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. In the UK, there are only four new albums among top 20 best-sellers for the first half of 2021. The majority of the chart is occupied by long-toothed classics by Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, ABBA and Oasis.

The frustrating thing about music is that now there’s too much of it, there’s 64,000 songs a day uploaded to Spotify, so it’s a lot harder to get heard. A large portion of the people that are streaming, they’ve never owned a CD, they may not listen to the radio, and when they hear David Bowie’s Life On Mars, they’re hearing it for the first time.

Classic songs are strangling new music