30 Incorrect Predictions About Music and Culture for 2022

I look at the current scene, and serve up a sad list of incorrect forecasts

Predictions can be so depressing. Maybe that’s why I never read my horoscope.

But wrong predictions can be quite liberating. Below I offer thirty of them, mostly focused on music and culture.

I fear that none of the forecasts below will come true. Of course, I’d love to be wrong about this. . . .

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30 Incorrect Predictions About 2022

1. A major media company will announce a new strategy that doesn’t use the word ‘pivot’ in the press release.

2. Tech bros will get bored with NFTs and start buying works of art that don’t exist on a blockchain.  

3. A musician convicted of a heinous crime will fail to get a 500% boost in streaming plays the next week.

4. As lockdowns end, dancing to live music will suddenly seem very, very cool.

5. Disney will invest in a big new movie that isn’t a prequel, sequel, remake, reboot, or adaptation.

6. At a highly-publicized séance, a famous dead jazz musician will explicitly ask Kenny G not to collaborate on a song.

7. Apple CEO Tim Cook will admit during an interview that the iPhone “sucks as a music delivery device” and promise to come up with a stand-alone product that offers a “transformative listening experience.”

8. On the 145th anniversary of the birth of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden, a previously unknown cylinder recording of his band will be discovered on the shelves of a New Orleans archive. It will generate one million YouTube clicks in the first week.

9. The bestselling song of the year will use more chord changes than songwriters.

10. An unexpected act of public forgiveness will be a major story of 2022.

11. Books entering public domain in 2022 will get turned into surprise hit miniseries—including Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Franz Kafka’s The Castle.

12. A new music style will emerge as a global sensation and not come from the English-speaking world or Korea.

13. A court decision will force Google to share 5% of its advertising revenues with the newspapers and periodicals it has used parasitically to earn billions and build portal dominance. This small reallocation of search ad revenues will add a stunning $2 billion to the journalism ecosystem.

14. Streaming licenses with record labels will be leaked to the media, and people will be shocked at the terms and the ingenious ways artists get cut out of the cash flows

15. Hollywood will stop self-censoring movies just to gain market access from authoritarian regimes.

16. In the middle of a heated panel discussion at an otherwise forgettable academic conference, musicologists will suddenly agree that it’s okay to study both jazz and classical music—and other styles too. In the aftermath, participants will wonder why they ever thought otherwise.

17. People will decide en masse that it’s rude and vulgar to use the noun ‘content’ to describe music and other works of creative expression.

18. Jazz musicians will occasionally play a song by a living composer who isn’t a member of the band or more than 80 years old.

19. In an amazing turnaround, Universal Music and other major record labels will decide to invest more in launching talented new artists than acquiring publishing rights of old songs.

20. A brave person in Congress will introduce an intellectual property law dictating that companies refusing to make music and books available to the public eventually lose their copyright—which reverts back to the creator of the work in question.

21. Due to a surprise viral video, electric blues will take off on TikTok.

22. Movie theaters come booming back into life after the pandemic—with both fans and filmmakers realizing that straight-to-streaming distribution undermines the cinematic experience and even reduces cash flow.

23. When Forbes announces the 10 top-earning musicians of the year, at least one of them will have made more money from music than licensing deals.

24. A new mantra will emerge in the music world: More rhythm; less algorithm.

25. I will somehow go an entire week without encountering an unemployed person who claims to have the job title of influencer.

26. Major record labels and musicians will come together to launch a 50/50 coop streaming platform that bypasses Spotify and other tech companies.

27. The Nobel Prize in Literature will be given to an author with a large, enthusiastic audience of intelligent readers.

28. Meta and Alphabet will decide to change their names back to Facebook and Google—recognizing the simple fact that this is what everybody calls them and always will.

29. Record labels will work to accelerate the vinyl revival by significantly cutting prices and massively expanding the catalog of available offerings.

30. Twitter will add an edit function, and within days social media posts will start becoming smarter, kinder, and more accurate.

Yeah, I know I’m a terrible prognosticator. But at least I can hope. And I can’t be wrong on all of these, can I?