One thing is certain – this is a golden age for catalogue. Never before has there been so much interest – and profit – in older music.
There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the explosion of short form video – aka TikTok. Gen Z users of this platform choose music based on the concept of the video they’re making, not on its novelty. In other words, if the lyrics, mood, or a sudden change up are perfect for your performance, the age of the song is irrelevant. What this means is that the fastest growing social media platform – and the one that most directly feeds streaming – is release date agnostic. It isn’t necessarily going to drive the discovery of new music.
Second up is mood and genre based playlisting, which works on roughly the same dynamic. If you ask Alexa to play Sunday morning music, she’s not going to worry about being cutting edge, or directing streaming revenue to struggling new artists.
Then there are wider cultural factors at play. It would be remiss of me to omit a customary dig at the major record labels. They happily co-opted the boom in vinyl consumption, dominating supposedly indie-leaning initiatives like Record Store Day, and clogging up the pressing plants with giant runs of eye-wateringly expensive classic rock reissues. That’s one of the reasons new artists need to wait six months plus to release their records.
Because of all this, there’s been a subtle shift in the culture at large. The old is no longer inherently less cool or less interesting. Big industry players are very happy to follow along. After all, back catalogue requires no new advances or difficult, expensive audience building, so profit margins are much higher. Publishing behemoths like Hipgnosis are making headline purchases of ageing stars’ catalogues because they make excellent long-term prospects.
But it would be wrong to blame the suppliers – labels, streaming services, social media – without examining our consciences as consumers, too. That means considering the nature of our demand. After all, doesn’t that come first?
It’s well established now that we increasingly trade our privacy for convenience. It’s easier to give up personal info and ask a device to play something to suit our mood than it is to hunt out new stuff. High quality music coverage in the press and on television is perishing for lack of interest. Meanwhile, our attention and data are increasingly devoted to homemade videos on a social media platform operating under the graces of an authoritarian regime. In such a scenario, can we really expect a healthy cultural climate?
