Music by Numbers: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in the Music Industries

 

As a Christmas present this year, I received hard copies of Music by Numbers: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in the Music Industries, a book that I co-edited with the great Dave Laing.

            It has been a long time coming. Dave proposed the idea for the book at the inaugural Working in Music conference, which took place in Glasgow in January 2016. What a five years it has been since then. The Trump presidency has come and nearly gone. The UK has had the Brexit vote and is set to leave the European Union at the end of this week. Covid-19 has transformed the world.

            On a personal and professional note, the saddest event has been Dave’s death. He passed in January 2019, having kept from me how seriously ill he had become. Music by Numbers is the last book project that he worked on. I hope that I have managed to complete it with the care and skill that Dave’s legacy warrants. One of the most satisfying aspects for me is that this edited collection contains chapters by many of his friends.

Music by Numbers provides the first in-depth examination of the use and abuse of statistics in the music industries and addresses five key areas: sales and awards; music industry policy; live music; music piracy; and digital solutions. Its aim is to expose the culture and politics of data. The book has been published by Intellect, with the brilliant help of production editor Aimée Bates. It can be ordered via this link.

Vinyl in the Time of Covid-19

 

On Thursday I was interviewed on the fruity American television programme LIT Entertainment News about a turnaround: in America vinyl records are outperforming compact discs. Trade figures for the first half 2020 demonstrate that vinyl sales constituted 62 per cent of the revenues for physical formats. It was the first time since the 1980s that vinyl had generated more money than CDs.

            This is something that had been predicted. Sales revenues for vinyl records have increased every year since 2006. Sales revenues for compact discs, in contrast, have declined annually since the millennium. When 2019's trading figures were announced it was predicted that, if trading patterns continued, vinyl would be on course to surpass CDs. Some people called this a long time ago. In my book Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record, I quote the music journalist Adam Woods, who stated in 2004, ‘it is easy to believe that the format could thrive even as the CD begins to lose ground to the Internet’. I also have a 2011 quote from Lyor Cohen, who was then the CEO of the Warner Music Group, stating that ‘vinyl will definitely outlast CDs’.

It should be noted that vinyl is outperforming compact discs in terms of revenues but not in terms of units sold. One of the reasons why vinyl is generating more money is because each album typically costs two and a half times more than a CD. It is also the case that, in our time of lockdowns, it is more likely that consumers will purchase vinyl than CDs. The former format appeals to collectors and remains accessible via mail order. The latter format is more casually purchased and will be neglected in times of shop closures. Trade figures also indicate that the overall market for physical records is paltry. Vinyl accounts for four per cent of the American market. Streaming, on the other hand, accounts for 85 per cent.

Yet the figures are still remarkable. Vinyl looked on course for obliteration twenty years ago; it is now firmly established as a recording format that both consumers and the recording industry will invest in. Pressing plants have struggled to keep up with demand. Equally impressive is the fact that vinyl sales have continued to increase despite the strictures of Covid-19. In the United States they are up four per cent year-on-year. In the UK the trade magazine Music Week has reported that vinyl has defied ‘coronavirus chaos to post big rises’. Sales for the third quarter were up 41.4 per cent on 2019. This is largely due to the rescheduling of Record Store Day, but is demonstrative of the public’s commitment to this format.

After fifteen years of sales increases and a resolute performance in the face of coronavirus we should probably stop talking of vinyl’s revival. Instead, our focus should be elsewhere. The compact disc has been defeated. Will it now become an object of fetishism for collectors?

 

 

It's a Merry Christmas for Songwriters

Songwriters are earning four times as much as recording artists.

            We can reach this conclusion by using the work of Will Page, who is the go-to person for music industries’ statistics. When he worked for PRS for Music he would annually total up the British figures. Now that he is Spotify’s Director of Economics he is performing the same task on a global scale. He has discovered that our planetary music copyright business was worth $24.37bn in 2015. This represents a rise of $941m on 2014.

            In his findings, Page lists the money earned by the record company members of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI); the income of the publisher and composer members of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC); and the money that is going to the publishers directly. The results are as follows:

IFPI digital recordings                           $6.5bn

IFPI physical recordings                        $5.0bn

IFPI performing rights                            $2.1bn

IFPI sync rights                                          $0.3bn

CISAC performing rights                          $6.8bn

CISAC mechanical rights                           $1.2bn

CISAC private copying income                 $0.2bn

Publishing sync rights                                 $0.8bn

Publishing other                                            $0.8bn

Non-CISAC publishing mechanicals          $0.5bn

It is size of the collections and the increase in the money that has attracted headlines. Nevertheless, Page is also keen to point out that there is ‘a misconception about the David-Goliath relationship between labels and publishing’. The publishers are not dwarfed. The overall income for songwriting copyrights is $10.4bn (42.7% of the total), while the income for sound recording copyrights is $14bn (57.3% of the total). According to Page:

When you factored in all the monies that flow to PROs [Performing Rights Organisations], publishers and songwriters, they were much more neck-and-neck in true value than often perceived. However, how that money then flows from firms (labels, publishers and collectives) to individuals (artists and songwriters) is an entirely different conversation.

Page does not enter into this dialogue and it is easy to understand why. It is hard enough getting the total income figures from industry organisations, but at least this information is available. In contrast, the contract details of songwriters and recording artists remain private. As such, it is difficult to determine the percentage royalties that they are receiving from their publishers and record labels. Moreover, these royalties vary from country to country and from artist to artist. These royalties have also varied through time. Songwriters and performers who signed contracts in the 1950s or 1960s, for example, will generally be on lower royalty rates than artists who are signing contracts today.

But the conversation is still worth having. It provides a means of assessing the relative prosperity of songwriters and recording artists. And while the precise details of contracts are not known, some general figures are available. If all artists were on contemporary UK contracts, the splits would look something like this:

Sound Recoding Copyright $14bn

IFPI digital recordings            80%-85% record labels/15%-20% recording artists

IFPI physical recordings         80%-85% record labels/15%-20% recording artists

IFPI performing rights             50% record labels/50% recording artists

IFPI sync rights                        50%-85% record labels/15%-50% recording artists

Songwriting Copyright $10.4bn

CISAC performing rights                           20%-25% publishers/75%-80% songwriters

CISAC mechanical rights                           20%-25% publishers/75%-80% songwriters

CISAC private copying income                  50% publishers/50% songwriters?

Publishing sync rights                                  15%-35% publishers/65%-85% songwriters

Publishing other                                            15%-35% publishers/65%-85% songwriters?

Non-CISAC publishing mechanicals            20%-25% publishers/75%-80% songwriters?

Although some of these splits can only be estimated, these percentages would place the income of songwriters far above that of recording artists. Their take home would be something like $7.75bn, while the overall copyright income for recording artists would only be $2.1bn.

Songwriters would also be in a better position than recording artists when it comes to non-recoupable royalties, the money that cannot be used to pay off advances. At least £3.4bn of the songwriting income would be free from recoupment. In contrast, the only element that would be non-recoupable for recording artists would be the $1.05bn earned from their 50% share of the IFPI performing rights.

            These total figures would have to be reduced, however. At least half of the worldwide copyright income is derived from back catalogue. Consequently, there will be many recording artists and songwriters who are on less favourable percentages than presented here. However, even though the totals for songwriting and recording would come down, there would be an even greater bias in favor of the writers. Old recording contracts tend to be more punitive than old publishing contracts are. The percentages for the artists are proportionally lower and the terms of the contracts last longer. Moreover, songwriters have been guaranteed at least 50% of the performing rights income in most territories for over a century. This is the biggest single income stream and it is non-recoupable. In contrast, recording artists in many countries are still not guaranteed equitable remuneration for performing rights income. Although this 50% share is now mandatory throughout the European Union, this has only been the case since the Rental and Lending Rights Directive of 1992.

            The money is still in the publishing.

The Single Goodbye

Ten years ago, when I was working on my PhD, I would regularly bump into Travis Elborough in the British Library. Little did I realise that we were exploring similar themes. I was writing my thesis about vinyl, which in adapted form became my book. Travis was also investigating recording formats. He believed that iTunes was destroying the album as a source of income and a ‘thing’. The fruits of his labour became The Long-Player Goodbye, which was published by Scepter in 2008.

            His predictions have not necessarily come true. 159m albums were sold in 2005. This figure was for physical formats only, as the download album was not yet generating any income. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) published the sales figures for 2015 yesterday. They claim that there were 122m album sales last year. While this represents only three-quarters of the sales of a decade ago, it is probably more than anyone expected. Travis, for example, had suggested that the album appeared to be ‘severely imperilled’. But rather than being at risk, the album has revived. The sales figures for 2015 were up 3.7% on the previous year.

            Or at least that is how the record industry has chosen to present things. When we look more closely at the figures we find that genuine ‘albums’ - a collection of songs that a user purchases or consumes as a combined body of work - are not doing so well. CD sales are surprisingly resilient, but they are definitely not increasing: at 55.8m they were down 3.9% on the previous year. Digital albums are faring worse. Standing at 25.7m, they were down 13.5%. Back in 2008, Travis had glimpsed stirrings of a vinyl renaissance, describing it as a ‘peculiar rearguard action’ in the face of the defeat of the album. It is now more than that. In their report on the 2015 sales figures, the BPI note that vinyl was facing ‘near extinction’ in 2007, but its ‘fairy tale revival’ has seen sales reach a 21-year high. 2.1m units were sold last year, an increase of 66% on 2014. This does, however, still represent less than 2% of music consumption in the UK. In total, these formats accumulated 81.5m sales. This was five million fewer than the previous year, and just over half the albums figure for 2007.

            How, then, has the BPI reached its total of 122m album sales? First, they have quantified all individually downloaded tracks as ‘album equivalent sales’. Each download is only allowed to represent a tenth of a purchase, however, in deference the average number of tracks an album. In addition, each individual stream is counted as an album sale. These are divided by a thousand, in accordance with a ‘standard music industry metric’: ‘100 streams = one track sale and 10 track sales = one album’. Using these calculations, individual downloads were equivalent to the sale of 13.3m albums in 2015. Although this was down 14.7% on the previous year, any shortfall was more than made up by the popularity of streams. These were equivalent to the sale of 26.8m albums, a huge 81.7% increase on 2014.

            These mathematical shenanigans are not to everyone’s taste. Tim Ingham, founder of Music Business Worldwide, has described them as ‘self-evident madness’. I don’t think that Travis would approve of them either, albeit that they do provide evidence that some of his hunches were right. These ‘equivalents’ have helped to crack open ‘any notion of the album as linear, unalterable whole’.

            The larger question, however, is why should the record industry want to present every use of music as an album sale. Economics surely come into it. These figures help to downplay the popularity of streaming. This is useful in a climate when the low royalty income from streams is widely criticised. There were 26.8bn individual audio streams in the UK last year, as opposed to 81.5m physical and digital album sales, and yet despite this vast traffic streams are only generating around a third as much money (£251m as opposed to £687m, according to the BPI’s figures, which due to the low income from ad-supported services only feature the income from streaming subscriptions). The division by 1,000 makes this income appear just, as streams represent a third of physical and digital album sales when employing the ‘equivalent’ calculation. However, the BPI’s streaming figures are not only divided by a thousand, they are also halved. They fail to include the 26.9bn streams of music that took place through video sites. This includes YouTube, the most popular provider of music in the UK.

            If these figures tone down the popularity streaming, they also boost the importance of physical formats. When the equivalents are in place, the CD emerges as the leading product. In addition, vinyl’s percentage increases enable this format to be widely praised. It remains important for the record companies to promote these products, as this is where their main profits lie. The companies may well be deriving more income from streaming services than their artists do, but those royalties are dwarfed by the money they rake in with the sale of vinyl and CDs. Tim Ingham has calculated that Adele’s 25 would need to have been streamed 16.4 billion times to equal the $115bn it has thus far generated via physical formats and download sales.

In some cases, however, it costs the industry money to describe products as albums rather than as singles. Simon Fuller’s company 19 Recordings has taken their parent label Sony Music Entertainment to court, alleging a number of contractual misdemeanours. Among them is the fact that Sony regard individually downloaded tracks as singles, whereas 19 Recordings believes they should be classified as ‘segments’ of albums. These definitions have financial consequences, derived from the days when all records were physical, as the plaintiff’s case makes clear:

Because of the high costs of promoting the ‘single’ to radio as well as the relatively high costs of manufacturing, and distributing and marketing it to the ‘brick and mortar’ retail stores that then existed in comparison to those comparable costs expended on an Album, virtually all record labels historically paid lower royalty rates to artists on this less profitable ‘singles’ product. In contrast, the Album, with its relatively small incremental additional costs to manufacture and distribute, but with its 3 to 4-fold higher selling price, permitted labels to achieve a substantially higher profit margin in comparison to the ‘single’, and thus the labels were able to pay a significantly higher royalty rate on albums, including escalations in that rate based on sales success since those profit margins only increased as sales volume went up.

Sony has paid 19 Entertainment a royalty rate for singles that is 25%-35% lower than their album rate. The album rate has the further advantage that, if worldwide sales of 1m are achieved, the royalty increases.

Fuller’s company is furious at the treatment they have received in the download world. First, Sony Entertainment has allowed iTunes to ‘disaggregate’ albums without 19 Recordings’ permission, thus making all tracks available individually. Second, Sony have claimed that these individual tracks should be paid at the reduced ‘records other than album’ rate. Third, Sony are not allowing the sales of these individual tracks to count towards ‘the equivalent of the sale of one Album ... for purposes of calculating sales escalations on that Album’. Consequently, 19 Recordings believe they are being cheated in respect of some ‘albums’ whose disaggregated tracks total the equivalent of 1m sales. There is much in 19 Recordings’ argument. In the online world the costs of manufacture and distribution cannot be used to justify a lower royalty rate for singles. Moreover, the fact that trade bodies are keen to report all online activity as ‘segments’ of albums should surely help 19 Recordings cause.

Given these royalty implications, there must be reasons beyond the financial why record industry personnel remain so devoted to albums. One explanation, perhaps, is that they are not so different to Travis Elborough: they admire the beauty of the LP. This is not as fanciful as it may it first appear. The industry’s major awards, whether these are Grammys, Brit Awards or Mercury Prizes are for albums, and these are (supposedly) based on artistic merit, rather than upon sales. The artists that the industry admires most are those who consistently make important albums. It has commonly accorded greater merit to rock than to pop. Simon Cowell, from this perspective, is not an industry mastermind; he instead suffers from the industry’s snobbery – his artists are consistently frozen out from the most important industry awards.

Of course, these values are as financial as they are artistic. One of the reasons why the record industry praises rock artists over pop artists, and album sales over single sales, is because it is here that longevity lies. And with longevity lies profit. Development costs are paid off and break-even points are achieved. Nevertheless, it is not only consumers who value ‘product’ for its aesthetic worth. Industry personnel work best when they are promoting music they admire. They can also appreciate the beauty of the product itself: industry figures are capable of being spellbound by the look and feel of LPs. Tony Wadsworth, who retired as chairman of the BPI last year, left his post to help set up a vinyl-only branch of the record shop Sister Ray.

There is one further reason for the industry love of albums that mixes the financial with the emotional: patriotism. In 2015, seven of the 10 best selling albums artists were from Britain. In 2014, all 10 were British, the first time this had happened. The situation is different for streaming. The ten most popular streamed tracks in 2015 came from a variety of sources, with only a third of the artists hailing from the UK. This is reflective of a longer historical pattern. For the past ten years the best selling album in Britain has been by an artist from the UK, but the singles charts have been more international. The trade figures issued by BPI downplay the importance of singles by only reporting album sales and album equivalent sales. The triumph of international artists in the singles charts has been decimated, and it has been reduced by a thousand when it comes to streams. Meanwhile, the triumph of British artists in respect of conventional album sales is left to stand as it is. Overall, by kissing the single goodbye and recalibrating streams and individual downloads as albums, these trade figures promote the locals and give a lower profile to the foreigners. The British Phonographic Industry is putting British music first. 

Sympathy for the Mechanical

Although I’m not always sure of the motivations, there is a politics to the reporting of music industry sectors. In particular, there has been a desire to emphasise the health of the live music industry at the expense of recorded music.

The statistics that have been most widely used in support of this scenario come from Adding Up the Music Industry, a series of reports issued by PRS for Music. Sadly these reports are no longer compiled: the last of them concerns revenues for 2011. It calculates the total money generated by the UK music industry in this year at £3,793m. Out of this figure £1,057 comes from business-to-business income and £2,736m from business-to-consumer. The latter is divided into £1,112m for recorded music and £1,624m for live music.

And so live music triumphs over all other comers. It is this outcome that many analysts have taken up and run with. The reports have their problems, however. Live income is compiled in a different manner to the other streams. As well as documenting the primary market – the money spent on purchasing tickets from ticket agents and venues – the figure includes secondary ticketing and ancillary spend. Secondary ticketing is money derived from the resale of tickets. Although the report states that this business model is ‘legitimate under UK law and is an established practice’ it is somewhat contentious. Moreover, none of the money from these sales goes to writers, musicians, publishers or record companies. At the very least this income is comparable to the second hand sale of records, an income stream that is omitted from the figure for recorded music. Under a different legal system it could be considered more akin to bootlegging. The report calculates its worth at £208m.

Ancillary spend is the extra money that is spent at gigs and festivals: the purchase of ‘merchandise, food, beverages, parking and public transport’. It is questionable whether the money spent on food, drink and transport should be included as part of music industry income. Some money from these sales might trickle through to a few performing artists, but it will be tangential and minimal, and in these instances should be included in the business-to-business figures, rather than business-to-consumer. Moreover, although these sales are included in the live income stream, money spent on food, drink and parking when going record shopping is not included in recorded music. This is the case even when the record shops are serving food and drink themselves.

Artists can make money from merchandise. There are famous cases where bands have made more money from t-shirt sales than they have from ticket sales. It is unfair, however, to include the sales of merchandise in the live tally while omitting it from recorded music: these reports do not include the sale of t-shirts and other merchandise in record shops.

It is difficult to calculate how much ancillary spend is worth as the 2011 report fails to provide precise figures. The best it offers is that festivals and arenas each account for ‘around 25 percent of the market’ and that ancillary spend at festivals is equal to ’95 percent of the average face value ticket per person’ while the ‘level for most other venue sizes was between 35 and 50 percent’. At the very least, then, ancillary spend is equivalent to a third of the money spent on primary tickets. The live income stream can therefore be broken down into £208m for secondary ticket sales, £472m for ancillary spend and £944m for primary ticket sales. It is only the latter figure that can effectively be compared with the statistics for recorded music. Looked at this way, live income is the lower of the two.

Recorded music is unfairly represented in other ways. In 2011 PRS for Music reported £65m income for ‘mechanical revenues’, i.e. the money that songwriters and publishers earn from record sales. Adding up the Music Industry contrasts the ‘continued decline of the recorded music market’ with the ‘phenomenal revenues’ earned in the live sector. However, live income for PRS for Music was £23m, which is lower than the mechanical income derived from its MCPS alliance.

In addition, the summarising table in the report equates ‘recorded music’ solely with business-to-consumer income. The total of £1,112m is made up of ‘payments for physical music products, downloads-to-own and subscriptions’. This obfuscates the fact that there is plenty of recorded music income that is derived business-to-business. A substantial amount of the £448m that is attributed here to PRS for Music comes from the use of recordings. Away from the main breakdown of figures, the report itself allocates £101.6m of PRS income to ‘recorded music’. Sound recordings also contribute to its other income streams: broadcast & online, public performance, and international. It should be conceded that live music also contributes to each of these remaining areas of business-to-business income, albeit that it is recorded music that dominates when it comes to the income generated by radio, television, the internet and the use of music in public premises.

Moreover, while PRS for Music owns the performance right in its members’ works, MCPS does not have complete jurisdiction over the mechanical right. Its members can opt to self-licence the use of recorded music for films, adverts and some television programmes. As such, recorded music makes up a significant proportion of the music publishers’ direct income. Out of the £210m that is allocated to them in this report, £48m comes from these sync rights. Ultimately, the mechanical income for songwriters and publishers is holding up better than much industry reporting would lead us to believe.

There is, in addition, plenty of business-to-business income that makes its way to record companies and recording artists. Recorded music is responsible for all of the £80m income that is attributed to PPL and the £220m accorded to ‘record label direct revenues’. The latter figure, in fact, includes some PPL revenue, as it is made up of ‘music synchronisation, “360 degree” artist deals, concerts, music-related TV production, broadcasting and public performance’.

Because of the way the figures are reported, it is impossible to make an accurate tally for the income derived from sound recordings. Recorded music is, however, worth considerably more than the £1,112m highlighted in Adding up the Music Industry. For the vast majority of professional songwriters and musicians it provides more money than live music does. While the same is obviously true for record companies, it applies to music publishers as well.

There are good reasons why some academics have seized upon PRS’s analysis: they like to emphasise the freedoms of the live music scene in comparison with the tyranny of being signed to a record company. PRS also has a performance emphasis. It is, after all, the ‘performing right’ that is enshrined in the society’s initials. Unlike the Musicians’ Union, however, it does not campaign to keep music live: it collects money from the performance of records as much as it does from performance in person. The reasons why PRS have chosen to under-represent recorded music in their reports are therefore obscure. Finally, I should concede that I have my own biases. Although I do think I’ve provided a fairer way of reading the statistics, I also know that I’m a record man. My main pleasures in popular music have always come from recordings. 

Sounds Revolting

Big data is big news. In Spring 2015 two reports about popular music gained worldwide attention. The first came on 22 April, when Ajay Kalia posted his blog entry, ‘Music Was Better Back Then’. It was followed on 6 May by a report in the journal Royal Society Open Science. In their article, ‘The Evolution of Popular Music: USA1960-2010’, a team of academics from Queen Mary and Imperial College London used data to investigate ‘the evolution of popular taste’ and determine periods in which there had been ‘rapid change’. I have written about Kalia’s research in a previous blog entry. This second article has much in common with it. The public was drawn to the reports for similar reasons: their eye-catching and over confident use of data; the way this data can be contested; the focus upon ‘new music’.

The academic researchers believe that their data forms ‘the basis for the scientific study of musical change’. They have analysed 17,000 American chart hits from 1960 to 2010, classifying their ‘harmonic and timbral qualities’. The resulting data has then been employed to chart the rise and fall of these qualities through the time span of their study. Their conclusion is that ‘musical evolution is punctuated by revolutions’. There are three years in particular in which they posit rapid change: 1964, which saw musical developments in rock and soul, 1983, which had advances in new wave disco and hard rock, and 1991, which witnessed the break-through of hip-hop.

Although the researchers believe that ‘Those who wish to make claims about how and when popular music changed can no longer appeal to anecdote, connoisseurship and theory unadorned by data’, there are several grounds upon which their quantitative analysis of musical qualities can be challenged. The first is that it does not include enough musical data. Where, for example are lyrics within their analysis? Moreover, where is the music that lies outside of the Billboard charts? Many would suggest that musical revolutions first occur within the underground. Secondly, although the researchers have taken genre into account, they have not made any allowance for different rates of progression. While change is the hallmark of some genres, others are relatively static. In the former case, wild diversions can be the mark of stability rather than change; in the latter, mild alterations to the form can be of great significance. Thirdly, their research can be criticised for not including enough non-musical data. Genres are not about music alone, but also about the ways that music is articulated and presented. Finally, the research can be criticized for not considering a wide enough range of statistical data. Two of their peak years – 1964 and 1991 – can be explained, in part, by changes to chart rules. Billboard did not have a separate chart for black music between November and January 1965. As a consequence, there was an influx of soul music into the Hot 100 in 1964. Similarly, it was in 1991 that Billboard first used the sales information from barcodes to determine its chart positions. Hip-hop consequently gained a greater chart presence, as it was selling more records than had been previously been quantified.

The academic researchers are media savvy. They have pointedly come up with three revolutions, thus tapping into the ‘rule of three’ beloved by storytellers, politicians and joke tellers alike: if you want to make a list stand out, then give it three items. They have also come up with three curious years. 1964, the year of the Beatles invasion of America, might be the most obvious of their dates for musical upheaval, but the researchers excitedly report that the Beatles were the result, rather than the cause, of this revolution. They also stress that 1991, the year of hip-hop, represented the most revolutionary phase of all. This revelation has prompted headlines, such as CNN’s ‘Hip-Hop is More Important than the Beatles’. The musical revolutions are not, in fact, the main emphasis of the scientists’ paper. They are instead more concerned with publicizing their data methods as a whole. The team has nevertheless latched on to the fuss they have generated and have re-branded their material for more popular media. In The Conversation they boast: ‘How We Discovered the Three Revolutions of American Pop’.

The two big data reports are both concerned with age and new music. They come at their target from different angles, however. Kalia analyses new music in purely quantitative terms. For him it represents the latest releases by the latest artists. He seeks to determine the age at which we lose interest in these new forms. ‘The Evolution of Popular Music’ adds a qualitative dimension. The academics want to know the eras in which music was at its newest: were there times when it was more revolutionary than others? In doing so, they address a widespread belief, particularly amongst the old, that there is ‘a relentless decline in cultural diversity of new music’. The two surveys could be said to answer each other: one reason why older people are not interested in ‘new music’ is because it is not, in fact, new.

Things aren’t quite that simple, however. The team from Queen Mary and Imperial College retain a faith in newness. For them, ‘musical diversity has not declined’. I agree with them. As I have argued before, the music of the modern era has a distinct timbral quality and it features particular ways of singing. Does this mean, then, that Kalia is right: older people no longer have the appetite for newness?

Well, it all comes back to which meaning we want to wrestle from that word ‘new’. The word can have qualitative meanings: it can point towards things that are ‘unfamiliar or strange’. It obviously has quantitative meanings as well, but these are complex. The OED defines ‘new’ as being ‘produced, introduced, or discovered recently or now for the first time; not existing before’. It also states that the new can be ‘already existing but seen, experienced, or acquired recently or now for the first time’. In addition, new can be ‘superseding and more advanced than another or others of the same kind’. It is therefore quite possible for an old person to lose faith in the new because they feel that is already exists. On the contrary, they may turn away because they find the new too new. It is strange. They think that it’s revolting.