Yesterday's Gone

Pop music is supposed to be a young person's bag. Young folks make it, and young folks consume it. That's been conventional wisdom since Sinatra was breaking the hearts of bobby-soxers at the Paramount.

But have a look at Rolling Stone's list of the top earners in pop music last year.

Prince, $56.5 million, Madonna $54.9, Metallica $43.1 million (you'd think Ronald Regan was still in office), Elton John $42.9, Jimmy Buffet $36.5, Rod Stewart $34.6 million, Shania Twain $33.2 million, Phil Collins $33.2 million, Linkin Park $33.1, and Simon and Garfunkel $31.3.

Hardly a collection of hip young rockers or up-and-coming rappers with mad flow, eh? Jimmy Buffet? Ask your average 15-year-old to hum you a few bars of "Cheese Burger in Paradise" and see what happens.

Of the top 10 earners on the Rolling Stone list only Linkin Park and Shania Twain have careers that don't predate the Clinton administration.

To be fair the Rolling Stone list probably skews older than some other lists might.

First, it is based on estimated net earnings, not gross, and veteran artists--in the position to negotiate more favorable terms with record companies--typically take home more of what they generate. Prince for example, who cuts major label distribution deals on an album-by-album basis, solid 1.9 million copies of Musicology last year--many of them bundled with concert tickets. By contrast Usher sold 8 million copies of Confessions. But Prince earns $2 per CD, Rolling Stone notes, while artists like Usher have to make a bigger share of their income from live performances.

Second, the Rolling Stone list includes income from sales of back catalog as well as from songwriting royalties--areas where artists like Paul Simon—with a thick stack of disks and portfolio of copyrights behind him--have a leg up on the likes of Linkin Park. (Simon, Rolling Stone reports, earned $4 million on songwriting royalties alone.)

Still, the list is remarkable for what it tells us about where the real money is in the music business. Sure there are still new acts that sell well by appealing to a younger audience. But 50 Cent, perhaps the most inescapable act of the past year, earned less than Van Halen, Sting, The Eagles and Eric Clapton (despite royalties from other acts on his G Unit label). Fleetwood Mac out-earned Beyonce Knowles. Cher made more money than Alicia Keys. And The Beatles, despite having broken up in 1970, out-earned Hilary Duff, who wasn't born until 1987. In fact, The Beatles sold 2 million albums last year--more than the 1.4 million units that Beyonce Knowles shifted. Not bad for an act that hasn't performed a live show since 1966!

Music execs bemoan the state of the industry citing the increasing competition for leisure dollars from new media like video games and wailing about the sales lost to file sharing. But the truth is, when it comes to making big money in pop music, it's all about the Baby Boomers. It has always been all about the Baby Boomers.

The Boomers have passed through the US economy like monarch caterpillars chomping their inexorable way through a soon-to-be dessicated forest, dragging their money and America's pop music along with them into middle age. And the Baby Boomers are getting old. In 1970, the year that the above picture of Bill and Hil was taken, the median age in America was 28. By 2000 the median age was 35.

It's a commonly heard axiom in the record business that a consumer's tastes areset by the time he's 21, most music marketers think it's even earlier. The last time a boomer was 21 MTV was new and Michael Jackson still kind of looked black.

By the time Elvis hit in 1956 the leading edge of the Boomers was 10. By the time of Sgt. Pepper's the leading edge was 21. By the time of Rumors the oldest group was 30 and the youngest just reaching its teens. It's no wonder that Rumors was the first modern blockbuster, the record that blew the doors off the pop music business--the entire Baby Boom was within the industry's core target market. Whammo! Rumors remains the quintessential Boomer album—breezy on the surface; tormented below by divorce, drugs and drink; emotionally self-absorbed; technologically advanced. When Bill and Hillary danced to “Don't Stop” it was the crowning Boomer pop moment.

After Rumors things changed. By the time of Thriller, as the youngest of the Baby Boomers started marrying, the generation's musical preferences were settled and the age of the blockbuster album started it's continuing decline.

Today Boomers are still the biggest single demographic chunk of record buyers and a growing percentage of the whole--more than 45% of record buyers were 35 and over in 2001, according to a fascinating study by Stan J. Liebowitz, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Dallas (Will MP3 Downloads Annihilate the Record Industry). Compare that to 1987 when less than 25% of buyers were over 35.

But it's more than demographics that ensure the Boomers role as pop music market-makers. Boomers were the first, and still the only generation to expect more of popular music, something approaching art, something with broad social import, a public projection of their internal lives. With the Boomers in the marketplace, popular music changed from "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?" to a shared signifier of sexual liberation, race mixing, radical politics, and ultimately a kind of spend-it-all-now hedonism that was the generation's blitzed reaction to their parent's Depression-inspired penury. With the Boomers in the marketplace, the market grew.

Perhaps more than any other consumer industry, the music industry will struggle as the Baby Boomers age out. Not only is the next generation smaller, but it also has less invested culturally and emotionally in pop music. In his memoir, Chronicles Vol. 1, Bob Dylan talks at length about the pressures of being expected to have Messianic powers by a public with an almost pathological attachment to music in the 1960s. Today, although Jay-Z likes to refer to himself as Jehovah, no one really expects to find salvation in “99 Problems But a Bitch Ain't One.”

Comments

[Tony Alva]

You hit another one out of the park Jason with this post. What time is proving is that the music industry has always had a balance of fad acts that are rooted in the whims of youngsters desperate to be different and veteran groups that emerge from the pop scene that possess real talent to sustain a career past their rookie release, ego inflation/deflation, sophomore slump, drug problems, etc... What has occurred in the past 10 or 15 years is that fewer and fewer acts are making it past this maturity mark. While we all might bob our heads to a Haircut 100 song that nostalgically brings us back to a time in the eighties, we're not rushing out to buy the record. Why? Because it's not a good record. It was new, different, and fit the fashion of the time, but it was a talentless void musically.

The industry really screwed up when they trended towards chasing the next Back Street Boys record vs. serious artist development and now they are paying for it. Remember that fiasco? In Sync sold 2 million units in the first week of release, and the BSB’s label was disappointed when they only managed to muster a paltry1.2 million units on their competing release.

I like a great deal of today's pop music. I accept it for what it is and no longer view it as audio cancer like I did during my real rocker days, but as much as I enjoy it, I know that we will be asking the question 10 years from now, "...who the hell is Brittany Spears?

Boomers will one day die, that is for certain. The industry needs to get back to the business of long-term artist development so a new boomer like demographic of music aficionados is nurtured. The good news is that there is no lack of viable talent out there. They just need to look past the 2 million unit first week sales to find artists who have something to say. They need to seek these acts out now. Otherwise, it's going to get far worse than it's current state.

[JR]

Not that it matters, but monarch caterpillars eat milkweed, a scruffy little plant that needs lots of sun. The caterpillars don't go anywhere near forests.

Maybe you're thinking of gypsy moths?

Now, as to popular music, you say, "Boomers were the first, and still the only generation to expect more of popular music, something approaching art..."

In the generations before the boomers, popular music included: La Boheme, Gilbert & Sullivan, ragtime, Broadway, Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Nat Cole, Frank Sinatra. Not to mention Monk, Coltrane, Mingus, Miles Davis, the MJQ (maybe jazz isn't "popular" enough for you.) Still, you really want to argue that "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" approaches art more closely than "One More for My Baby"? I'll give you odds on that one any day of an 8-day week.

[chervokas]

As someone argued to me just this weekend when I brought up Pucini much the way you did, JR, Gilbert & Sullivan through Richard Rodgers were writing for a difference audience than the popular song sheets that were the mass market of the day (largely novelty records). No one considered Bing Crosby's Pedal Pushing Papa art, nor did they expect that it should be. It wasn't a qualitative judgment.

I'd say ONe for the Road is almost infinitely better a song than I wanna hold your hand. But I still say no one expected Sinatra to lead a political and cultural revolution.

Not that I think it's necessarily sane to expect pop singers to lead a revolution.

Just that it's a peculiar aspect of the Boomers attachment to pop music.

Similarly, no one considered My Little Grass Shack in Honolulu art, or any of the pop before it, at least no one expected it to be art.

[sean]

Please, not another elegy to the lost youth of Boomers. Hasn't the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame done enough damage? Hasn't Jann Wenner's crappy magazine tried to foist the same old tired cliches too long? Of course Baby Boomers spend money on the Eagles or Clapton or whatever because they have the discretionary money to do so. That's obvious. But look at the numbers you quoted. Prince hasn't made a good album in years. Madonna, even as a singles artist seems kaput. Metallica, fresh off therapy, released a lame album hoping to catch the Nu-Metal wave. Elton John and Rod Stewart should spend their remaining years counting heir millions. Phil Collins is a joke. And if I saw any teenager humming along to anything by Jimmy Buffet I would be worried.
You'll always have takers for every Who-Stones-Simon & Garfunkel reunion because its a way for people to rehash their youth ad nauseum. Which wouldn't be so bad if they could keep their whole culturally superior we-were-for-art-above-all line from sounding so dated and so tired. So enervating that you end up overating not only Sgt. Pepper's and many other touchstones of the Sixties, just because,well, they were made in the Sixties,including every bloated concept album and rock opera.(Boomers have to answer for In The Court of The Crimson King and especially, Tales From Topographic Oceans.) It's like listening to Camille Paglia go on and on about "My Generation.." complaining that art is not up to it these days, then giving thumbs up to Celine Dion or Titanic. She's too lazy to do the work, so she just keeps talking about the Stones as if they'd just recorded Exile last week. You can see Boomer defiance at its best in those Rolling Stone specials: 500 best albums, 1000 greatest singles, "Immortals," anything to keep the flame of their youth alive.

[chervokas]

Sean-

I'm not talking about the quality of the "art" at all. Just talking about the business of pop music. Execs moan about living in this era of shrinking sales, but the reason is demographic, boomers were a demographic bulb and they still are the record buyers. Just talking about the culture and the biz.

We can argue about the best music until the cows come home, that's just personal taste. But the $$ is measurable. To this day the way to make money in the music biz is to sell to boomers.