Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market

> Consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack of reaction, because the cultural response was little more than a yawn.

Never actually watched the grammies... but would think the decline in cultural significance is similar macro factors to TV. Streaming has allowed for audience to be fragmented across content, so mega-hit culturally shared songs everyone knows are less common. Whenever I look at US Top 50 on Spotify I pretty much only recognize the mega artists who have been around for 10 years & the rest are Hip Hop artists who I might have heard of but am not interested in. These 'popular' songs are just the most popular of the largest sub-culture, you aren't going to be hearing many of them in bars, clubs or the gym.

From the article:

Only songs released in the past 18 months get classified as “new” in the MRC database, so people could conceivably be listening to a lot of two-year-old songs, rather than 60-year-old ones. But I doubt these old playlists consist of songs from the year before last. Even if they did, that fact would still represent a repudiation of the pop-culture industry, which is almost entirely focused on what’s happening right now.

Is this also partly a “measurement artifact” of looking at streaming activity instead of physical media or download purchases?

If you were just looking at physical media purchases or downloads, those would be overweighted toward new music vs. what you actually listen to. Streaming picks up the stuff that’s already on your shelf, so to speak.

With the rise of online streaming and satellite radio, plus the demise of physical record shops, magazines, MTV, and local radio, everything is way more fragmented. The 80s & 90s were probably the last decades of 'common' songs based on shared media.