retrotalk2022#3 - the dead oppressing the living

" Is Old Music Killing New Music?" asks Ted Gioia at his substack The Honest Broker, and goes on to explore the steady growth of catalogue sales in music. 

"I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms—but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers. According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market....

"The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

".... the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It was twice that rate just three years ago. 

"The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century...

"....Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact. 

"... Old recordings, like zombies in those bad films, are out to kill the living"

Gioia also points to declining audience figures for the Grammies, radio programming trends, hologram tours, A&R and other music biz executives losing confidence in the present, and other symptoms. 

In Retromania, I looked into this issue of catalogue outselling new and recent ("deep catalogue" being a particularly potent category) and asked Billboard's Ed Christman for his specialist-knowledge low-down. So I'm not surprised to see the tendency has continued and escalated... 

It's a kind of oligopoly of the elderly -  a gerontocracy comprised of those who were able to establish  enduring stature through the Analogue System aka the Monoculture. Now as Gioia observes, they are selling off their publishing for massive sums, to investors betting on a posthumous dominance that will continue to hold sway: 

"The hottest area of investment in the music business is old songs—with investment firms getting into bidding wars to buy publishing catalogs from aging rock and pop stars. The song catalogs in most demand are by musicians in their 70s or 80s (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, etc.)—if not already dead (David Bowie, James Brown, etc.).  Even major record labels are participating in the shift, with Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, and others buying up publishing catalogs—investing huge sums in old tunes that, in an earlier day, would have been used to launch new artists."

"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living"

Rolling Stone piece on "The Sudden, Lucrative Gold Rush for Old Music"

Andy Green and Kory Grow note that: "catalog sales, biopics, holograms, and other media are extending the lifespan — and sometimes enormously expanding the value — of rock's classic brands."

"Some well-heeled investors are shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars for lucrative publishing catalogs; others are making use of TikTok and developing technologies like holograms; others envision deepfake software that could create “new” songs by departed artists. Industry experts say that’s just the beginning."

The retro-goldmine has deep roots - 

"Starting in the mid-Seventies, Hollywood realized the potential for rock biopics and produced films about Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley. Subsequent decades introduced tell-all memoirs, docuseries, jukebox musicals, Vegas residencies, full-album playthroughs at concerts, traveling museums, and other endeavors to hold on to consumers’ interests."

But holograms is a new frontier of necrophilia: 

“Eventually age does become a factor,” says Jeff Pezzuti, CEO and founder of Eyellusion, a company that stages classic-rock hologram tours. “How do you extend that? Does it just end? Do they just break up and they call it a day? Do they just release DVDs of the old shows? Or is there a way to actually continue that and make something cool and exciting that would cause buzz?”

"... Touring holograms of Buddy Holly, Frank Zappa, and Ronnie James Dio made respectable money before the pandemic....  ” Olivier Chastan, CEO of Iconic Artists Group — which now owns most of the Beach Boys’ intellectual property — hopes to bring the group’s California girls to the final frontier. “In five years, I could send you a text and say, ‘At 2 p.m., let’s put our Oculus Rift glasses on, and let’s go see the Beach Boys record ‘Good Vibrations’ at Western Recorders,’” he said after the acquisition. And a lawsuit Chris Cornell’s widow has filed against the late grunge superstar’s bandmates cites her interest in tours with a replacement singer, hologram concerts, and “deep-fake renditions of Chris’ vocals drawn from extant recordings by artificial intelligence that could mint brand new Soundgarden hits.”

Another one is the transplant of a new member to replace dead tissue, giving the band an extra lease of life: 

"Queen are a rare example of a band that’s managed to find a new audience on the road decades after the death of their frontman. They’ve been gigging with Adam Lambert for nearly 10 years, but it was in 2019, after the release of the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, that keyboardist Spike Edney started to notice something incredible. “People were lustily singing along to every song that was in the movie,” he told Rolling Stone in 2019, “and looking blankly during every song that wasn’t.” The movie grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide and earned Rami Malek a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury. It allowed Queen and Adam Lambert to launch their biggest tour since the Eighties, but the 

"Nowadays, [Pezzuti]'s especially eager to work with living artists on creating holograms they could use now and after death. “With living artists we would actually set up a stage of some kind, and we would actually record one show with the intention of creating holographic performances,” he says. “So basically you’d be creating a show where the artist looks like they’re there. Obviously, they’ll sound like they’re there because there will be live sound. But basically it could be in five or 10 or 15 places at once. So the idea is, the older acts could actually be out there in front of people generating revenue and quote-unquote ‘touring.'” windfall it generated went far beyond ticket sales."..

... “We were offered an AC/DC hologram of Bon Scott,” says CAA agent Christopher Dalston, referring to the band’s singer who died in 1980 (he didn’t say which hologram company approached him). “We asked ourselves, ‘Do we want to represent something with Bon Scott?’ And it just wasn’t right for us at that point. It’s a very personal thing to the groups. … You have to be careful what you do there. AC/DC is still a very current band with Brian Johnson singing.”

Biopics are relevance-reinstaters and revenue drivers: 

"There’s even talk of a new Doors movie. “The Oliver Stone one was 31 years ago,” Jampol says. “That means that everybody on planet Earth who’s 31 and under was not alive when that movie came out. That’s why we’re looking at making a new one.”

Biopics create life after death.

Julian Sanchez wonders why copyright terms are so long, and offers a retromaniacal speculative theory: it's a form of "protectionism against the past":

"Insanely long copyright terms are how the culture industries avoid competing with their own back catalogs. Imagine that we still had a copyright term that maxed out at 28 years, the regime the first Americans lived under. The shorter term wouldn’t in itself have much effect on output or incentives to create. But it would mean that, today, every book, song, image, and movie produced before 1984 was freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Under those conditions, would we be anywhere near as willing to pay a premium for the latest release? In some cases, no doubt. But when the baseline is that we already have free, completely legal access to every great album, film, or novel produced before the mid-80s—more than any human being could realistically watch, read, or listen to in a lifetime—I wouldn’t be surprised if our consumption patterns became a good deal less neophilic, or at the very least, prices on new releases had to drop substantially to remain competitive.

If that’s right, there’s a perverse sense in which retroactive extensions for absurd lengths of time might actually, obliquely, serve copyright’s constitutional imperative to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”: Not by directly increasing the present value of newly produced works, but by shrinking the pool of free alternatives to the newest works... If that’s true, though, it’s not enough in itself to justify the longer terms: The question is whether the marginal new content is actually worth losing universal free access to the older material. For reasons unclear to me, there often seems to be an undefended assumption that more newer stuff, whatever the quality, outweighs wider access to existing content at any conceivable margin. I’m not sure how you’d go about quantifying that, but it strikes me as wildly implausible on face."