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Old 21-01-22, 07:43 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 22nd, 22

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January 22nd, 2022




Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft Weave a Fiber-Optic Web of Power

The four tech giants increasingly dominate the internet’s critical cable infrastructure
Christopher Mims

To say that Big Tech controls the internet might seem like an exaggeration. Increasingly, in at least one sense, it’s literally true.

The internet can seem intangible, a post-physical environment where things like viral posts, virtual goods and metaverse concerts just sort of happen. But creating that illusion requires a truly gargantuan—and quickly-growing—web of physical connections.

Fiber-optic cable, which carries 95% of the world’s international internet traffic, links up pretty much all of the world’s data centers, those vast server warehouses where the computing happens that transforms all those 1s and 0s into our experience of the internet.

Where those fiber-optic connections link up countries across the oceans, they consist almost entirely of cables running underwater—some 1.3 million kilometers (or more than 800,000 miles) of bundled glass threads that make up the actual, physical international internet. And until recently, the overwhelming majority of the undersea fiber-optic cable being installed was controlled and used by telecommunications companies and governments. Today, that’s no longer the case.

In less than a decade, four tech giants— Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Meta (formerly Facebook ) and Amazon —have become by far the dominant users of undersea-cable capacity. Before 2012, the share of the world’s undersea fiber-optic capacity being used by those companies was less than 10%. Today, that figure is about 66%.

And these four are just getting started, say analysts, submarine cable engineers and the companies themselves. In the next three years, they are on track to become primary financiers and owners of the web of undersea internet cables connecting the richest and most bandwidth-hungry countries on the shores of both the Atlantic and the Pacific, according to subsea cable analysis firm TeleGeography.

By 2024, the four are projected to collectively have an ownership stake in more than 30 long-distance undersea cables, each up to thousands of miles long, connecting every continent on the globe save Antarctica. In 2010, these companies had an ownership stake in only one such cable—the Unity cable partly owned by Google, connecting Japan and the U.S.

Traditional telecom companies have responded with suspicion and even hostility to tech companies’ increasingly rapacious demand for the world’s bandwidth. Industry analysts have raised concerns about whether we want the world’s most powerful providers of internet services and marketplaces to also own the infrastructure on which they are all delivered. This concern is understandable. Imagine if Amazon owned the roads on which it delivers packages.

But the involvement of these companies in the cable-laying industry also has driven down the cost of transmitting data across oceans for everyone, even their competitors, and helped the world increase capacity to transmit data internationally by 41% in 2020 alone, according to TeleGeography’s annual report on submarine cable infrastructure.

Undersea cables can cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. Installing and maintaining them requires a small fleet of ships, from surveying vessels to specialized cable-laying ships that deploy all manner of rugged undersea technology to bury cables beneath the seabed. At times they must lay the relatively fragile cable—at some points as thin as a garden hose—at depths of up to 4 miles.

All of this must be done while maintaining the right amount of tension in the cables, and avoiding hazards as varied as undersea mountains, oil-and-gas pipelines, high-voltage transmission lines for offshore wind farms, and even shipwrecks and unexploded bombs, says Howard Kidorf, a managing partner at Pioneer Consulting, which helps companies engineer and build undersea fiber optic cable systems.

In the past, trans-oceanic cable-laying often required the resources of governments and their national telecom companies. That’s all but pocket change to today’s tech titans. Combined, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon poured more than $90 billion into capital expenditures in 2020 alone.

The four say they’re laying all this cable in order to increase bandwidth across the most developed parts of the world and to bring better connectivity to under-served regions like Africa and Southeast Asia.

That’s not the whole story. Their entry into the undersea fiber-laying business was inspired by the growing cost of buying capacity on cables owned by others, but is now driven by their own insatiable demand for ever more terabytes of bandwidth, says Timothy Stronge, vice president of research at TeleGeography. This has made profits razor-thin for traditional players in the cable-laying industry, like NEC, ASN and SubCom, he adds. (It has done the same to profits of wholesalers of capacity on submarine cables, such as Tata and Lumen.)

By building their own cables, the tech giants are saving themselves money over time that they would have to pay other cable operators. That means the tech companies don’t need to operate their cables at a profit for the investment to make financial sense.

Indeed, most of these Big Tech-funded cables are collaborations among rivals. The Marea cable, for example, which stretches approximately 4,100 miles between Virginia Beach in the U.S. and Bilbao, Spain, was completed in 2017 and is partly owned by Microsoft, Meta and Telxius, a subsidiary of Telefónica, the Spanish telecom. In 2019, Telxius announced that Amazon had signed an agreement with the company to use one of the eight pairs of fiber optic strands in that cable. In theory, that represents one eighth of its 200 terabits-per-second capacity—enough to stream millions of HD movies simultaneously.

Meta works with global and local partners on all of its submarine cables, as well as with other big tech companies such as Microsoft, says Kevin Salvadori, vice president of network infrastructure at the company.

Sharing bandwidth among competitors helps ensure that each company has capacity on more cables, redundancy that is essential for keeping the world’s internet humming when a cable is severed or damaged. That happens around 200 times a year, according to the International Cable Protection Committee, a nonprofit group. (Repairing damaged cables can be a huge effort requiring the same ships that laid the cable, and can take weeks.)

Sharing cables with ostensible competitors—as Microsoft does with its Marea cable—is key to making sure its cloud services are available almost all of the time, something Microsoft and other cloud providers explicitly promise in their agreements with customers, says Frank Rey, senior director of Azure network infrastructure at Microsoft.

But the structure of these deals also serves another purpose. Reserving some capacity for telecom carriers like Telxius is also a way to keep regulators from getting the idea that these American tech companies are themselves telecoms, says Mr. Stronge. Tech companies have spent decades arguing in the press and in court that they are not “common carriers” like telcos—if they were, it would expose them to thousands of pages of regulations particular to that status.

“We’re not a carrier—we don’t sell any of our bandwidth to make money,” says Mr. Salvadori. “We are and continue to be a major buyer of submarine capacity where it’s available, but in places it’s not available and we need it, we are pretty pragmatic, and if we have to invest to make it happen we’ll go do that,” he adds.

There is an exception to big tech companies collaborating with rivals on the underwater infrastructure of the internet. Google, alone among big tech companies, is already the sole owner of three different undersea cables, and that total is projected by TeleGeography to reach six by 2023.

Google declined to disclose whether or not it has or will share capacity on any of those cables with any other company.

Google has built and is building these solely owned-and-operated cables for two reasons, says Vijay Vusirikala, a senior director at Google responsible for all of the company’s submarine and terrestrial fiber infrastructure. The first is that the company needs them in order to make its own services, such as Google search and YouTube streaming, fast and responsive. The second is to gain an edge in the battle for customers for its cloud services.

All of these ownership changes to the infrastructure of the internet are a reflection of what we already know about the dominance of internet platforms by big tech, says Joshua Meltzer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in digital trade and data flows.

The ability of these companies to vertically integrate all the way down to the level of the physical infrastructure of the internet itself reduces their cost for delivering everything from Google Search and Facebook’s social networking services to Amazon and Microsoft’s cloud services. It also widens the moat between themselves and any potential competitors.

“You have to imagine this investment will ultimately make them more dominant in their industries, because they can provide services at ever-lower costs,” says Mr. Meltzer.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-...er-11642222824





An Undersea Cable Fault could Cut Tonga from the Rest of the World for Weeks
Rina Torchinsky

In the aftermath of a 13-mile-wide volcanic eruption in Tonga, it could take weeks to repair an undersea communications cable that connected the South Pacific archipelago to the rest of the world.

Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai, an underwater volcano off the coast of Tonga, erupted Saturday, carrying volcanic ash nearly 20 kilometers into the air and causing tsunami waves that reached the western shores of the U.S. On Tuesday, the Tongan government confirmed three fatalities in its first official update following the eruption.

The archipelago relied on a single fiber optic cable for global communications, Reuters reported. But the cable ruptured amid the 7.6-magnitude earthquake as the volcano erupted.

"Due to the damage to the international fibre optic cable, the internet is down," according to the Tongan government's statement. "The two communications operators are working on satellite options to restore some services including the internet."
Related Story: The volcano in Tonga is still erupting which could make clean up difficult

Since the eruption, internet traffic in Tonga has plummeted, according to data from Cloudflare.

Operators in Tonga will prioritize the restoration of international calling and other communications services, such as email, according to the statement. Domestic calls are also limited, according to the statement.

Repairs to the damaged cable are reliant on the arrival of a specialized ship in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea's capital, per Reuters' report.

If all goes well, it could take two weeks for it to arrive, Craige Sloots, marketing and sales director at Southern Cross Cable Network, told Reuters.

The majority of global international data traffic is carried on a network of about 280 submarine cables that stretch for more than 600,000 miles, according to Reuters.

This isn't the first time Tonga's undersea cable has been damaged. In 2019, the country was without almost all internet services for more than 10 days.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/18/10738...orld-for-weeks





The Tonga Volcanic Eruption has Revealed the Vulnerabilities in our Global Telecommunication System
Dale Dominey-Howes

In the wake of a violent volcanic eruption in Tonga, much of the communication with residents on the islands remains at a standstill. In our modern, highly-connected world, more than 95% of global data transfer occurs along fibre-optic cables that criss-cross through the world’s oceans.

Breakage or interruption to this critical infrastructure can have catastrophic local, regional and even global consequences. This is exactly what has happened in Tonga following Saturday’s volcano-tsunami disaster. But this isn’t the first time a natural disaster has cut off critical submarine cables, and it won’t be the last.

The video below shows the incredible spread of submarine cables around the planet – with more than 885,000 kilometres of cable laid down since 1989. These cables cluster in narrow corridors and pass between so-called critical “choke points” which leave them vulnerable to a number of natural hazards including volcanic eruptions, underwater landslides, earthquakes and tsunamis.

What exactly has happened in Tonga?

Tonga was only connected to the global submarine telecommunication network in the last decade. Its islands have been heavily reliant on this system as it is more stable than other technologies such as satellite and fixed infrastructure.

The situation in Tonga right now is still fluid, and certain details have yet to be confirmed – but it seems one or more volcanic processes (such as the tsunami, submarine landslide or other underwater currents) have snapped the 872km long fibre-optic cable connecting Tonga to the rest of the world. The cable system was not switched off or disconnected by the authorities.

This has had a massive impact. Tongans living in Australia and New Zealand can’t contact their loved ones to check on them. It has also made it difficult for Tongan government officials and emergency services to communicate with each other, and for local communities to determine aid and recovery needs.

Telecommunications are down, as are regular internet functions – and outages keep disrupting online services, making things worse. Tonga is particularly vulnerable to this type of disruption as there is only one cable connecting the capital Nuku'alofa to Fiji, which is more than 800km away. No inter-island cables exist.

Risks to submarine cables elsewhere

The events in Tonga once again highlight how fragile the global undersea cable network is and how quickly it can go offline. In 2009, I coauthored a study detailing the vulnerabilities of the submarine telecommunications network to a variety of natural hazard processes. And nothing has changed since then.

Cables are laid in the shortest (that means cheapest) distance between two points on the Earth’s surface. They also have to be laid along particular geographic locations that allow easy placement, which is why many cables are clustered in choke points.

Some good examples of choke points include the Hawaiian islands, the Suez Canal, Guam and the Sunda Strait in Indonesia. Inconveniently, these are also locations where major natural hazards tend to occur.

Once damaged it can takes days to weeks (or even longer) to repair broken cables, depending on the cable’s depth and how easily accessible it is. At times of crisis, such outages make it much harder for governments, emergency services and charities to engage in recovery efforts.

Many of these undersea cables pass close to or directly over active volcanoes, regions impacted by tropical cyclones and/or active earthquake zones.
https://blog.apnic.net/2021/01/13/ho...-to-end-users/

In many ways, Australia is also very vulnerable (as is New Zealand and the rest of the world) since we are connected to the global cable network by a very small number of connection points, from just Sydney and Perth.

In regards to Sydney and the eastern seaboard of Australia, we know large underwater landslides have occurred off the coast of Sydney in the past. Future events could damage the critical portion of the network which links to us.
How do we manage risk going forward?

Given the vulnerability of the network, the first step to mitigating risk is to undertake research to quantify and evaluate the actual risk to submarine cables in particular places on the ocean floors and to different types of natural hazards. For example, tropical cyclones (hurricanes/typhoons) occur regularly, but other disaster such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen less often.

Currently, there is little publicly available data on the risk to the global submarine cable network. Once we know which cables are vulnerable, and to what sorts of hazards, we can then develop plans to reduce risk.

At the same time, governments and the telecommunication companies should find ways to diversify the way we communicate, such as by using more satellite-based systems and other technologies.
https://theconversation.com/the-tong...-system-175048





Some Roku Smart TVs are now Showing Banner Ads Over Live TV

It's still unclear which TVs are affected.
Samuel Axon

Some Roku smart TV owners are seeing banner ads appear over live content, according to a thread on the r/cordcutters subreddit.

A user named p3t3or posted the following message:

Welp, this is the last time I purchase or recommend a Roku. After a Sleep Number commercial, I just got a Roku ad sidebar while watching live TV. Really loved the Roku experience up until now, but this is a deal breaker.

The message was accompanied by the following photo:
An ad appears over a sports game on a Sharp-branded TV running Roku software.

The photo shows a Sharp TV running Roku software and displaying an ad for a bed over a live sports broadcast, plus a prompt to 'press OK to get offer."

These ads don't seem to appear on Roku's own hardware, like the Roku Ultra, Express, Streambar, or Streaming Stick. Rather, they show up on certain smart TVs running the Roku TV platform—and it might just be certain brands, like Sharp. Some owners of TCL Roku TVs commented that they had not seen the ads.

Fortunately, users in the thread reported that the feature can be disabled in privacy settings. But it's possible that doing so may disable other Roku features.

Roku's platform is not the only one adding ads to content. Users have complained previously about ads featured prominently on Samsung's TVs, and while we haven't seen reports of ads appearing over live content on LG's webOS TVs, they do appear in other places in the TV's software.

Further, some of these platforms collect and monetize user data, as we previously reported about Vizio TVs.

Smart TV platforms offer convenience, but it's rare for software and services that receive ongoing free support and updates to operate without showing ads, monetizing user data, or both. The profit margins on TVs can be small outside of the high-end part of the market, and supporting software and live services over time costs money, so TV and platform makers are seeking out ways to generate recurring revenue on top of what they get from initial sales.

User complaints like these may reflect a trend to which there is no clear end.

We've reached out to Roku for comment and clarification about which devices serve these ads and what the effects of disabling them in settings might be.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022...-over-live-tv/





Netflix Stock Plunges as Subscriber Growth Worries Deepen
Michael Liedtke

Netflix delivered its latest quarter of disappointing subscriber growth during the final three months of last year, a trend that management foresees continuing into the new year as tougher competition is undercutting the video streaming leader.

The Los Gatos, California, company added 8.3 million worldwide subscribers during the October-December period, about 200,000 fewer than management had forecast. Besides releasing its fourth-quarter results Thursday, Netflix also projected an increase of 2.5 million subscribers during the first three months of this year, well below analysts’ expectations for a gain of 4 million, according to FactSet Research.

The disappointing news caused Netflix’s stock price to plunge by about 20% in extended trading after the numbers came out, deepening a steep decline during the past two months.

It capped a challenging year for Netflix after it reveled in eye-popping gains during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 that drove homebound people to its service.

Netflix picked up 18.2 million worldwide subscribers during 2021, its slowest pace of annual growth in five years. It came after Netflix gained more than 36 million subscribers during 2020. The service now boasts nearly 222 million worldwide subscribers worldwide, more than other video streaming leader.
Technology

But other services backed by deep-pocketed rivals such as Walt Disney Co. and Apple have been making inroads in recent years, and a bevy of other networks also are wading into video streaming in an attempt to grab eyeballs and a piece of household budgets. The escalating competition is one reason Netflix decided to expand into video games last year.

“The 2022 backdrop for Netflix seems to have been set with a theme of competition abound,” said Third Bridge analyst Joe McCormack.

While acknowledging the competition is having a “marginal” effects on its growth in i ts quarterly shareholder letter, Netflix emphasized its service is still thriving in every country where it’s available.

In a Thursday conference call, Netflix executives also said uncertainty caused by the ebb and flow of the pandemic during the past year has made it more difficult to gauge future growth.

COVID “has created a lot of bumpiness,” co-CEO Ted Sarandos said. The company’s other co-CEO, Reed Hastings, also expressed some frustration before adding, “For now, we’re just like staying calm and trying to figure (it) out.”

Despite the choppiness, the company is faring well financially, even though its profit margins are being squeezed and cash is being drained by spending on more original programming to attract subscribers. Netflix earned $607 million, or $1.33 per share, in the fourth quarter, a 12% increase from the same time in the prior year. Fourth-quarter revenue rose by 16% to $7.7 billion.

Investors, though, are getting more worried that Netflix may be nearing its peak in popularity. Those concerns have caused Netflix’s stock price to plummet by more than 40% from its peak of roughly $700 reached in mid-November.

The opportunities for future growth have become particularly tough in Netflix’s biggest market -- the U.S. and Canada -- where it’s starting to appear that most households interested in subscribing to the service already have an account. Netflix ended 2021 with 75.2 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada, translating into a paltry one-year gain of 1.3 million subscribers in that region.

Last week, Netflix raised its price by roughly 10% within the U.S. and Canada -- a move that could cause some subscribers to cancel the service, based on the company’s past history with previous price hikes.

On the upside, Netflix on Friday will unveil the fourth season of “Ozark,” one of its most popular series and a potential magnet for new subscribers.
https://apnews.com/article/technolog...a3dd2353cdbf67





Music Subscriber Market Shares Q2 2021
Mark Mulligan

MIDiA’s annual music subscriber market shares report is now available here (see below for more details of the report). Here are some of the key findings.

The global base of music subscribers continues to grow strongly with 523.9 million music subscribers at the end of Q2 2021, which was up by 109.5 million (26.4%) from one year earlier. Crucially, this was faster growth than the prior year. There is a difference between revenue and subscribers – with ARPU deflators, such as the rise of multi-user plans and the growth of lower-spending emerging markets – but growth in monetised users represents the foundation stone of the digital service provider (DSP) streaming market. So, accelerating growth at this relatively late stage of the streaming market’s evolution is clearly positive.

Spotify remains the DSP with the highest market share (31%), but this was down from 33% in Q2 2020 and 34% in Q2 2019. With Apple Music being a distant second with 15% market share, and Spotify adding more subscribers in the 12 months leading up to Q2 2021 than any other single DSP, there is no risk of Spotify losing its leading position anytime soon – but the erosion of its share is steady and persistent. Amazon Music once again out-performed Spotify in terms of growth (25% compared to 20%), but the standout success story among Western DSPs was YouTube Music, for the second successive year. Google was once the laggard of the space, but the launch of YouTube Music has transformed its fortunes, growing by more than 50% in the 12 months leading up to Q2 2021. YouTube Music was the only Western DSP to increase global market share during this the period. YouTube Music particularly resonates among Gen Z and younger Millennials, which should have alarm bells ringing for Spotify, as their core base of Millennial subscribers from the 2010s in the West are now beginning to age.

But the biggest subscriber growth came from emerging markets. Between them, Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) and NetEase Cloud Music added 35.7 million subscribers in the 12 months leading up to Q2 2021. Together, they accounted for 18% of global market shares, despite being available only in China. Yandex, in Russia, was the other big gainer, doubling its subscriber base to reach 2% of global market share.

Combined, Yandex, TME and NetEase account for 20% of subscriber market share, but they drive 37% of all subscriber growth in the 12 months leading up to Q2 2021.

The strong growth in subscribers holds an extra meaning going into 2022. The surge in non-DSP streaming in 2021 means that the streaming market is no longer dependent on the revenue contribution of maturing Western subscriber markets (nor indeed ARPU-diluting emerging markets). With non-DSP streaming revenue looking set to have contributed between a quarter and a third of streaming revenue increase in 2021, streaming revenues look set for strong growth, even if subscriber growth lessens. That is what you call a diversified market.
https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/m...shares-q2-2021





Is Old Music Killing New Music?

All the growth in the music business now comes from old songs—how did we get here, and is there a way back?[/b]
Ted Gioia

I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms—but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers. According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.

Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—have to look on these figures with fear and trembling.

But the news gets worse.

The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

Just consider these facts: the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It was twice that rate just three years ago. And the mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted to older music—the current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police.

I saw it myself last week at a retail store, where the youngster at the cash register was singing along with Sting on “Message in a Bottle” (a hit from 1979) as it blasted on the radio. A few days earlier, I had a similar experience at a local diner, where the entire staff was under thirty but every song more than forty years old. I asked my server: “Why are you playing this old music?” She looked at me in surprise before answering: “Oh, I like these songs.”

The reasons are complex—more than just the appeal of old tunes—but the end result is unmistakable: Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact. In fact, the audience seems to be embracing en masse the hits of decades past. Success was always short-lived in the music business, but now it hardly makes a ripple on the attention spans of the mass market.

A few hearty souls take solace in the fact that only songs released in the last 18 months get classified as new in the MRC database. But that’s cold comfort indeed. I doubt these old playlists consist of songs from the year before last—and even if they do, this still represents a stinging repudiation of the pop culture industry, which is almost entirely focused on what’s happening right now.

Old recordings, like zombies in those bad films, are out to kill the living

Every week I hear from hundreds of publicists, record labels, band managers, and other professionals who want to hype the newest new thing—for the simple reason that their livelihoods depend on it. The entire business model of the music industry is built on promoting new songs. As a music writer, I’m expected to do the same—as are radio stations, retailers, DJs, nightclub owners, editors, playlist curators, and everyone else with skin in the game. Yet all the evidence indicates that few are paying attention.

Just consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack of reaction—because the response was little more than a yawn. I follow thousands of music professionals on social media, and I didn’t encounter a single expression of annoyance or regret that the biggest annual event in new music had been put on hold.

That’s ominous.

Can you imagine how angry fans would be if the Super Bowl or NBA Finals were delayed? People would riot in the streets. If they cancelled Carnival in Rio or even just Bloomsday in Dublin, I’d hear an outcry on social media. But the Grammy Awards go missing in action, and hardly anyone notices.

The declining TV audience for the Grammy show underscores this shift. In 2021, viewership for the Grammy Awards collapsed 53% from the previous year—from 18.7 million to 8.8 million. It was the least-watched Grammy broadcast of all time. Even the core audience for new music couldn’t be bothered—around 98% of people between the ages of 18 and 49 had something better to do than watch the biggest music celebration of the year.

A decade ago, 40 million people watched the Grammy Awards. That’s a meaningful audience, but now the devoted fans of this event are starting to resemble a tiny subculture. More people pay attention to streams of video games on Twitch (which now boasts 30 million daily visitors) or the latest reality TV show. In fact, musicians would probably do better getting placement in Fortnite than signing a record deal in 2022. At least they would have access to a growing demographic.

More people watch the Great British Bake Off than the Grammy Awards

Some would like to believe this is just a short term blip, perhaps caused by the pandemic. When clubs open up again, and DJs start spinning new records at parties, the world will return to normal—or so we’re told. The hottest songs will again be the newest songs.

I’m not so optimistic.

A perfect storm has hit the music ecosystem. A series of unfortunate events are conspiring to marginalize new music. The pandemic is one of these ugly facts, but hardly the only contributor to the growing crisis.

Consider these other trends:

• The hottest area of investment in the music business is old songs—with investment firms getting into bidding wars to buy publishing catalogs from aging rock and pop stars.

• The song catalogs in most demand are by musicians in their 70s or 80s (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, etc.)—if not already dead (David Bowie, James Brown, etc.).

• Even major record labels are participating in the shift, with Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, and others buying up publishing catalogs—investing huge sums in old tunes that, in an earlier day, would have been used to launch new artists.

• The hottest technology in music is a format that is more than 70 years old, the vinyl LP. There’s no sign that the record labels are investing in a newer, better alternative—because, here too, old is viewed as superior to new.

• In fact, record labels—once a source of innovation in consumer products—don’t spend any money on research & development to revitalize their businesses, although every other industry looks to innovation for growth and consumer excitement.

• Record stores are caught up in the same time warp. In an earlier day, they aggressively marketed new music, but now they make more money from vinyl reissues and used LPs.

• Radio stations are contributing to the stagnation, putting fewer new songs into their rotation, or—judging by the offerings on my satellite radio lineup—completely ignoring new music in favor of old hits.

• When a new song overcomes these obstacles and actually becomes a hit, the risk of copyright lawsuits is greater than ever before. The risks have increased enormously since the “Blurred Lines” jury decision of 2015—with the result that additional cash gets transferred from today’s musicians to old (or deceased) artists.

• Adding to the nightmare, dead musicians are now coming back to life in virtual form—via holograms and deepfake music—making it all the harder for a young, living artist to compete in the marketplace

As record labels lose interest in new music, emerging performers desperately search for other ways of getting exposure. They hope to get their self-produced tracks on a curated streaming playlist, or license their songs for use in advertising or the closing credits of a TV show. But here’s the problem—these options might generate some royalty income, but do little to build name recognition.

You might hear a cool song on a TV commercial, but do you even know the name of the artist? You love your workout playlist at the health club, but how many song titles and band names do you remember? You stream a Spotify new music playlist in the background while you work, but did you bother to learn who’s singing the songs?

Decades ago, composer Erik Satie announced the arrival of ‘furniture music’—a kind of song that would blend seamlessly into the background of our lives. That seemed like a radical notion at the time, but this vision of the future is rapidly turning into the banal reality of today. And the lack of excitement among consumers is palpable.

Some people—especially baby boomers—tell me that this decline in music is simply the result of lousy new songs. Music used to be better, or so they say. The old songs had better melodies, more interesting harmonies, and demonstrated genuine musicianship, not just software loops, Auto-Tuned vocals, and regurgitated samples.

There will never be another Sondheim, they tell me. Or Joni Mitchell. Or Bob Dylan. Or Cole Porter. Or Brian Wilson. I almost expect these doomsayers to break out in a stirring rendition of “Old Time Rock and Roll,” much like Tom Cruise in his underpants.

Just take those old records off the shelf
I'll sit and listen to 'em by myself. . .


I can understand the frustrations of music lovers getting no satisfaction from the current songs, though they try and they try. I also lament the lack of imagination on many current hits. But I disagree with their larger verdict. I listen to 2-3 hours of new music every day, and I know that there are plenty of outstanding young musicians out there. The problem isn’t that they don’t exist, but that the music industry has lost its ability to discover and nurture their talents.

There are many reasons for this, some of them quite alarming. For example, the fear of copyright lawsuits has made many in the music industry deathly afraid of listening to unsolicited demo recordings. If you hear a demo today, you might get sued for stealing its melody—or maybe just its rhythmic groove—five years from now. Try mailing a demo to a label or producer, and watch it return unopened.

That’s a bizarre situation, no? The people whose livelihood depends on discovering new musical talent face legal risks if they take their job seriously. And that’s only one of the deleterious results of the music industry’s over-reliance on lawyers and litigation—a hardass approach they once hoped would cure all their problems, but now does more harm than good. Everybody suffers in this litigious environment, except for the partners at the entertainment law firms, who enjoy the abundant fruits of all these lawsuits and legal threats.

But the problem goes much deeper than just copyright concerns. The people running the music industry have lost confidence in new music. They won’t admit it publicly—that would be like the priests of Jupiter and Apollo in ancient Rome admitting that their gods are dead. Even if they know it’s true, their job titles won’t allow such a humble and abject confession. Yet that is exactly what’s happening in the music business. The moguls have lost their faith in the redemptive and life-changing power of new music—how sad is that? Of course, the decision-makers need to pretend that they still believe in the future of their business, and want to discover the next revolutionary talent—but that’s not what they really think. Their actions speak much louder than their empty words.

In fact, nothing is less interesting to music executives than a completely radical new kind of music. Who can blame them? The radio stations will only play songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven’t changed much in decades. That’s even more true for the algorithms curating so much of our new music—the algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That’s actually how the current system has been designed to work.

Even the music genres famous for shaking up the world—rock or jazz or hip-hop—face this same deadening industry mindset. I love jazz, but many of the radio stations focused on that genre play songs that sound almost the same as what they featured ten or twenty years ago. In many instances, they actually are the same songs.

That doesn’t have to be the case. A lot of musicians around the world—especially in Los Angeles and London—are conducting a bold dialogue between jazz and other contemporary styles. They are even bringing jazz back as dance music. But the songs they release sound dangerously different from older jazz, and are thus excluded from many radio stations for that very reason. The very boldness with which they embrace the future becomes the reason why they get rejected by the gatekeepers.

The same thing is happening everywhere. A country record needs to sound a certain way to get played on most country radio stations or playlists—and that sound dates back to the last century. And don’t even get me started on classical music, which works hard to avoid showcasing the creativity of the current generation. We are living in an amazing era of classical composition—with one tiny problem: the institutions controlling the genre don’t want you to hear it.

So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it.

I learned the danger of excessive caution long ago, when I consulted to huge Fortune 500 companies. The single biggest problem I encountered—shared by virtually every large company I analyzed—was investing too much of their time and money into defending old ways of doing business, rather than building new ones. We even had a proprietary tool for quantifying this misallocation of resources—which spelled out the mistakes in precise dollars and cents.

But senior management hated hearing this, and always insisted that defending the old business units was their safest bet. After I encountered this embedded mindset again and again and saw its consequences, I reached the painful conclusion that the safest path is often the most dangerous. If you pursue a strategy—whether in business or your personal life—that avoids all risk, you might flourish in the short run, but you flounder over the long term. Sad to say, that’s what now happening in the music business. Keep your head in the sand long enough, and you suffocate.

The leading companies in music had many chances to reinvent themselves over the last quarter century, taking bold action that might have transformed themselves and the entire culture. But they didn’t want to take any risks. They could have invested in new technologies—but didn’t, instead allowing Silicon Valley companies to swallow up most of the profits from music in the 21st century. They could have signed and nurtured new talent—but didn’t, preferring to invest in 50-year-old songs. They could have embraced exciting new sounds—but didn’t because the algorithms and dominant formulas reward rehashes of the old sounds.

Even so, I refuse to accept that we are in some ugly endgame, witnessing the death throes of new music. And I say that because I know how much people crave something that sounds fresh and exciting and different. If they don’t find it from a major record label or algorithm-driven playlist, they will find it somewhere else. Things can go viral nowadays without the entertainment industry even noticing until it has actually happened. And that will be how this story ends—not with the marginalization of new music, but with something radical emerging from an unexpected place.

In fact, that’s how all the apparent dead ends of the past were circumvented. Music company execs in 1955 had no idea that rock ‘n’ roll would soon sweep away everything in its wake. When Elvis took over the culture—coming from the poorest state in the US, lowly Mississippi—they were more shocked than anybody. And it happened again the following decade, with the arrival of the British Invasion from lowly Liverpool (again a working class city, unnoticed by the entertainment industry). And it took place again when hip-hop emerged from the Bronx and South Central and other impoverished neighborhoods, a true grass roots movement that didn’t give a damn how the close-minded CEOs of Sony or Universal Music viewed the marketplace.

And if we had the time, I would tell you that the same thing has always happened—with the troubadours of 11th century or Sappho and the lyric singers of ancient Greece or the artisan performers of the Middle Kingdom in ancient Egypt. Musical revolutions come from the bottom up, not the top down.

The CEOs are the last to know.

That’s what gives me solace. New music always arises in the least expected place, and when the power brokers aren’t even paying attention. And it will happen again just like that. It certainly needs to. Because the decision-makers controlling our music institutions have lost the thread. We’re lucky that the music is too powerful for them to kill.
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/is-o...ling-new-music

















Until next week,

- js.



















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