America’s Music Vacuum
Music is more popular than television in the U.S., but its passive ubiquity is also its value leech
When I was a teenager, listening to music was something you did. That’s not an incomplete sentence—it really was its own standalone activity. You stopped playing Atari, you stopped any plans to go out and ride your bike or kick a ball. You stopped everything to listen to the new cassette tape of the Thriller album, all 9 tracks of it.
I thought about this after reading a report from Nielsen, which celebrated how much music is being consumed in the U.S.
According to Music 360 2014, Nielsen’s third annual in-depth study of the tastes, habits and preferences of U.S. music listeners, 93% of the country’s population listens to music, spending more than 25 hours each week tuning into their favorite tune.
While that’s not completely surprising, it goes on to reveal that music is the top form of entertainment for hundreds of millions of Americans.
When surveyed about their activities in the past year, 75% of respondents said they actively chose to listen to music, even ahead of watching television at 73%.
Regardless of how you feel about surveys and their potentially made-to-measure outcomes, there’s something worth noting about music being marginally more popular than television.
It’s worth noting if only because in dollar terms the TV business is 20 to 30 times larger than the ever-shrinking music business. The gap is of course in the value of recorded music versus TV/film.
But there might also be a gap in how Nielsen defines “actively choosing” to listen to music versus “actively choosing” to watch television.
Am I actively choosing to listen to music if put on my favorite Pandora or iHeartRadio channel and set about doing the dishes? Is it really active listening if I’m focused on completing my five-mile morning run to a collection of 130 BPM EDM tracks as picked by Spotify or Beats?
The point about all these is that the music washes over you, in abundance, but it doesn’t compare with the near undivided attention that top TV shows get. Look at these numbers.
Maybe that’s where some of music’s inherent value is being lost as music fans, particularly younger digital savvy fans, get more and more music through passive channels, which can be tweaked perfectly to your mood and environment. As music executives will happily point out, music is available in more places today than it ever was in 30 years ago—the industry achieved Music Everywhere status long before the TV business had conceived the phrase. Yet, that doesn’t seem to have helped its cause.
Today’s teens can have a mix of their favorite artists’ YouTube videos running in the background while they work on their homework. In this world, the album, once the dominant profit generator of the music business, loses its influence and cultural value.
It might help explain a little of why, even as we have more music (touched on in this rather good ‘Tyranny of choice’ post by analyst Mark Mulligan), we seem to value it even less. Several executives in the business have privately said music royalties need to be reduced so services like Spotify and Deezer can sell music packages for much lower than $10 a month. Now that Apple has had a closer look at Beats Music’s numbers it also appears to have to come to the same conclusion.
That might not increase the standalone value of a piece of music, but it might help to grow the industry again if a few more million people pay for subscriptions. Well, perhaps they will deem it as good value compared with the $7.99 a month they pay for Netflix.
Follow Yinka Adegoke on Twitter @YinkaWrites
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