Our music tastes are stuck in the past – and AI is ruining the future

This summer, at the age of 76, Sir Elton Hercules John retired from touring with a glorious show watched by 200,000 people at Glastonbury (and seven million on TV). Were they witnessing the end of an era… or the changing of the guard?

The year actually belonged to pop’s superwomen: Taylor Swift and Beyoncé both staged record-breaking tours, while Madonna got back on the road following a life-threatening health scare. It was heartwarming to see the sexagenarian superstar still throwing risqué moves, but she could no longer claim to be the woman on top.

Beyoncé’s phenomenal Renaissance tour raised half a billion dollars, yet it was Swift who ruled the roost. By the time it concludes next year, her ongoing Eras tour is expected to have generated $1.5 billion, supplanting Elton’s Farewell as the highest grossing tour in history.

Swift was inescapable in 2023. She also had a box-office-smashing concert film, the year’s bestselling album, two chart-topping re-recorded versions of older albums, and a dozen UK chart singles (44 in the US), ending the year as the most streamed artist globally on Spotify. Much like Elton, she has accomplished this ubiquity while creating music of genuine substance, with lyrics of wit and emotion, and sparkling melodies that rank alongside the best.

Among the 50 bestselling acts of all time, Swift is now one of just 12 female solo artists – most of them older than her. Are a new generation ready to break pop’s shatter-resistant glass ceiling? There have certainly been false dawns for women before, and festivals continue to stage all-male headline bills. Across all UK festivals this year, only 18 per cent of headliners were female.

The sad death of Sinead O’Connor aged 56, and a very troubling Britney Spears autobiography both served as reminders of what women in popular music have been up against for decades. In The Woman in Me, Spears wrote coldly of how she “smiled politely while TV show hosts leered at my breasts, while American parents said I was destroying their children by wearing a crop top, while executives patted my hand condescendingly and second-guessed my career choices even though I’d sold millions of records, while my family acted like I was evil.”

The death of Tina Turner in May also brought up hard memories of how she’d had to fight her way to success against steep odds, abused by her husband Ike, and dropped by her record company. When Turner was dismissed by a senior executive as “an old n—– douchebag” she was 43 – just a year older than Beyoncé is now – and on the verge of one of the greatest comebacks in pop history. Will we see her like again? 

Jeff Beck, David Crosby and the Band’s Robbie Robertson were among other pioneering talents we lost in 2023, while even the apparently ageless (though actually 74-year-old) Bruce Springsteen postponed touring for health reasons. The Eagles, Aerosmith and the somewhat less lamented Kiss all embarked on farewell tours. Stevie Nicks called time on Fleetwood Mac. 

There were other losses, of artists whose work is embedded in the fabric of our musical times, including such unique talents as Television’s new wave guitar genius Tom Verlaine, Oscar-winning experimental composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, supreme melodicist Burt Bacharach, one-time Calypso giant Harry Belafonte and the last of the crooners, Tony Bennett. You won’t be able to go anywhere this Christmas without hearing Irish folk punk laureate Shane MacGowan serenading us from beyond the grave with his masterpiece Fairytale of New York. 

There is solace in the notion that great music outlives its makers, but the well needs to be replenished with fresh talent. What are we to make of the fact that, as 2023 came to an end, the most successful British stars appeared to be a couple of old beat combos with a combined age of 399 years? The Beatles made it back to number one with their AI-assisted sentimental “final” single, Now and Then, while the Stones topped the album charts with their rip-roaring swansong Hackney Diamonds. 

Who might replace the stars of the 1960s and 1970s? For now, it seems the answer is the stars of the 1980s and 1990s. Depeche Mode lost an original member but they also delivered one of the finest albums of their career, Memento Mori. We had a summer of Britpop featuring Blur and Pulp, while Oasis’s Liam and Noel Gallagher continued to snipe at each other from afar while drawing huge crowds to their solo concerts. 

Are any young British household names emerging to replace the giants of yesteryear? The average age of this year’s Glastonbury Festival headliner was 53. In 1997, when The Prodigy, Radiohead and Ash topped the bill, it was 26. Apart from Dua Lipa and Lewis Capaldi, it is hard to think of a 20-something British star who would be considered fit for the challenge. And before you all scream “Harry Styles”, the former One Direction pin-up turns 30 next year. (Ed Sheeran is already 32.)

That a jazz band (Ezra Collective) won the Mercury Prize probably says it all about the state of contemporary music. UK rappers filled arenas at home but – with the possible exception of Central Cee – aren’t making much headway abroad. The singles charts continued to confuse everyone over the age of 15 with a mad scramble of dance tracks, viral novelty hits and collaborations by a rapidly changing cast. And, once again, not a single new UK artist’s debut featured among the top 50 biggest selling albums of the year, a chart comprehensively dominated by old records.

It wasn’t for want of trying: somewhat disturbingly, there was more music released every two days in 2023 than was released in the whole of 1970. Online, there are somewhere in the region of 100 million tracks available to stream, with tens of thousands more appearing every single day. We are drowning in music, but we no longer have shared and trusted filters to help us navigate through the deluge. In the absence of Top of the Pops, a functional national pop radio station or authoritative music magazines, we rely on algorithms to shape our playlists – or else we retreat to the comfort of music we already know. 

British consumers spent £2 billion on stadium, outdoor and arena gigs this year, big-ticket events usually catering for some form of nostalgia. During a single weekend in July, a combined total of around a million people attended shows across London by artists including Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Blur and Lana Del Rey; only one of those musicians is under 50. 

At the same time, the UK lost nearly 16 per cent of its grassroots music venues in 2023: 125 small venues closed their doors; many more are currently at risk. Audience figures for small gigs are down 16.7 per cent on pre-pandemic numbers. These are the very places where the Eltons of the future might have expected to put in the hours, honing live performance skills that could lead them down the yellow brick road to the Emerald City, or at least the Emirates Stadium.

Of course, live music isn’t everything. In a streaming-dominated world where artists are paid incremental royalties for songs concocted cheaply on home technology, it can make little economic sense to take the show on the road. A lot of artists of whom you’ve probably never heard are flourishing in their own online scenes. Britain’s secret superstars clock up ridiculous numbers without ever venturing offline. PinkPantheress, a 22-year-old from Kent who endeavoured to keep her real identity a secret, has drawn in 22 million monthly listeners on Spotify and scored one of the breakout hits of the year with Boy’s a Liar, while having only ever played a handful of (none too impressive) live shows. That is an entirely new model for pop success, and there are many more like her, though I would question whether anyone without a live presence can ever hope to progress into the mainstream. 

And there’s a storm on the horizon, of which we are only just beginning to see the first threatening gusts. Its impact will be far beyond the novelty of cleaning up a lo-fi John Lennon vocal (as happened with the Beatles single), prank songs with computer-generated impersonations (a track falsely purporting to feature US stars Drake and The Weeknd went viral), or concocting terrible lyrics in the style of famous artists (Nick Cave dismissed a ChatGPT song mimicking his style as “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human”). 

The real issue is how the music industry (and, indeed, we listeners) will cope when a tsunami of music entirely generated by AI engulfs streaming platforms, adding ever more content to an already overflowing pool. At the simplistic ends of dance and ambient musical genres, machine-generated tracks are already hoovering up streaming royalties, many of them allied to streaming farms (networks of bots, posing as online listeners, that artificially inflate the popularity of these tracks). 

Various studies have suggested between 3 and 10 per cent of music on streaming services is fraudulent – and the fact that experts struggle to agree on a more precise figure is disturbing in itself. If we accept the higher end of such estimates, fraudsters could currently be generating a billion dollars in royalties a year. And this is at a time when AI music generation is only in its infancy.

 This year, 60,000 songs were uploaded to Spotify every single day, exercising a profoundly distorting effect on the way we consume music. What is going to happen when AI makes 600,000 tracks a day? Or six million? If you found it hard to keep up in 2023, hold on to your hats, because things are about to get very stormy indeed. Perhaps Elton got out just in the nick of time.