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From a sales-only perspective, this article makes sense, but the very obvious influence of TikTok seems noticeably absent from the analysis. TikTok, by nature of its scale, has completely changed how the music industry works. If you want to prove this, check the top 40 chart of your favorite music streaming service or listen to your local top 40 station for a bit. Both of these were originally designed to provide a good metric on what songs people enjoy listening to from beginning to end. However, they're now almost entirely populated with songs made popular by 30 seconds to a minute of their content rather than the entire work. TikTok has created a fundamental shift in the metrics by which people collectively evaluate music's popularity. Forty years ago, what was most "safe" for radio (in the sense that it was palatable enough for most people) was what got played. Now, the shareability of even a single segment of a song is its entry point into the feedback loop of exposure that creates viral hits. Whether this is a good or bad thing is honestly subjective (and likely polarizing to some) but the article's failure to recognize it feels significant. In a system where the extent to which people get bored of listening to a song in its entirety is no longer a concern, people are revisiting old releases and finding that they perform extremely well under the current metrics. That's why we have Kate Bush and Metallica in the top 40. Their songs performed well under the previous system before fading into irrelevance, and they just happen to perform well under this new system as well. Stranger Things may have given them the push they needed to re-enter the public conscience, but what followed was the same process that would have happened if their music was released, say, ten years ago rather than 40. Age itself is secondary when shareability is king. Personally, I'm of the belief that this will stabilize in the long term if short-form shareability remains the dominant metric of a song's popularity. In the same way that radio stations stop playing songs as people get bored of them, so too do older songs fade from popularity on TikTok as they begin to become tiresome to enough people. Combined with the fact that this happens at an extremely fast pace and that the amount of legacy pop music is finite, this means that TikTok users are bound to run out of sufficiently popular legacy content to use eventually. |