What the end-of-year lists tell us about the music industry

Athe end of each year comes a rush of lists. Every publication, blog, broadcaster and online or offline entity of every hue is putting the year to bed in a flurry of top 10s, 20s, 30s and 100s summing up the previous 12 months. Be it albums, tracks, gigs, bands, books, videos, reissues or haircuts, the lists have taken over the narrative. It’s futile to protest, so just dive in and count to 10.

Historically, these end-of-year lists provided a robust and reliable guide to the year gone by. Collective wisdom means there’s usually a couple of albums that get the nod from most critics and pop up on nearly every list.

These are the albums that sum up the year in rock, pop, jazz, trad and whatever you’re having yourself, and the same names typically dominate. Of course, a diehard indie fan or publication would be championing a completely different set of selections to their hip-hop brethren, but there would be at least some uniformity between those of a similar persuasion.

ExpandAutoplay

Image 1 of 3

Sufjan Stevens

This year, however, the spread of albums getting mentions in individual dispatches is wider than before. It's interesting to look at the top 10 album lists from Today FM's Paul McLoone, 2FM's Dan Hegarty and God Is an Astronaut's Torsten Kinsella, as published on Paul Page's Between the Bars blog. There was just one crossover – Blur's The Magic Whip – between the three contributors, making for 29 different albums in all. When The Ticket's music writers were polled, they ended up plumping for 50 different albums between the seven involved.

Sign of the crossover

This disparity is not unique. There’s a certain crossover between lists, with acts such as Grimes, Julia Holter, Kendrick Lamar, Sufjan Stevens and Björk featuring at the sharp end of many end-of-year round-ups.

But there are acres of difference when you get stuck into the lists in depth. It seem that most have been happily listening to completely different artists and albums all year long. Birds of a critical feather no longer flock together.

The differences are striking, but they’re also understandable. This eclecticism is a result of the great disruption that has occurred in our listening habits. We now have so much more music at our disposal that we inevitably listen to a wider and deeper selection of releases. Even if we listen to only alternative rock or Americana, we listen to a hell of a lot more acts who wear those hats than in previous times.

Technology has reduced or eliminated many of the barriers to entry, and there are now more new releases from more acts than ever before. A recent Billboard report pointed out the obvious: people bought more albums in 1994 than in 2014. But there are far, far more albums and acts competing for our time now than there were 20 years ago.

In the attention economy of today, time and dedication are far more valuable currency than the money in your pocket you might use to buy a CD or download an album and then ignore it. Getting people to commit to listening to an album is hard, but getting people to chatter on their social media networks and evangelise about that album is the real holy grail.

Aside from displacing traditional commercial channels, the popularity of streaming services such as Spotify and other new arrivals has also introduced fans to a much wider and more regularly updated range of music than they would have had access to before.

The success of Spotify’s Discover Weekly or Fresh Finds playlists demonstrates that people are prepared to check out new music when there’s a friendly guide. This will likely come as news to music radio programmers, who seem to be afraid to experiment beyond a narrow, conservative spectrum.

In the case of Spotify, this guide turns out to be a hard-working algorithm that creates a personalised playlist for each user every week “based on your listening history and the listening history of others with similar tastes to you”. Week in, week out, the Spotify bots tear through millions of tracks, new and old, to come up with a list of tracks to keep you listening or at least stop you clicking to the next track after 15 seconds.

Indeed, much of the disparity in what we are listening to and rating comes down to the rise of the playlist. Regardless of whether there’s a computer or a human being picking the tracks, playlists have become a key part of music promotion in the past 12 months, as time constraints prioritise the track over the album. Many of the more popular playlists on streaming services now have thousands of subscribers and play a crucial role in introducing new acts to the widest possible audience.

For those who make their living within the music business, the rise of playlists is yet another wrinkle to contend with in an endless cycle of innovation and iterations. The old system around recorded music, a system that existed for a couple of decades at most, produced a steady supply of acts that graduated from an apprenticeship as newcomers to become best-sellers, arena fillers and headliners.

However, the latest disruption, with its flood of new entrants, means there are far more acts that will never make it beyond the bottom rung or two of the ladder. Further up the food chain, it ensures the same predictable headliners hang around forever and, yes, that means Red Hot Chili Peppers must be due a run-out in an Irish field in 2016.

Even previously reliable barometers to new music seem to have outlived their usefulness. Benjamin Clementine won the Mercury Music Prize in November. In previous years, winners have enjoyed a boost in profile and sales, but Clementine didn’t get much of either after his victory. With so many new acts to choose from, the attention economy means people move quickly on if the latest bright new thing does not immediately grab them.

Chasing the long tail

In some ways, the current situation, in which the end-of-the-year lists demonstrate such diversity and divergence, is an interesting take on the long tail so beloved of Wired writer Chris Anderson. While the vast majority of new releases will not get the same attention, listens or love as the new Adele album, the musical long tail shows that there's still an audience that will find its way to that music at some stage or another. The fact that Spotify playlists, for example, are just as keen to champion music from a few years ago as a few weeks ago means that "new to me" takes on a whole new meaning.

But it does present some macro problems for a traditional music business that, like all industries, likes to deal in scale and volume. Record labels have long worked on the principle of signing many acts in the hope that a handful will succeed.

However, a system producing hundreds of small winners rather than a couple of new Adeles, George Ezras or Coldplays every year is pretty inefficient if you need a new batch of all-conquering superstars every season to pay industry-wide research and development bills. Add in the reduced revenue from the slump in sales of recorded music and you can see problems ahead.

For the music fan, though, all of this matters little. We live in a time of plenty, a time when even the most fickle and hard-to-please music snobs have never had so much new music to choose from.

As the end-of-the-year rankings show, a lack of uniformity has resulted in a much more idiosyncratic, unpredictable and – let’s be honest – exciting choice of musical highlights.