Norma Desmond hit on something in the 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard. A silent film stars whose career had been decimated by talking pictures, she refused to change with the times. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” she said.
Fast-forward to today and that quote could be applied to the concept of mainstream music. We still have stars, but the mainstream got small.
Let’s start by defining “mainstream.” These are the ideas, trends, attitudes and activities considered normal, known far and wide, and something in which virtually everyone partakes on some level. Put another way, if the average person knows about something in society, culture or politics, it is part of the mainstream and binds everyone together with common knowledge and attitudes.
Before 2000, mainstream attitude dominated everything. Everyone got their news and culture from television, newspapers, the radio and magazines. We all went to the same movies, watched the same must-see network TV shows, talked about the latest series on the big cable channels and read the same books. When it came to music, we had our preferences, but because there was so much less music out there than there is today, we were able to have at least some awareness of most of the music out there at any given time, even songs and artists we didn’t like.
There were five main cultural gatekeepers back then. Record labels scouted for talent and only signed artists with potential commercial appeal or genuine artistic merit, limiting the number of new albums to about 3,000 a year. If you managed to release a record, you hoped it would be sold in record stores. But stores filtered the supply of available music even more to just what they thought they could sell.
Radio concentrates on playing music that holds an audience for as long as possible, winnowing things down even further. Same thing with video channels. Music magazines were there for backup: news, information, interviews and reviews/recommendations. These publications were often our only real conduit into the personal and professional lives of our favourite musicians.
Those artists who survived all five rings of relentless and vicious cultural filtering became our biggest stars. And boy, those stars were big.
Let’s look at just radio. In the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, we all had one or two favourite radio stations that we depended on for music. We had to wait for our favourite songs to come on, which meant that we ended up hearing a lot of other music as well. If a track we didn’t like came on, fine. We had the patience to wait it out. There was always the promise of something better coming up next.
Meanwhile, we also became aware of everyone else’s favorites. This was especially true for anyone who only had top 40 radio when they were younger. We were fed a little bit of everything all of the time. In those pre-internet glory days of top 40 and FM rock radio, we were intimately acquainted with almost everything that was happening in music at a given time.
The result was that big music stars were ubiquitous. Even if you had zero interest in them or their songs, they were so prevalent that you had no choice but to participate in their careers, even at a distance. They were part of society’s common musical vocabulary and everyone spoke the language. Musicians drove culture and we were all swept up in what they did. The music was everywhere so we absorbed everything.
We would have bought it all, too, but we were constrained by what we could afford. Those artists who really got our attention also got our money, a financial investment by the fan in the artist. Because we shelled out hard-earned money for an expensive commodity (and compared with day, music ownership was very expensive), our relationship to the artist went deeper. We owned a piece of them.
But when the internet began asserting itself around 2000, the traditional cultural gatekeepers began losing their monopoly on power. First through apps like Napster, then with iTunes and iPods, then with smartphones and streaming, we were provided with unfettered access to more music than we’d ever dreamed of. We made discovery after discovery, from a cool new indie band to some French dance duo.
Everything about our relationship to music began to change as record labels saw their hundred-year-old business model — selling us music on pieces of plastic — collapse. Fewer and fewer people went to record stores resulting in the collapse of international chains. Labels could no longer afford to advertise in music magazines, causing a collapse in revenue and forcing many into oblivion. Streaming made songs instantly available on demand. YouTube made waiting for a music video to come up on MuchMusic and MTV unnecessary.
Radio has survived; it is still powerful, profitable and popular, although its level of influence as a cultural gatekeeper has changed. Everyone with a smartphone is now their own music director, able to listen to whatever song we want, whenever we want, wherever we happened to be and on whatever device we happen to have. For most of the 21st century, no one has been able to tell us what to listen to or make us wait to hear it. We love our little niches. Who doesn’t want to be in control in a world where everything seems uncontrollable?
And for the most part, people love this. Who doesn’t want to be independent and in charge of the music (and all other culture) we allow into our lives? And with more than 200 million songs available on the streaming music platforms, there’s virtually nothing we can’t access. Unlike the days of old when we sat through that song or video knowing something else was coming on the other side, there’s now no reason to sit through anything we don’t find pleasant.
Music culture is now a series of separate and barely connected self-organizing communities that come together and break up with alarming frequency. The commonality and consensus required for the kind of common music culture and language we had before 2000 is dead and it’s not coming back. Anyone who operates until the old assumptions might as well apply to be a project manager on the Tower of Babel.
Sure, we still have big acts like Taylor Swift, but it’s different. If this were 1995, so many people would have been exposed to her music that she’d been exponentially more popular than she is today. Walk up to a random person on the street today and ask them to name three Taylor Swift singles. How many could do that? Meanwhile, if you’d done the same thing with The Beatles in 1967, a typical grandmother would have been able to rattle off the group’s entire discography, complete with release dates and catalogue numbers, including all the Japanese releases.
Music charts tell a different story than they did 30 years ago, too. Compilation metrics are different. And those metrics reflect audience behaviours that didn’t exist back then. Who thought we’d be using terms like track-equivalent albums (TEAs) when compiling the weekly charts?
Try this experiment: Look at the weekly most-streamed songs chart on Spotify. You’ll probably recognize a lot of the names; how how many songs can you hum? If these were the old top 40 days, you’d be able to sing 75 per cent of the songs in full — even the ones you hated. Oh, Tay-Tay is monstrously huge. It’s just that back in the day, there were many more like her — and they were bigger because everyone knew everything about such stars.
Oh, we still have superstars, but today, they come without the ubiquity and universality they did 30 years ago. That feeling, that understanding, that sensation that by listening to a certain song/artist you were part of something unimaginably bigger, something that everyone was part of and participating in, has been traded for instant access to all of humanity’s music for free, or something close to it.
For better or worse, there is less common culture when it comes to music these days. That means to be mainstream — that is, having that appeal to casual music fans who are happy to sing along and tap their fingers on the steering wheel — is just another of one of the many musical avenues available today. Mainstream artists lack their former cultural dominance. (Music industry pundit Bob Lefsetz has written a lot about this in case you want backup.)
To be a mainstream artist today is to be part of one of the many thousands of niches we find in music. Mainstream’s role as a binding agent is gone. If the centre cannot hold, what does this portend for music over the next few decades?