What Happened Last Year? Pt. 2

Last week, we talked about 3 of 2022's most important musical trends. Let's talk about 3 more.

Today is my dad's birthday. After he found a typo in this newsletter a few weeks ago, he's been editing it. Please wish him a happy birthday with me while you read about...

Some More Trends from 2022
This is part two in a series. Go back and read part one if you haven't yet.

Backlash Against Ticketmaster: The 2010 merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster is one of the most disastrous in the history of the music industry. And that's really saying something given that three companies - Sony, Universal, and Warner - control nearly every hit record you hear. But the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger is so problematic because it has repeatedly harmed both fans and artists. In fact, these issues are so pervasive that Ticketmaster's Wikipedia page has an entire section dedicated to "Criticism and controversies."

Although artists and fans have complained about Ticketmaster for years, things came to a head in 2022 during the pre-sale for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. In short, Ticketmaster handled the entire pre-sale so poorly that the site crashed, leaving almost no tickets for the general sale. After the fiasco, Swift's tour promoter, AEG Presents, claimed they had no choice but to work with the ticketing behemoth because Ticketmaster has exclusive deals with the vast majority of venues of the capacity that Swift requires. Shortly after, the federal government alleged to have opened an inquiry into the matter. We can only hope that Joe Biden stands by what he said in some unrelated remarks back in July 2022: "Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation."

Fans Become Creators: In an earlier edition of this newsletter, we talked about mazie's song "dumb dumb." I'll quote a passage from that newsletter:

"dumb dumb" fits well within mazie's oeuvre ... Regardless, what fascinates me is that not even a month after it started blowing up, she released a sped-up version of the song. Literally the exact same song just played at probably 1.25 times the speed of the original. 

The act of re-releasing songs with the speed manipulated is a larger trend. On Spotify, you can find full playlists of sped-up songs, sometimes dubbed "nightcore." On YouTube, you can search nearly any song and add the suffix "slowed + reverb" to get the opposite. The re-release of "dumb dumb" falls into the former category. While the trend was first explored by DJs and producers in the early-2000s, it has come into vogue on TikTok. While artists are now releasing official versions of these speed-adjusted tracks, this is an audience-driven trend. Artists just noticed that people were ripping, manipulating, and re-uploading their tracks.  

As we enter 2023, this trend shows no signs of stopping. Because you can get cheap recording and editing software on any phone or computer, artists now have to deal with the fact that they might not have the final say on their own songs. That power may belong to a random kid using a laptop in their parents' basement to add more reverb to your song than any professional would advise.

The Decontextualization of Music: At the end of last week's newsletter, I noted, "Though TikTok is super powerful, it also had some dangerous consequences for artists." Though there are a few consequences you could point to, I think the most pressing is decontextualization. "BILLIE EILISH." by Armani White, the 9th most popular song on TikTok in 2022, illustrates this.

If you use TikTok, you've likely heard the opening line to White's song scores of times: "B*tch, I'm stylish / Glock tucked, big t-shirt, Billie Eilish." It's been used in over 3 million posts on the app. It's usually accompanied by a video of somebody waving a large t-shirt or sweatshirt past the camera and being in a wildly different outfit once they are visible again. Though this trend helped Armani White land a record deal and propel the song to number 58 on the Hot 100, I'm worried it won't do much for the Philadelphia rapper in the long term. And that's not because I think he's talentless.

While most young people will be familiar with the song, a much smaller cohort will actually know who Armani White is. That's because nearly all of the content surrounding the song was unconnected to him. It was connected to random people on TikTok. This is very different than, say, how MTV broke hits in the 1980s. A video would always be associated with an artist because they were in it. This is not the case on TikTok. Between the "Fans Become Creators" trend we talked about this week and the "Absurd Number of Releases" trend we talked about last week, it's very hard for artists to build a career even if one of their songs pops off. Lyor Cohen, the Global Head of Music at YouTube, described this as one of the biggest crises for the music industry. It's hard to build a career when nobody associates your music with you.

A New One
"Heading South - Live" by Zach Bryan
2022 - Outlaw Country

One thing I work on at Audiomack is using our data to identify up-and-coming talent. A few years ago, a song by an artist named Zach Bryan appeared in one of our reports. I clicked play and was captivated. It was chilling country tune in the spirit of Johnny Cash or Waylon Jennings. I sent the recording over to our head of marketing. He had someone reach out to Bryan to get more of his music on the platform.

Since then, Bryan's been an unstoppable musical force. He's signed to Warner Records and has sold out shows throughout the United States. This is a new live recording of "Heading South," the demo I heard way back when on Audiomack. His voice still drips with the same power that I heard on the original demo, but it's multiplied by the audience and his band. Both seem like they might catch fire if the energy abates. The album, recorded at Red Rocks, has an apt name for this edition of the newsletter: All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster.

An Old One
"When Will I See You Again" by The Three Degrees
1974 - Philly Soul

When Jacob DeGrom left the New York Mets to sign with the Texas Rangers a few weeks ago, my friend jokingly sent me this song saying that he wished he could sing it to the former Met. I was familiar with the song, but I clicked play because I hadn't heard it in a while. That was a mistake. You've got to be ready for a song like this. It's too powerful.

On the surface, you might think that its power is in its melancholy lyrics (e.g. "Are we in love or just friends?"), but that's only a small piece of it. Its real strength is in the strings that punctuate almost every line. Each lyric in this song is a question. And those strings are there to answer those questions. And they're not giving the answer you want to hear.

When will I see you again?
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, the old ones, and some other favorites.