Is popular music getting worse?: Discovery optimists

The pipeline broke, and it was beautiful

Blinky Bill, twenty-four, Nairobi. Kenyan benga guitar fused with Berlin techno and Swahili vocals. No label. No gatekeeper. Algorithm placed it on three playlists. Eighteen million streams across 61 countries. He toured Europe.

Mdou Moctar — Tuareg guitarist from Niger playing psychedelic desert blues — sold out American theaters after algorithmic discovery connected him to indie rock fans who would never have found him through any prior system. Josefine was listening to an album a friend recommended and realized this kind of cross-genre serendipity is now the default.

The declinists are measuring the charts. The charts were always a bottleneck — a reflection of which songs labels promoted. They never measured what people loved. When Serrà found declining diversity, he documented the homogenization of a distribution system, not of music.

The whole planet

Spotify has over 100 million tracks. 57,000 artists crossed 100,000 streams in 2023. Annabeth wants to find people who dig what she digs — the algorithm is the first tool that makes that possible at global scale.

Measuring McDonald’s menu and calling it popular food while ignoring the food revolution happening everywhere else is the declinists’ category error. A teenager in São Paulo can hear Mongolian throat singing before breakfast.

The vinyl resurgence makes our case. Discover through the algorithm, fall in love, purchase the physical artifact as deliberate commitment. The declinists hear the top forty. We hear the whole planet.

Where we concede ground: A Tuareg guitarist reaching American ears is real. That guitarist earning $0.004 per stream while Spotify is worth $80 billion is also real.

What would change our mind: If the long tail shrank — fewer countries and languages in the top 100,000 tracks, declining listener engagement with discovery.

Read the full synthesis: Is popular music getting worse?