Kate Bush exposes a lot of what’s broken with music industry

Kate Bush’s continued success due to Stranger Things is a reminder of the “new music” fallacy

People are more interested in great music that is new to them

Than new acts and this week’s best new releases

Greatness never gets old.

Agreed or…?

My theory has long been that an obsession with new-new-new has caused more damage to the industry than piracy. Here’s a Twitter thread with a few more thoughts on this

This can be the same as

this though

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There is an overwhelming amount of music out there - I find in a typical month I’m saving a minimum of 120 hours of new albums into a Spotify playlist to listen to, which is more than 4 hours per day of new stuff to keep on top of. I can and do listen to older music (started the How Good Was The Year thread series specifically to help plug the gaps in my historic knowledge) but it’s difficult to stay on top of the current music scenes across multiple genres and still have time to look back. I definitely understand why some people might ignore either new releases or historic music in order to have enough time to devote to the music they want to listen to.

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I wonder when Kate Bush broke even though? That is to say paid off her ‘debts’ to the record company. My guess is when she released the Whole Story comp after 5 studio albums.

When is she touring though :person_shrugging:

Yep.

I find thatI’m at the point where there’s wnough stuff by artists I already like that I havent given a good listen to yet, side projects, related artists etc as well as recommendations from trusted sources that theres already too much for me to get through.
And by get through I mean actually give repeated considered listens rather than just having music playing 24/7 just to power through - because whats the point in that.

The upshot is there is lots of good stuff. I guess the downside is the latest artists/album might not get as much attention but to be honest the music industrys obsession with the ‘new’ (often regardless of quality)getting a light kicking isn’t neccessarily a bad thing maybe?

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Think it’s as much to do with exposure as anything. Before digital / streaming really took hold, albums would go out of print after a certain point (unless they were still selling loads) and these would be replaced by new albums by new artists and so there was more of a natural life cycle. Different now because nothing ever really goes out of print. Means that there is less focus on new artists as labels / advertisers / soundtracks tend to fall back on the tried and tested (not talking about Stranger Things in particular - totally understandable why they would be using 80s music).

Don’t really think it’s an “obsession” with the new. Just the mechanics of the industry changing. Don’t think it’s a good thing at all. Makes it even harder for new artists (and it’s hard enough already)

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Your capacity for music listening is astonishing though and a massive contribution to these boards. No idea how you do it tbh.

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Fascinating insight and I wonder what the new music high was that started this wonderful addiction?

It’s this lighting strikes moments that many people are missing by deciding to ignore the deluge of recommendations of new releases and new music

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Also, recording costs were much more expensive so there was a lot less released, so like film releases, it was much easier to keep up with and make sense of.

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Fixed this for you.

Because you’re in the industry you’re going to be constantly pushed new acts/new releases. That’s not true of everyone. I keep an eye on new/emerging stuff though I largely go on recommendations. Otherwise I’m listening to old stuff, be that albums I’ve always loved or playlists of old/classic stuff generated by Apple Music.

I’m still spending a fair amount on records. It’s a mix of new releases from artists I’ve liked for ages, old things that I’ve not had before, the odd re-release, and new artists.

That’s very different from the idea that I’m being pushed/want new-new-new.

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One thing that’s been interesting about the How Good Was the Year threads has been not just discovering or rediscovering albums from those particular years but also to consider how you think about those years in musical terms and how that has changed over time. e.g. the music you associate with say 1968 that you may have discovered when you were 16 and what you may have subsequently discovered and how you feel about those albums now. Also to find out other posters here have a completely different set of go to albums so their discovery must have been very different.

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Don’t think it’s anything new really

My entire life old songs have been getting rereleased and becoming hits again cos they were in a film or a jeans advert or something

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People just like the songs they hear on telly

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Gears of War really got me into Fleetwood Mac

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I’m so out-of-touch with Stranger Things, think early season 3 was the last I watched, if that.

However, I watched the clip where Running Up That Hill was featured and was like ‘ok’. But I wonder if I didn’t know the song would I have found it eminently more powerful? Also, you can imagine that TikTok will have now clipped the track a million times or whatever further widening its reach even beyond those young people who didn’t watch Stranger Things.

I heard my colleague talking about the scene and track the other day, and realised it must be new to him, because I was just a bit ‘oh, yeah, good song’.

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uuuuuuuurrrrggghhhh

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It’s at the expense of getting to know albums in depth the way I would have done in the past, but it works for me just now - always had a bit of compulsive need to know what everything is like - used to be with food mainly (always order as much from the menu as possible, couldn’t order the same thing as any diners I might be able to share tasters with, always went for the most unusual things I hadn’t tasted before). Eased up a bit on that in recent years but now it’s music where I really want to hear what everything is like. Think it’s partly because I spent a lot of years in the dark to music that I probably would have liked if I’d had the exposure - hip-hop, jazz, African music, techno… I’m keen to make sure I’m not missing out on anything now!

Expect I’ll probably burn out this way of listening in the near future but I’ll have taken from it a much better appreciation of what kinds of music I want to listen to.

Hard to pinpoint exactly but I think scrawling year-end lists like the Quietus and the Wire and realising I knew little of it but was enjoying what I found when I listened to them, I realised there was probably some way to be more on top of this stuff.

I remember 2017 the album of the year poll on this site I ended up with 3/5 of my poll being albums I’d only discovered in list season (Mario Batkovic, Porter Ricks, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard), at that point I started paying more attention to the weekly release schedules. Covid lockdown and WFH helped turn that to an obsession!

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Don’t particularly disagree with what you’re saying here, but it’s an artist-oriented perspective.

I remember back when I first really started to become obsessed with music, everything felt much more label / scene driven. Now it’s all about individuals. Individualism has a lot to answer for.

I’d find navigating new music much easier and more satisfying if the wider context was more visible: there are still labels I follow, but curation on streaming simply doesn’t revolve around labels or scenes (genres maybe, but I liked the discovery of something completely different which was put out by a label you trusted, but wasn’t a part of their ‘house sound’).

The industry is now heavily focussed on finding amazing new artists, great new talent, but it ignores the fact that these artists don’t emerge in a vacuum, and didn’t become a fully-formed end-product purely as a result of their own genius. Far from it.

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Dunno but my entire social media is people talking about Kate Bush. To the point of apologising about how much they’re posting about it. No need.

Also do people really like mac miller enough for me to see posts about mac miller every day?