Oldies are dominating the charts – and strangling new music at birth

By wazup on January 3, 2024 Comments Closed / 77 views

Hear that discordant clang? It’s probably Keith Richards hanging up his guitar for good. According to new figures from the UK music industry, not one of the top 10 best-selling albums of 2023 was originally released in 2023. This is despite new releases last year by a slew of huge global acts including the Rolling Stones, Olivia Rodrigo, Lewis Capaldi, Blur and Drake. The mighty Ed Sheeran even released two albums in 2023 – and neither of them made the top 10.

Perhaps 2023 was a dud musical year (it certainly didn’t sound like one – see above, plus albums by Lana Del Rey, Pink, Take That and Miley Cyrus, among many other household names). No, the stats highlight just how hard it is for new albums to make an impact in our increasingly streaming-obsessed and algorithm-driven world. When the combined heft of an on-form Mick and Keef, Ed, Drake, Lana and Olivia fail to make a dent in the top 10, you know that something has changed in the music industry.

According to the figures from the BPI, the biggest-selling album of 2023 (including so-called Album Equivalent Sales, which is a metric that includes streaming numbers) was a greatest hits compilation called The Highlights released in 2021 by Canadian megastar The Weeknd. Taylor Swift occupied the two and three slots with Midnights (2022) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version), which was released in 2023 but was a re-recording of an earlier 2014 album so doesn’t constitute “new” music.

At four was Elton John’s hits compilation Diamonds (2017), followed by Harry Styles’s Harry’s House (2022), Fleetwood Mac’s 50 Years – Don’t Stop (2018), Eminem’s Curtain Call hits album (2005) and US singer-songwriter SZA’s SOS (released at the end of 2022). The list was rounded off by the Arctic Monkeys’ AM (2013) and ABBA Gold (1992).

Miley Cyrus, whose latest album failed to reach the top 10

The highest-placed album of new music that was actually released in 2023 was Lewis Capaldi’s Broken by Desire to be Heavenly Sent, which sits at number 14 in the chart. In the entire top 40 best-selling albums of last year, only seven were released over that period. Compare this to the previous 17 years: in 13 of those years, the best-selling album was released in the year in question. This figure would be even higher had Adele and Capaldi not each seen single albums become best-sellers for two years in a row (in 2015/2016 and 2019/2020 respectively).

So what’s going on? It’s not as though the record industry is on its uppers. Quite the opposite. Record labels are in the rudest of health and positively coining in the cash. According to the BPI, streaming numbers hit a record annual high of 179.6 billion streams last year, almost double the total in 2018. It’s how we consume almost 90 per cent of our music these days. The world’s biggest label Universal Music Group saw revenue increase by 10 per cent in its last reported quarter (the eye-watering bonus package of up to £80 million offered to Universal boss Sir Lucian Grainge last year tells you all you need to know about how healthy the industry is feeling).

Ironically, though, the streaming boom is part the problem. Due to the convenience of Spotify and the like, we are all listening to far more music than ever before. Recent figures from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry showed that we listened to 20.7 hours of music each week on average last year, up from 20.1 hours per week in 2022. That’s the equivalent of listening to an additional 13 three-minute songs per week.

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It may not sound like much, but the more music we listen to, the more it’s in danger of becoming passive listening. Tunes become like sonic wallpaper; we hear but we don’t actually listen. This erodes the power of the album, and this is what seems to have happened last year.

Streaming platforms’ in-built algorithms don’t help. They constantly play us songs they think we’ll like based on previous listening patterns. Enjoyed Fleetwood Mac’s Little Lies? Well, here’s Landslide. We become trapped in a musical echo chamber of our own making, thus sending those artists further up the charts. It’s no wonder that new music doesn’t get as much of a look-in as it used to.

We are also seeing, at the top of the charts at least, listening becoming increasingly concentrated among a few artists. Five of last year’s top 20 albums were by the supremely talented Taylor Swift. This gives her a whopping market share of 25 per cent at that end of the market. Talented, yes, but also ubiquitous and inescapable. And we’ll see and hear much more of her his year as her monumental Eras tour rolls into Edinburgh in June.

But the way we consume music has always morphed, hasn’t it? Emile Berliner’s gramophone threatened sheet music vendors 125 years ago, while the dawn of the CD saw vinyl manufacturers despair about their future in the Eighties. Illegal downloads were meant to herald the death of the music industry. But just look at it now. Is this just another adjustment? Well, no. Because the squeezing out of new artists is having an impact further down the food chain.

Our obsession with old music means that young bands have less of a shot at making it. Small venues – the lifeblood of the up-and-coming artist – are closing at an alarming rate. Over the year to October, 125 grassroots venues either closed or stopped putting on live music. This equated to 16 per cent of all such spaces in the UK at the cost of 14,250 concerts, £9 million of income for musicians and 4,000 jobs. They’re still closing at a rate of one venue a week. Trade body the Music Venues Trust has said that venues are “in the middle of a full-blown crisis”. And so the music scene is in the most curious and seemingly unsustainable situation: it’s blooming at the top but the roots are withering. Urgent action is needed.

Here’s an idea. Every time a major artist plays a show at a big venue like London’s flagship O2, they could be contractually obliged to put on a warm-up show at a nearby small venue. The cash could be a lifeline that would ensure the venue’s survival and let it host smaller bands.

Peter Gabriel, who released his acclaimed album i/o in 2023

Credit: Nadav Kander

But let’s not get too depressed. There is fantastic music out there, if you can escape Spotify playing you Rhianna again. Last year saw wonderful music from Raye, Jessie Ware, Cleo Sol and Loyle Carner. Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon released career-high albums. Secretive collective Sault wowed critics with a genre-defying live show in London just before Christmas. Springsteen and Coldplay are about to embark on yet another lap of the world, while The Killers and Liam Gallagher are set to be live highlights in 2024. Glam-baroque chamber group The Last Dinner Party release their hotly-tipped debut album in less than a month. There’s much to look forward to.

The BPI’s figures also reveal some notable news when it comes to the gender balance in music. Last year, female artists spent the most weeks at number one in the singles chart since the chart countdown was launched in 1952 (a record-breaking 31 out of 52 weeks). Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa, Ellie Goulding and Billie Eilish were among the chart-toppers. This is a welcome development. Last year Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis blamed the lack of female headliners at the festival on a “pipeline” problem in the music industry. She was suggesting that not enough female artists were breaking through. I didn’t buy that line at the time, and these figures prove that it was demonstrably – and thankfully – wide of the mark.

The BPI’s figures prove that the music industry is in good shape. Just think twice before you release a new album.