Why Are People Consuming Less New Music?

Last year Ted Gioia penned an interesting piece about the declining proportion of music sales for which newly created music accounts. In considering the matter I am not so sure that, as he tells us, this is no reflection of the quality of that music. (I defer to the scientific finding that—with less timbral variety and pitch content, louder, more repetitive--it is indeed getting worse, a bombastic yet flat sameness helped along by the degree to which, as Gioia himself has had prior occasion to remark, critics have become claqueurs.)

However, I do think he is right to emphasize the way in which the industry's executives have conducted themselves--sticking with the old and familiar as they mine it for whatever additional profits they can and displaying the rankest laziness and cowardice with regard to the hard work, and risk-taking, involved in discovering and cultivating new talent, and new creations. Admittedly the Suits have always done this--as Balzac makes clear in his portrait of the utterly vile Parisian publishing king Dauriat. Yet the tendency to this behavior seems to have just gone on getting more and more extreme across the entire range of the entertainment-industrial complex, from the movies (where every one of the top ten hits at the North American box office last year was a sequel or remake), to TV (where you can barely tell what decade it is from the line-up), to fiction (where the thriller writers whose names you see on the paperback rack are Patterson, Grisham, Clancy, Cussler--just as was the case back in the twentieth century).

I know the world of music journalism less well than I do those others, but unless it is very different from what prevails in those other areas (where suck-up entertainment reporters write as if they expect every last one of us to grow incontinent with enthusiasm at the announcement of each and every new remake of some classic), I applaud his readiness to criticize the industry. Noteworthy, too, is his sparing a word for what hard times it means for those musicians struggling to "make it," which struggles he acknowledges as meaning something for the culture we live in, and meriting some sympathy--a thing even rarer in our journalism. After all, certainly where print fiction is concerned we almost never see anyone with the standing of Gioia spare a thought for the creatives who have not yet made their names--the default mode instead a sniveling defense of how publishing treats them, and sneers at those who aren't "professionals" yet as worth no one's time, with the "liberal" Guardian and Salon disgracing themselves by publishing particularly nasty pieces of aspiring writer-bashing by the bitter little trolls who had once been slush pile readers. ("The shocking truth about the slush pile" declared the title of the Guardian piece. Rather it was a reminder that we are long past the day when people like Balzac or London could tell the truth about such things in fiction or nonfiction, confirming the not-at-all-shocking truth that their industry, and the media generally, like the society we live in generally, operate by what Carl Sagan called the "Tin Rule": "Suck up to those above you and abuse those below you.") If anything, Gioia's not swimming with this filthy tide merits at least as much applause as his readiness to call out his industry's insiders.