The Slow Death of Popular Music

The writer Will Self said the older he gets, the longer ‘now’ stretches back. This is how I feel. When I was seven, ‘now’ went back a few days. When I was eighteen, it went back a month or two. These days, ‘now’ goes back a decade or more.

Does everyone feel this stretching of ‘now’ as they get older? Undoubtedly. The older we get, the more we have seen, and the passing of ‘today’ represents a smaller and smaller portion of the total.

But is there something else going on in this third decade of the twenty-first century? Is something magnifying and accelerating this phenomenon?

As I write, it’s day one of the Glastonbury Festival. This prompted me to revisit the iconic Radiohead set from, from … from … it can’t be, can it? 1997? 1997! That’s 28 years ago. How did that happen?

If you could cut Radiohead from history and paste them back into our timeline, 28 years later, such that their iconic performance is taking place this weekend, it would not seem outdated. Moreover, in the last few years people would have been amazed at the emergence of this visceral and haunting sound. Plenty of the tracks in that set are older, of course. The Bends is 30, Creep is 32. If these were released today, would they sound retro? Would they sound “nineties-inspired” — I don’t think so. So what's going on? Is it just that some artists sit magically outside their time? Possibly, but I think that answer is too easy.

Let’s try a parallel. Let’s go back to 1985. We’re riding a multi-coloured aural tsunami, we’re witnessing a creative supernova unparalleled in popular music. The zeitgeist is captured in one extraordinary track:

In just five years we've seen the emergence of new wave, synth pop, new romantic, hip hop, post-punk, a reinvigorated rock and heavy metal scene, and established greats are riding higher than ever —  Queen, Micheal Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie  —  and everyone is in blissful ignorance that in just two short years Stock Aitkin Waterman will piss all over this wondrous sparking brushfire. Admittedly, there are plenty of crimes against music in these years — Joe Dolce — but there are few manufactured bands; there are no ultra-processed products of reality television. Talent is king. Talent is everything.

Sticking with 1985, let’s home in on an iconic cultural moment — Live Aid. We’re at Wembley Stadium on the 13th of July. It’s 7:02 p.m. and Queen have just left the stage. Instead of David Bowie, on comes the premier live act of 1957, fresh from his own 28-years-later cut and paste. It’s Elvis Presley. To many, Elvis was and still is the King, and his music lives on not just 28 years later, but 68 years later, and a full-of-vitality 1957 Elvis transported into a 1985 Wembley would have rocked the stadium. But it would have felt starkly anachronistic. No one would be talking about his amazing new sound. Some may even have dubbed him a poor man’s Shakin’ Stevens.

What about a little further back? Let’s stick with Elvis. It’s June 1968. He’s about to perform his iconic comeback special (aired the following December). A support act is brought in via our time machine, from 28 years earlier. Yes, it’s the premier live act of 1940. It’s the hellraiser himself, Glenn Miller, and his band, whipping the teenage crowd into an adrenaline-fuelled frenzy with Chattanooga Choo Choo and Pennsylvania 6–5000, security staff working overtime at the edge of the stage to hold back the groupies. I think not.

So, the Radiohead effect feels new. It’s far from unique, however. For most of the history of music, glacial progress was the norm. In 1425, were middle-aged Middle-Agers looking back in amazement at the revolution that had taken place since 1397, with all the kids writing wild new ballads in the burgeoning lute and citole scene? No. 

So we’ve had something like an S-curve over the last hundred years. Starting almost flat, going exponential, then trailing off as we approach maturation and saturation. The further musicians went along the curve, the more the collective body of work grew, and the harder it got to find and break new ground. Furthermore, one of the factors that once propelled music forward — technological progress — is now killing it. The music business used to act like a giant filter. There was only so much room in the market; making and publishing music was expensive. Gatekeepers, in the form of producers, DJs, promoters and music journalists, meant only the best (with the noted exceptions of Joe Dolce and the like) made it. It was hard on those who didn’t, many of whom will have been talented musicians, but it meant we, the buying and listening public, only heard the very best (with the noted exceptions of Joe Dolce and the like). In 2025, anyone with a phone can write, record, produce, AutoTune and publish their music at almost zero cost. The gatekeepers are gone. All we have left is the algorithm and our hope that it will spot the few rafts of sublime talent in an ocean of content.

Dying, too, is the shared experience — a fundamental of popular music from the outset. The more choice we have, the less likely we are to find a tribe that shares our taste, and the smaller each artist’s following is likely to be. In the extreme, this becomes hyper-personalization. You can now use services like Udio, Aimi and Mubert Play to summon into being custom AI-extruded tracks of your choosing. Perhaps that’s satisfying, or gratifying, for some, but it reduces the shared experience to absolute zero. These days, kids go elsewhere for their subcultures.

The tragedy is that there are teenagers out there, right now, every bit as talented as Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Donna Summer, Freddie Mercury, Thom Yorke, Michael Jackson, Kate Bush, Nile Rodgers, Madonna or David Bowie, their veins every bit as full of fire and revolution, but their opportunities are so diluted and of such poor quality when compared to those of four decades ago, and fewer and fewer people are listening. 

R.I.P. popular music. It’s been a blast.

Colton.

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All images in this article were created by Gordon Meal for Colton Lazars using Playground AI base images with novel adaptations