Recently my wife and I went to a performance by a band whose debut album came out in 1986. Every couple of years they produce yet another album of well-crafted, well-played, mid-tempo album of songs about life in all its mysteries and heartbreaks. More than 20 studio albums in these 38 years. (Considerably more than Pink Floyd or Fleetwood Mac or the Eagles, if, like me, you’re prone to thinking like that.)
These days their new music get modest attention, and the venues they play are decidedly smaller. Still, here they were touring behind their latest album, but it was also clear the singer knew what she was up against with that. After the band kicked off with two older tunes, the singer, in a manner so sheepish that it made me feel both pity and anger, announced they were going to play a few new songs tonight. Cue the uneasy smattering of applause. She immediately added, less there be immediate walkouts, that they’d also be playing all the old favorites we expected to hear. It was all I could do to not stand up and shout, “Play your new music!” They’d more than earned that right. But I was sure by the crowd’s stiff reaction that if I voiced such support I’d be beset by the 60-somethings around me in their flowy smocks and spartan sandals.
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For me, all of this only underscored a question I’d been asking for several years, despite feeling sure I know the terrible answer: Do we even want new music anymore?
I’ve asked the question of friends, strangers, and also famous musicians, who could have been offended but weren’t despite the fact that their response revealed some uncomfortable truths. I asked it of people who toiled in the music industry and of people who made a living writing about music.
Once I asked it of a woman at the Quail Creek Country Club in Naples, Fl., after watching a Tom Petty-Stevie Nicks tribute act—tribute acts being a sure-fire way to avoid hearing anything new. I explained that I was writing a book exploring this central question, but this time instead of posing it like I had a million times before, I just said, “What I’m writing about and arguing in this book is that we don’t really want to hear new music anymore,” to which she quickly said, “Correct. I would fully agree with you on that.” And then her friend, standing next to her, added, “For a certain age group,” and I said yes, she was right about that—I wasn’t talking about teenagers or people in their early 20s. But pretty much everyone older than that.
Over the years the answers I got were sometimes nuanced, but on the whole people tended to answer with sighs of knowing resignation, even relief. The old hits are today’s hits, too.
In 2024, we’ve arrived at the point in which a remarkably select number of songs within the scope of the history of recorded rock and pop music—a great many of them from the ’80s—are always playing somewhere across this once great musical landscape. On the airwaves they’re hawking everything from Geico insurance (Homeowner: “We do have a Ratt problem,” which cuts away to Ratt playing in the basement), to TurboTax (Spandau Ballet’s “This Much is True”) to Yoplait (Boston’s “More Than a Feeling”) to Fiber One (the Scorpions’ “Rock Like You a Hurricane”). Hey Scorpions, come clean: The impetus behind “Rock You Like a Hurricane” was always about the importance of fiber, right?
Somehow we got so content with the music we know from long ago that we became dangerously well-gorged on it. And at such a state we decided—however consciously or unconsciously—that we just didn’t need any new music.
To be clear, I’m aware that the new music keeps coming. Bad Bunny! Beyonce! More Taylor Swift! And we can listen to that new music in more ways than ever before. Yet digital album sales continue to be down—dropping about 8% compared to 2023’s totals, according to Luminate, an entertainment data company. And while the sale of vinyl albums is up—at an estimated 6%—that’s largely because people want “classic” albums on vinyl. Less Coldplay, more Led Zeppelin.
Sure, you might check out the new album by the Foo Fighters, Adele, Post Malone, or the Weeknd, and for a few weeks it’s what all the music press and bloggers and podcasters are in rapture over. Maybe you try to listen to it intently for a few weeks because you understand you’re supposed to love it—it’s supposed to be the best album they’ve put out. Everyone is saying so. And you either come to believe that, too, or, just as likely, you accept it without actually feeling it. But in a month’s time or less, it’s as if that big album never dropped at all, and you go right back to listening to everything that came well before it, and it never finds a place in your playlist closest to your heart. Because on your playlist and in steady rotation is Journey’s “Greatest Hits” album, released in 1998, which, as of this writing, has spent 828 weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart.
We’ve arrived at this strange juncture with new music and old music due to two powerful forces—one deeply commercial, the other deeply human: repetition and nostalgia. With the arrival of MTV, the Video Age was here, and with it came consequences that still play out today. As MTV became more mainstream, Top 40 radio and MTV fed each other incessantly. If a song was a hit, it had a video in constant rotation. If that video was popular, then the song was on the airwaves nonstop. Sometimes the video was insipid, but that hardly mattered. We were stuck in a new loop of musical periodicity.
Read more: Nostalgia: Our Favorite Cultural Copout
In the years before MTV, had we really settled for all that bowling coverage on ABC and “Baretta”?
Despite all the new music made after the height of MTV, it turned out we still couldn’t get enough of those songs from the era of Video Killing the Radio Star, no matter how lame or shoddy they were. They have survived like the Great Pyramids thanks to the deepest layers of fervent nostalgia for the era that birthed them.
My experience is that pretty much everyone believes that music from this century won’t nearly have the same afterlife because it’s vastly inferior to the music that came 40 or 50 years before it.
But you also can’t rate what you’ve never listened to.
According to a 2022 Luminate report, boomers are listening to more music from the ’70s than from any other decade, which is no great surprise. Both Millennials and Gen Xers prefer ’90s music. Only Gen-Z prefers the music of this decade. Also this: Only 63% of boomers even like it when their favorite artists release new music. New Blondie? New Doobie Brothers or Kansas? Mostly boomers prefer new knees.
The consequences of this are worrisome: The more we’re apathetic to new music from even the long-established artists we love, the more they’ll just settle for touring for a living and playing the songs they recorded back when Thursday nights meant staying home and watching “Seinfeld.” But even with our endless capacity for endless repetition, the greatest hits eventually stop feeling, well, as great.
What does this all mean for new artists? Increasingly they’re going to be on the outside looking in, due to one major and well-documented development in recent years that will have a profound impact on the music we’ll be hearing in the future—what and how: the massive acquisition of artists’ catalogs. When the pandemic took hold and it was clear no artists were going on tour for who knew how long, some established musicians tried to soothe our anxiety—and themselves—by performing live via their Instagram accounts. They strummed their acoustic guitars in their kitchens and home studios and on their porches, often covering other artists’ songs, perhaps to remember better days. Some made what came to be known as COVID records. (Predictably, on the whole, a lot of themes of isolation set to 4/4.) But other artists hatched plans that I would not consider soothing: They sold their back catalogs to venture capitalists for vast fortunes. And that music is going to show up in ways you can’t even imagine.
So if you think you hear an awful lot of Huey Lewis and the News and the Steve Miller Band now, in 2024, you’re about to find out just how “Stuck With You” Huey and his peers from the ‘70s and ‘80s really are.
There’s always going to be the next Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter. What this century has shown us, though, is how dicey it is for the break-out artists to keep making new music we want to hear in the years that follow. Snow Patrol, anyone? Gnarls Barkley? Daniel Powter?
It may be hard to remember, but we used to want so much from music. Today mostly what we want is for it to remain deeply familiar. The Internet makes this exceptionally easy. Yes, we’ve always been prone to nostalgia in music. Think of groups like Sha Na Na, who performed at Woodstock right before Jimi Hendrix’s mind-bending set and whose entire career was made up of performing ‘50s music; or the Stray Cats, an ‘80s band whose very look and sound paid tribute to the ‘50s rockabilly scene.
Read More: Leave Chappell Roan Alone
But today nostalgia is so immutable because so much about the Internet exists to remind us of life as it once was. Whether it’s the Facebook post from your childhood friend of a KC & the Sunshine Band album he dug out of his basement, or Joan from book club putting another clip of the Macarena on her Instagram, the Internet can lull us into a perpetual state of looking back and believing that what the culture offered us through the previous decades was more gratifying and more fun, and that life in the past was inherently a better and richer time. And so was the music
On YouTube old music reigns: We can watch whole episodes of “American Bandstand” or full, grainy-footage concerts of Grand Funk Railroad and the Carpenters. On an endless line of music sites you can pour over the latest ranking of a band’s albums who peaked when TV Guide was still at the grocery-store check-out. Or maybe you like Rolling Stone’s incessant polls of greatest guitar players of all time, greatest singers, or greatest drummers. There is certainly room for that reflection on music from the past, but all those lists—and the impulses behind them—ultimately help keep us in Exile on Main Street.
Nothing to get hung about, you say? I think I disagree.
Adapted from The Endless Refrain: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Threat to New Music. Used with permission of the publisher, Melville House Publishing. Copyright © 2024 by David Rowell.