a decade and a half ago, the presence of an overarching musical monoculture meant that most music fans (both ardent and casual) shared a common sonic backdrop. The ubiquity of music of this monoculture was so great that it permeated shared experiences and became an emotional connective tissue for communities. In his book, “Rockonomics”, the author Alan Krueger highlights something called the “bandwagon” effect in which music listeners’ preferences are influenced by someone else’s validation of a song or artist’s popularity. That someone else invariably ends up being a gatekeeper with scale providing a common musical backdrop for a community. A shared familiarity of the music meant that these songs would last for longer in the consciousness of these communities than they would if they were consumed in solitary, non-overlapping, and confined music spaces. Today, our music consumption in algorithmically curated sonic bubbles is no match for the network effects of the music of a well-entrenched monoculture – which is currently (i.e. as of 2024) being dominated by 5-8 acts/superstars. This might be very good for those few artists/bands, but it is not great for other musicians and certainly NOT good for music fans in the long run. This over-exposure of a few artists while others are relegated to  varying levels of obscurity over time will lead to a music scene that is far less diverse and far less creative. Us music fans will be worse off for this. We just do not realize this yet. The saddest part of this reality is that us music aficionados will have no one but ourselves to blame for our collective inertia and apathy towards the dynamics propelling the accelerated demise (for which many of us are unwitting enablers) of an art-form that we claim to consider sacred.

Sadly, we do not have any concrete solutions for what listeners can do to address this reality. A compelling argument can be made that trying to reconstruct a monoculture of the sort that defined yesteryear is impractical and regressive – especially since this notion of a breakdown of monoculture is also extending to other forms of entertainment such as television shows. In what is arguably a golden age for television content, many great shows are going under the radar. Noteworthy examples include Netflix’s “Loudermilk” (starring Ron Livingston of Office Space fame), HBO Max’s “The Girls On The Bus” (starring Melissa Benoist, Carla Gugino, and Scott Foley), and Netflix’s “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones” (a fantastic 4-episode documentary by best-selling author Dan Buettner).

That being said, we must push back on the curatorial mediocrity that has paralyzed America’s  influential music gatekeepers for the last 30 years. We still have an opportunity to turn this ship around. Now, we just need to exercise our collective will against the destructive tidal wave  that is our modern music gatekeepers who seem to be unknowingly decimating the soul of the music industry. The few suggestions that we made earlier in this article are a starting point. Now what are you waiting for? Get right to it!