What Happened Last Year? Pt. 1

Let's talk about the most important trends in popular music from the last year

Dec 29, 2022

In case you missed it, last week I sent around a survey asking for feedback on the newsletter so far. Please follow this link and fill it out if you haven't already. I want to make sure future editions always hold your interest. But before we get to the future...

Let's Talk About the Past

Over the next two weeks, I'm going to talk about what I think the most important popular music trends from the last year are. Let's talk about 3 this week.

The Popularity of Non-American Music in America: This year, as has been for the last three years, Bad Bunny was the most streamed artist globally on Spotify. While Latin music's popularity is undeniable in the US, we are beginning to see other artists from around the globe break stateside. BTS, the Korean pop juggernauts, could sell out arenas in the US despite rarely singing in English. As we talked about in an earlier newsletter, African music is continuing to make inroads in the US too. At some point in the next decade, there will be an African artist who becomes a bonafide pop star in America.

An Absurd Number of Releases: To quote the great newsletter Above the API written by my coworker Dave Edwards, "In 2000, roughly 1.5 million songs came to market each year: currently, over 60,000 songs are released each day (22M/yr). Most importantly, this growth has not been linear: 20,000 songs were released daily in 2018, representing a 3x in just three years." In short, there is an incomprehensible amount of music being released these days, more than any human could consume. As artificial intelligence audio tools come into vogue, these numbers will continue to increase to rise.

Why does this matter? The ability for anybody to make a professional quality recording in their bedroom is empowering. I would have released very few recordings if making music had not become so democratic. But this paradoxically has also weakened the power of artists. Simple economics tells us that if the demand for music stays the same and the supply increases, then we will see the price fall precipitously. This leaves individual artists powerless to the platforms that aggregate their content. And I don't just mean small artists. I mean the most popular artists too.

Over the years, huge stars have pulled their music off of Spotify - Taylor Swift, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan - but that hasn't inhibited Spotify's growth. If your 5 favorite artists were to pull their music tomorrow, you probably wouldn't cancel your subscription. You'd buy some of their CDs and keep streaming everything else on Spotify.

The Power of TikTok: TikTok has the hit-making power of MTV in the 1980s. If you look at Billboard's year end chart for 2022, many of the hits were associated with some trend on the app. "Heat Waves." "Stay." "As It Way." "abcdefu." "Bad Habit." Though TikTok is super powerful, it also had some dangerous consequences for artists. But we'll talk about those consequences next week.

A New One
"LET GO" by Central Cee
2022 - UK Drill

This song is emblematic of 2022 for two reasons. Primarily, it's built around a sample of the singer-songwriter Passenger's 2009 hit "Let Her Go." Throughout the last year, we've seen artists cash in on nostalgia by sampling massively popular records from the past. This idea isn't new. Diddy and MC Hammer were doing it in the 1990s. But in the last year, we saw more than a handful of hits utilize this (lazy) strategy:

Jack Harlow's number one hit "First Class" sampled Fergie's 2006 number one "Glamorous"
Latto's smash "Big Energy" interpolated elements of Mariah Carey's 1995 number one hit "Fantasy."
Dua Lipa & Elton John combined four of Elton's older songs to create their top ten hit "Cold Heart"
Nicki Minaj took a page out of MC Hammer's playbook and sampled Rick James's 1981 classic "Super Freak" on her number one hit "Super Freaky Girl."

But "Let Go" is emblematic of the last year for another reason. It demonstrates hip-hop's continued world domination. Though hip-hop was originally an American creation, scenes have cropped up around the world over the last few decades. Central Cee comes from the world of UK drill, a gangsta-ish style that brings a British twist to the American drill pioneered in Chicago and New York by the likes of Chief Keef, Pop Smoke, and Shef G.

An Old One
"Sedona" by Houndmouth
2015 - Indie Rock

I went to meet my girlfriend's family for the first time last week. They live just outside of Sedona, Arizona. As we were driving through the desert, my mind went to this relaxing indie rocker that I was obsessed with a few years back. But it wasn't just the name that made this song pop into my mind. It was how well the song evoked the varied terrain that I was crossing.

It was barren but beautiful, empty but lush, menacing but meditative. Those contradictions swirl together in Houndmouth's recording. You can hear them in the lackadaisical percussion, wistful electric guitar, and impassioned vocal.

You're not obliged to call,
Chris Dalla Riva

Want to hear the music that I make? Check out my new EP.

Want to listen to my song recommendations? Here are all the new ones and old ones, along with some other favorites.