The strange state of music in 2018

This is far from the first news story of this nature. In fact, similar reports have been coming down the pike for years.

Record sales are being touted these days as on a comeback. All you hear is: streaming will save us.

But things are pretty dire. For example, Justin Timberlake’s “Man of the Woods,” touted so highly on the Super Bowl and a hit in its first week, has been a total sales stiff. As of this week, “MoW” has sold just 285,000 copies.

Contrast this with Timberlake’s “20/20 Experience,” which was the best selling album of 2013 with 2.5 million copies. (Luckily, Justin had a smash single last year with “Can’t Stop the Feeling.”)

Even worse: U2’s “Songs of Experience” has taught us nothing. It had great songs, like Timberlake, but they didn’t save the situation. “Songs” has sold just 250,000 copies total. Remember U2? Their sales used to be huge.

In both cases, the only way to make money is touring. Timberlake and U2 are committed to long tours.

Even Taylor Swift has had trouble. Her “Reputation” album has sold 2 million copies, which sounds great. But it’s far less than her “1989” album, which did 5 million total since late 2014. “Reputation” is well past its peak and won’t do anything remotely like that in the end.

Columbia Records in particular is suffering. While parent Sony Music has kept up on the charts with the Epic label, and RCA, Columbia’s name has not been on the charts in months. Their Harry Styles solo album has sold only 375,000 copies to date— no amount of PR or touring has moved it close to 500,000 copies and gold status.

This past week’s chart should alarm everyone. The top selling CD/paid download was “The Greatest Showman” with just 38,453 according to BuzzAngle. Including streaming, the top seller was “Black Panther” soundtrack with 78,000 copies.

Where are the music fans? Back in the day, as they say, artists churned out music. Now it comes in a dribble, drip, drip, drip. A malaise has set in, that’s for sure, among rock stars.

There’s no really big name release until May, when pop star Charlie Puth releases an album that was scheduled for some time ago. Otherwise, we’re in a pretty stagnant period. Adele, who ruled the charts two years ago, won’t have anything out in 2018. Even Justin Bieber has no plans for new “music” until later in the year.

What has happened, it seems to me, is that music became so ubiquitous in our society that ennui has set in.

Consider the evolving role of music in Western life over the last 150 years. As urbanization gained a foothold, people making a full-time profession of singing or playing an instrument had an ever-easier time drawing crowds. Then came photography, which helped with publicity. Then came recording technology, which made music ever-more portable.

There arose a kind of tension between the concept of a performance being preserved for all time and the public's growing thirst for the latest form of musical stimulation. The hit record and the library of timeless creations coexisted uneasily.

As the music industry, broadly speaking, developed, turf based on demography became obvious. Webb Pierce, Charlie Parker and Arturo Toscanini all had very different fan bases.

Occasionally a phenomenon would come along that brought a number of these disparate demographics under one umbrella. This has happened twice since rock and roll became the all-encompassing paradigm: Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Particularly in the latter case, the confluence of factors was just right for the phenomenon to be imbued with an irresistible, electrifying magic.

That magic component reached its crescendo with the recording and certainly the release of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, as I discuss in a LITD post from December 2011:

I think of how EMI producer George Martin sweat bullets in the winter of 1966-67 as he acted as the go-between for the record company and The Beatles as that group ran up huge budget overruns and insisted that the Abbey Road studio be available to them at all hours of the day and night. They had arrived, you see. They sat atop the worldwide entertainment field and could basically snap their fingers and get whatever they wanted. At the same time, they were following a pseudo-spiritual charlatan (the Maharishi) and indulging any whim they harbored so much as momentarily.

That's really the story of the whole music business from about then to about 2000 in microcosm. The industry was awash in gravy, and everybody was mainly concerned with self-gratification.

It made for a jaded bunch of people. How were the heads of Warner Music or EMI or Sony in any position to hear - and recognize - something that was of true musica value, that is to say, ennobling, deeply, sonically rich, expressive of recognizable human passions? They weren't. They were too loaded.

Many developments since then - the further consolidation of the recording, radio and live-performance industries, the coarsening of the content being created, the democratization of the process of making and distributing music (in this century, we've witnessed the phenomenon of the musical act that opts to operate independently rather than sign with a major label), and the ever-increasing portability of the product - have taken the notion of genuine thrill about any particular offering out of the equation. With all the music ever recorded at our fingertips, we can take or leave any of it.

I've also said before that this is personally vexing for me. I am a musician. I can make a little money playing in a rock band or getting jazz gigs (these are nice, because they generally require little or no rehearsal, since everybody knows the same body of standards and bop charts, and the gigs are generally good-paying private gatherings, like wedding receptions, corporate events and deck parties), but the idea of using the latest resources to build a fan base and keep it primed for my latest move looks like an invitation to discouragement.

Taylor and Justin, after all, have a far more impressive track record than I do, and they don't seem to be generating much hoopla, comparatively speaking, anymore.