David Rowell is a journalist and the author of The Train of Small Mercies, a novel, and Wherever the Sound Takes You: Heroics and Heartbreak in Music Making. He was an editor and writer at The Washington Post for nearly 25 years and taught literary journalism in the MFA department of American University. He is currently a senior editor at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
What’s the big idea?
Isn’t it amazing how that song takes you back? Or rather—is it amazing? Music has the surreal power to transport us through history and memory, but overwhelmingly, the emerging structure of our evolving music industry traps culture in stiff, nostalgic confines. Fixation on the “greats” of bygone eras is holding new artists back from crafting a soundtrack for our times, and our future.
Below, David shares five key insights from his new book, The Endless Refrain: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Threat to New Music. Listen to the audio version—read by David himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. There is a dwindling interest in new music.
Increasingly, we don’t want new music anymore. Digital album sales continue to be down, and while vinyl sales continue to be up, mostly that’s because people want “classic” albums on vinyl—typically music released decades ago.
In 2024, instead of today’s music playing in all forms of commercial dwellings, a remarkably select number of songs within the scope of the history of recorded rock and pop music (many from the ‘80s) is dominating the public sphere. On the airwaves, old songs are hawking everything from Geico Insurance to TurboTax to Yoplait to Fiber One. If it’s old, then chances are you hear it all the time.
We are so content with the music from long ago that we’ve become dangerously well-gorged on it and have little or no room for anything new. We’ve arrived at this lamentable juncture due to two powerful forces—one deeply commercial, the other deeply human: repetition and nostalgia. With the arrival of MTV, the Video Age was here, and with it came consequences. As MTV became more mainstream, Top 40 radio and MTV fed each other incessantly. If a song was a hit, it had a video in constant rotation. And if it was a popular video, the song was on the airwaves nonstop. At home watching MTV or out and listening to the radio, we were stuck in a new loop of musical periodicity. That loop carries on today for Generation X, the MTV Generation.
According to Luminate, an entertainment data company, boomers listen to more music from the ‘70s than any other decade, which is no great surprise. Both Millennials and Gen Xers prefer ’90s music. Only Generation Z prefers the music of this decade. Only 63 percent of boomers even like it when their favorite artists release new music. New Chicago? New Rod Stewart? Mostly, boomers prefer new knees.
2. The internet plays a major role in music nostalgia.
We’ve always been prone to nostalgia in music. Think of groups like Sha Na Na, who performed at Woodstock right before Jimi Hendrix’s mind-bending set and whose entire career was made up of performing ‘50s music; or the Stray Cats, an ‘80s band whose very look and sound paid tribute to the ‘50s rockabilly scene. But today, nostalgia is immutable because so much on the Internet exists to remind us of life as it once was. Whether it’s the Facebook post from your childhood friend of Jimmie Walker as JJ saying “Dyn-o-mite!” that gets 700 likes or yet another clip on Instagram of the Macarena, the Internet can lull us into a perpetual state of looking back and believing that what culture offered during previous decades was more gratifying and fun; that life in the past was an inherently better and richer time.
“Nostalgia is immutable because so much on the Internet exists to remind us of life as it once was.”
On YouTube, old music reigns. We can watch whole episodes of American Bandstand or full, grainy-footage concerts of Grand Funk Railroad, Bread, and the Carpenters. On an endless line of music sites, you can pour over the latest ranking of albums by bands who peaked when TV Guide was still at the grocery store check-out. Or maybe you like Rolling Stone’s incessant polls of the greatest guitar players, singers, or drummers of all time. There is certainly room for reflection on past music, but these lists ultimately keep us on memory lane—far away from the music being made today.
3. Uneasy times have contributed to listeners turning to music from the past.
Between life in an extremely polarized America, two ongoing wars in Ukraine and Israel, the reality of mass shootings, and two assassination attempts on one presidential candidate, it’s a deeply unsettling time in our history. Some of us have a harder time imagining the future than we did in the past. As a result, when it comes to music, some of us have found it more pleasurable to go back to the past and renew excitement about that music.
In the early days of COVID, music from the concert stage or local club suddenly disappeared. Amid the anxiety and disorientation, many iconic musicians took to their Instagram pages and tried to soothe us by strumming acoustic guitars in their kitchens, home studios, and porches. They often covered other artists’ songs, perhaps to remember better days. Eventually, artists could return to the concert stage by the fall of 2022, and some of them had new “COVID records” they’d made while in isolation. But mostly, what we wanted from them was the comfort of old hits. All in all, nostalgia looked pretty good once more on the old Jumbotron.
4. Music holograms and avatars look to be a significant part of live music’s future.
One surefire way to avoid hearing new music is by bringing back dead musicians using digital recreations: put them on stage, surround them with live musicians, and then cue the hits. That’s the next chapter in live music. Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, opera singer Maria Callas, Ronnie James Dio, and Frank Zappa were the earliest touring holograms, but those acts didn’t bring in the masses. The Whitney Houston hologram that followed was hardly the greatest love of her fans, having a run in Las Vegas that lasted under a year and got less than stellar reviews.
“One surefire way to avoid hearing new music is by bringing back dead musicians using digital recreations.”
However, the show that turned the tide was 2022’s ABBA Voyage, which used digital avatars to represent the still-living members of the group. That show has been hugely successful financially. Meanwhile, at Kiss’s final concert, in Madison Square Garden, before the band members exited the stage, they previewed the next touring incarnation of the band: digital avatars created by the George Lucas-founded Industrial Light and Magic company. And these avatars had superpowers! Now, there’s eager anticipation for “Elvis Evolution,” which will showcase iconic moments from the King’s career via hologram.
The rise of music holograms is one more indicator of our shaky relationship with new music.
5. Obsession with our musical past threatens new music.
One major and well-documented development in recent years that will profoundly impact the music we’ll be hearing in the future—what and how—has been venture capitalists’ massive acquisition of artists’ catalogs. The prevalence of music from artists ranging from Bob Marley, Stevie Nicks, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, Cher, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Diamond, Genesis, Frank Zappa, Sting, Huey Lewis and the News to ZZ Top and numerous estates of deceased musicians, such as David Bowie and Tina Turner, is only going to increase. Vastly so.
That leaves many new acts on the outside looking in. The influential artists before them might have traveled Highway 61 or 52nd Street or roamed the promised land on Thunder Road to deliver their masterpieces, but many of those thruways feel closed now. Who knew that for those musicians who essentially shaped pop and rock music as we know it, the long and winding road turned out to be Wall Street?
In an opinion piece in the New York Times, writer Marc Hogan argued that the Wall Street takeover of the music industry “is only further weakening an industry that already offers little economic incentive to make something new.” We used to want so much from music. These days, we mostly want it to remain deeply familiar and stuck in the past.
To listen to the audio version read by author David Rowell, download the Next Big Idea App today:
