The New Music Problem
What is happening to the Musical Middle Class?
I’ve been trying to track new releases that interest me over on the Rec’s N Effect portion of this Substack. I’ve only sent one as a standalone newsletter (and that was an accident lol) which probably defeats it’s purpose but I have been doing it as a practice to give extra value to readers and keep me abreast of what’s going on. I’ve also been doing it because as music fans we have a very serious problem on our hands…
A few weeks ago I saw Meshell Ndegeocello at the Blue Note and while introducing her band she also made it a point to tell the audience about how hard it was to find new music.
There’s a lot of music going on and if you don’t have a big following then nobody knows it.
- Meshell Ndegeocello
This made me decide that it was finally time to tackle a subject that has been swirling around my head for years. One that continues to evolve and chance and probably will never go away. The New Music Problem.
How do you find new music? It’s a very simple question with an unnecessarily complex answer. It used to be that if you played the radio, read a magazine, watched BET/MTV or wandered in to a brick & mortar record store you were mostly up to date because almost everyone had the same information. I bet the average listener can’t even recall the last time that they even went into a record store.
We live in what I call the Stumble Upon Era. Music discovery is more fragmented than ever. Big artists have figured out they don’t even need to announce their albums anymore. In turn the media outlets that cover them have just started covering artists social media which essentially boils their coverage down to three topics: gossip, speculation or engagement-bait.
Not to get all “back in my day” with it but remember when albums dropped on a Tuesday and you had a week to digest it before you went out on the weekend and interacted with it? Well now it drops on Thursday at midnight and it’s sitting next to your text messages, unread emails, health monitor app and every other thing on your phone. New music has simply become another notification. It’s the same as Uber telling you your ride has arrived, Amazon alerting you to a new package being delivered or a random ‘U up?’ text.
This leaves smaller artists trying to launch a project or career with a very unique problem. How do you release new music to an audience that has been trained away from receiving new music?
If we are lucky we have a mailing list (Sort of like this one!) If we are savvy we know how to leverage our social media to activate the communities we’ve built. (Making compelling social media content is as much of a talent as making a #1 hit record). If we are good at all of that maybe one of our fans will feel compelled to toss a few bucks on top of the price that we’ve set on Bandcamp or we get playlisted and make a few fractal cents on streaming.
Make no mistake about it, this email is content. Yes it’s not as fun as a TikTok and probably 1000% less viral but it’s content nonetheless delivered to your email inbox. I chose email because I’m better with words than I am with angles, lighting and editing. Aside from the fact that I genuinely enjoy writing I would consider email to be the new equivalent to a phone number.
SIDEBAR: When’s the last time you got a real call from a wrong number? Not like a robocall or whatever but like an actual person trying to get in touch with another person? I would be willing to wager that the person who called you was a. child or an old person. They have a pretty remarkably high wrong number dial rate.
I just thought this was a cool video.
So if there’s no more press and no real curation what becomes of the musical middle class? Releasing music as a standalone item feels like it has lost almost all of it’s value and this weeds out a certain type of artist.
SIDEBAR: I kinda feel like this also applies to music journalism. Publications that were devoted to music are being bought and scrapped for parts. Like if they don’t deem it worthy of coverage that’s a huge indicator of what they feel the worth is overall. My use of ‘they’ here is 100% about ‘the man’ or whatever the ‘they’ is that DJ Khaled is always referring to.
If you zoom out there’s an even bigger problem being presented. That problem is the algorithm thinking that it knows your tastes and interests so well that it actively prohibits you being exposed to things that would challenge your sensibilities and expand your palette.
Case in point, last year I went on a Patrice Rushen bender. I’m talking weeks of her albums (Straight From The Heart man… Straight From The Heart) with some songs getting repeated listens for what felt like hours. Spotify in turn elected that any time I play anything remotely funk or soulful that she would be on that playlist multiple times. So if i cue up Isley Brothers Radio or Kashif Radio guess what the second song would be… yup, something by Patrice Rushen. Look i’m not complaining about hearing Patrice but I am saying that there are literal millions if not billions of songs on Spotify and the fact that they keep saying “all we got is Patrice” is really odd sad. Shit my Release Radar didn’t even tell me about my own record this week! So I can only imagine that a person who wasn’t me had no idea it dropped.
There is no more monoculture. There are only silos. Some are tall enough for you to spot from the distance and wonder “what’s happening over there?” but there are no more mountain ranges. Mountain ranges are inescapable and you can’t ignore them you can even live in them, silos on the other hand don’t even look like they should be permanent.
Monoculture used to be aspirational. Everybody wanted to be like Mike and even if you’ve never heard a KISS song you know what their painted faces look like. Now all we’ve got is Oprah, McDonalds, Nike, Beyonce and memes.
This is a subject that I can ramble about for hours (I didn’t even talk about venues yet or how this has affected TV & film or how it will affect the the upcoming election or local politics in general) but I should probably wrap this thing up here by saying that In the coming week’s I’ll probably try and embed some of the Rec’s N Effects picks in the newsletters and possibly send a few of them as standalone newsletters themselves.
Last week’s newsletter featured this Danny Brown video and a song from two of my friends. I’m including them below because I think they are really cool and deserve to be seen and heard. Bruiser Wolf got one of the more interesting debut’s out right now and every project that The Expert has done has been top tier so I expect the joint with NAH Really to continue the trend.
Nahreally x The Expert - Smarter Than I Am | BANDCAMP
That’s all for now but if you want to see some more new music, videos or other stuff check out the Recs N Effect column at the top of the newsletter or by clicking the hyperlinked text.
No seriously, when is the last time YOU went to a record store? Do you even remember? If so what did you buy? Leave it in the comments!
I went to a spot in my city called Old Gold Vintage Vinyl in December and bought a stack of old 12 inches and albums, including MC Lyte's "Cha Cha Cha" and The Boys' "Dial My Heart."
Really interesting topic and difficult to know where to start with it. Again thank you for the kind words and for sharing the new single!