Fragmenting and Personalizing

It's not a secret that the  music industry is a lot less monolithic than it used to be, and a lot more fragmented. Some of this results from the continuing decline of the major record labels; with the rise of smaller independent labels, the big companies have less control over what radio stations play and what music lovers listen to.

But there’s more than that; the industry itself has changed. Back in the heyday of Top 40 radio, radio stations played pretty much everything from everybody; radio was truly cross genre. A single station would play a little British Invasion rock mixed with Brill Building pop, beach music, sounds, Motown, country, even the occasional Frank Sinatra tune. That kind of variety helped promote all musical genres; everybody heard a little bit of everything.

All you have to do is scan up or down the dial to know that that’s not the way it works today. Over the past several decades radio programming has become much more segmented. Instead of a radio station playing music from different types of artists, stations today have relatively narrow playlists. A station might play only hip hop, heavy metal, or alternative rock, and nothing else. There’s no cross-pollination between genres. You pick your station of choice and then never get exposed to anything else.

This blinders-on programming is even worse in the worlds of satellite and Internet radio, where segments get further sub-segmented. You want a station that plays only gangster rap? You got it. How about an outlaw country-only station? It's there. What about a station that plays only Elvis Presley tunes? Yep, there's one of those, too. (Although you can’t yet discriminate between early “good Elvis” and later “Vegas Elvis” tunes.)

Then there’s the fact that most music lovers today program their own music, through personalized playlists on their iPods or streaming music services. When you can program your own music, you need never be exposed to anything new, let alone anything different. How do you hear the latest breaking artists when all you have playlisted is a bunch of New Wave bands from the early 1980s? We're all listening to our own private stations, everything else be damned.

Now, that may sound fine if you’re a discriminate music lover; you know what you like and that’s that. But there this fragmentation and personalization of the market has many ill effects, not the least of which is that we no longer have common musical experiences.

Let’s face it, in today’s digital world, there’s no such thing as a big act any more. In the old days, a hit single could sell tens of millions of copies, because people from all walks of life were exposed to it. Not the case today, where a "big" single only sells a hundred thousand copies or so, and isn't even recognizable by most listeners -- who happen not to listen to that particular format.

There are exceptions, of course; Brit singer Adele did a good job of bridging genres in 2011, due in no small part to the universal nature of her music and her all-around talent. But for every Adele there are a hundred Arcade Fires. Remember when Arcade Fire won the Best Album Grammy in 2011 (for The Suburbs) and the general chorus was “What is an Arcade Fire?” As talented as the group is and as great as that album was, it hit only a small segment of the listening audience. Aside from their small but dedicated fan base, nobody else had heard of them; everybody else was too busy listening to their own personalized and fragmented playlists, and missed out on a great album.

The challenge, then, is to move beyond the music you’re comfortable with and discover something new. That used to be as easy as tuning your radio to the AM dial (which is now filled with right-wing airbags); today, you have to try harder.