Oversaturation: Death of Heritage Brands in the Music Industry

As a past-life hip-hop producer, sound engineer, and “ghost writer” for other artists, I’ve witnessed the music industry, especially in the context of hip-hop music, take an interesting pivot as for what content is in high demand. Every name I hear seems to be “Lil’ ______”, and there appears to be hundreds of them. My younger brother, a promising electronic music producer, and I often talk about ongoing market value in the music industry, and what shifts in opportunity I see being someone that now turns much of my past-music-attention to UX Strategy — in an industry flooded with “Lil’s”.

Recently my brother raised a fairly introspective question, baring a multi facetted answer: “Do I think Eminem would have the same impact on music if his career were birthed today, and not in the early 2000's?”

As a fan of Eminem’s work and sobering metamorphism — I was forced to think about this so not to discredit the talent of the “My Name Is” MC, and long-lasting contribution he has made to hip-hop. My answer though, was a solid, and somewhat disheartening “no”. The rejection of Slim Shady’s present day greatness has nothing to do with lyrical or word flow skill — but is more concerned with the surrounding over saturation of the hip-hop market.

Truthfully, the fact of the matter is that there was less music to listen to when Eminem first broke into the mainstream. The likelihood that you’d heard of Marshall Mathers was incredibly high simply because there just weren’t as many rappers. But also, the likelihood that you’d heard of his competitors was high because, again, there just weren’t as many rappers. Because of this scarcity and at-the-time differentiation, Eminem was able to become a household name.

There was no Facebook to campaign the new LP, Instagram to visually interface with the fans, and Twitter to spew unending thought to interactive followers. Sure, these tools did come along, but Eminem’s presence on any social media platform remains sparse because his legacy remains in heritage brand and word-of-mouth.

The means of acquiring music was far different in the age of Shady. Physical album sales, then turned to iTunes sales (and the 30 second preview), were the primary methods of privately acquiring music. Fast forward to 2018 when a student pays $5 a month for a Spotify subscription with unceasing access to millions of artists and songs—listens per month far outweigh what is actually paid for. Listeners don’t have to choose what is worth paying for, it is included and expected with the recurring payment to Spotify (in a separate but involved argument, Spotify makes more money per-capita by guaranteeing payment to the music giant each month than the old iTunes method that relied on variable payment, not always guaranteeing a quota if listeners weren’t spending). With this, there are far more means for distraction from Eminem’s work because the listener has unending access to legitimately everyone else’s work.

So when hip-hop blogs are concerned with Eminem’s 218,000 record sales in his first week (1,500 song plays are now being evaluated as a “record sale” on Spotify), the lowest Eminem record sale of all time, know it is largely in part due to the listener having choice and ability to listen to whatever they want, anytime they want.

There are tons of hip-hop artists, which means tons of user distraction to absorb attention previously given to Eminem. So for Eminem to hypothetically release the Marshall Mathers EP today, both competition and listener distraction would be incredibly high. His campaign could take favor to social media for consumer interfacing and promotion, and the music might even be that much weirder to further differentiate himself.

But lucky for Eminem, he’s a heritage brand. People will talk about Eminem regardless, just less so as there’s so much else to talk about now.