Is Old Music Really Killing New Music?

In early 2022, on his blog The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia published a piece entitled “Is Old Music Killing New Music?” in which he lays out a string of charts based on numbers from MRC Data which point to a grim future. In the previous year, nearly 70% of all streaming music was of “old music.” A nearly 5% increase in share from 2020.

A dire situation for what Ted refers to as the “working musician.” How can anyone break out if they are forced to compete with the likes of David Bowie or Credence Clearwater Revival? He points out that the 200 most popular tracks of of the moment account for less than 5% of total streams. He tells a series of anecdotes about being in a retail shop where the young cashier was jamming out to the Police, or sitting in a diner and hearing exclusively songs which are older than the entire staff.

If you review social media and music forum posts from around the time Ted’s blog was published, average listeners posit a myriad of explanations as to how this trend might be explained. They argue that music from the 60s and 70s were just on another level. That there are no Lou Reeds anymore. Others point to the formulaic nature of modern pop music. Of algorithmically generated music backing industry plants. Still others point to the soulless nature of the lyrical content. That songs used to be “about something.”

In The Honest Broker post, Ted points to an extremely telling piece of information: the MRC (now rebranded as Luminate) only considers “new” music to be less than 18 months old. In the very report which he references (the 2022 Midyear Report), the US average monthly listenership is broken down by decade. The number one decade being the 2000s. But the number two decade? The 2020s. And considering that the 2020s were barely two years old (this is the midyear report), that seems to be fairly high.

If we jump ahead to 2025, almost half of all songs streamed are from the 2020s. The next highest decade is the 2010s at 28.5%. Then the 2000s at 11%. The 90s 6.4%. The 80s 3.3%. All decades from the 1970s backward make up a measly 2.7%. Now part of the issue is that the 2022 midyear report includes AM and FM radio as well as CDs and vinyl, which will skew the numbers older. But there are cultural factors which are unique to 2022 as well.

The MDC/Luminate 2022 Midyear Report contains an entire subsection discussing how Stranger Things helped to propel Kate Bush’s “Running up That Hill” back into the charts to the tune of approximately 15 million streams a day. The Batman was also released in 2022, pushing Nirvana’s 1991 deep cut “Something in the Way” into the top 20 of both Amazon and iTunes. 2025 thus far does not have any of these anomalies, it’s in the middle of the decade, and likely paints a more accurate picture of the new vs. old music paradigm.

So, whether or not modern music has less soul. Whether or not the classics never go out of style. Whether or not there will never be another Lou Reed. Considering that even in 2022, among Gen Z listeners, 73% of all songs consumed had been released within the past 2.5 years, I think new music is safe from total annihilation by the old.

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