Listeners Can't Remember the Names of Their Favorite Songs and Artists
New research tells a disturbing story about music discovery
Young people have always been the first to notice hot new artists—but not anymore. Teens are now less connected to the music scene than a typical 30 year old.
According to a new study from MIDIA Research:
“16-24-year-olds are less likely than 25-34-year-olds to have discovered an artist they love in the last year—and less likely to listen to more music from that artist when they do.”
Even when they find a song they like on TikTok, they rarely listen to the artist on a streaming music platform. What happens on TikTok stays on TikTok.
“Entertainment has become a zero-sum game,” MIDIA warns. “There is little room to carve out new spaces for attention.”
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This has a strange side effect. Musicians are turned into influencers—because their social media success is more likely to generate “follows” instead of “streams.”
There was once a big difference between a musician and a fashion model or comedian or pundit. But now they all compete against each other on the same reels for the same audience.
So here are the new rules of the game:
Artists no longer exist.
They have been turned into content creators for tech companies.
The platforms have an insatiable appetite for content—but they don’t care if it’s music or a goofy joke or a violent crime or anything else that gets attention for a few seconds.
You can’t entrust art forms and creative idioms to these platforms, but somehow they now possess life-or-death control over all of them.
If you’re a musician, that’s not a happy state of affairs. But it gets worse.
Here’s the scariest finding of them all—according to MIDIA:
“18% of consumers do not want to leave their social feed when they hear new music, and by the time that they do, 33% have forgotten what the music was or did not even see the song’s name in the first place.”
The entire MIDIA report is worth reading, but this chart is a good starting point
It makes clear that the single biggest reason why social media is now a deadend for musicians is that people can’t remember the names of artists or the titles of songs they like.
I warned about this a year ago in my article “The Rise of the Anonymous Music Star.” Artists can get millions (or even billions) of clicks, but this doesn’t translate into a successful career.
Back then I wrote:
This explains why so many new artists still struggle for visibility after they release a hit. Consider the case of Thomas Hewitt-Jones, who composed a song that generated eight billion streams on TikTok. Those are massive numbers, much larger than the Beatles’ 10 million copies of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
But this piece, aptly entitled “Funny Song,” didn’t build a reliable audience. “I have to be honest and say that in the wake of ‘Funny Song’, I wrote two more albums of the stuff—none of which have flown in the same way yet,” the composer told an interviewer.
Most of you won’t recognize his name. But he got eight billion streams—and there are only eight billion people on planet Earth.
Many will blame GenZ for this disturbing passivity. And even the youngsters admit that the music they hear on TikTok and Instagram is mostly chosen by algorithm, not their own active engagement. But social media platforms are driving these behavior patterns—and are the real root cause of our threatened culture.
These platforms aim to control behavior with their algorithms. They encourage passivity. This is all by design.
And if an artist’s success on social media fails to generate streaming plays, this is also part of the grand plan. Social media apps are now run as isolated bunkers, and the owners do everything possible to prevent users from leaving—so crossover from one platform to another is discouraged at every turn.
In confirmation of this, MIDIA reports that 55% young social media users want to have deeper engagement with new music. They just don’t know how.
In a sane universe, the major record labels would fight against this anonymity and ambivalence. But, instead, they have embraced TikTok—assuming that it will create the next generation of superstar artists.
I fretted about that in a blistering 2022 article entitled “Record Labels Dig Their Own Grave. And the Shovel is Called TikTok.” I wonder if they have figured that out yet.
I fear they might still be digging.
Of course, the big labels have a backup plan—namely the purchase of old song catalogs. Maybe that makes perfect sense to them. After all, if there are no more new superstars, they simply invest in the old ones.
But that’s not a wise longterm strategy. Businesses can’t live in the past. Eventually they need to create new value, not just live off residuals from yesteryear.
There’s one more hope for the music business, namely AI. I note that the same moment that MIDIA’s research report got released, this news story hit the wires.
This is the sad, but perhaps logical, endpoint of the anonymity problem. If fans don’t know anything about their favorite artists, does it matter if they even exist?
We already have the precedent of KPop Demon Hunters, which is making lots of money for the corporate owners of a non-existent band from an animated movie. So maybe 2025 will be remembered as the year when humans started to disappear from the music scene.
But I have a hunch that those endangered humans will fight back. They tend to do that, those pesky flesh-and-blood folk. And if the record labels won’t help them, they will find other allies.
Maybe their biggest supporters will be those fans who genuinely love music. I’m one of that cadre, and I know that many of you are too. We’re not quite ready to abandon music to bots and algorithms and corporate slop-masters.
In fact, we’re disgusted by the whole prospect. For us, music is a quasi-sacred ritual for humans, not one more vertical for the tech bros.
How many of us are there? More than they think.
How much influence do we have? We may soon find out.
As Terence McKenna pointed out at least 30 years ago, the Universe generates complexity in order to have increasing novelty. Moreover, human beings are a necessary and perhaps the primary component of this process. So while I agree with Ted's observations on the degrading of artist appreciation on the part of the "listener," this is a temporary situation.
Listeners are now consumers, artists are now content creators, and real music now floats in a sea of shit. We know this. But there's a backlash, and it's slowly building momentum.
As an artist myself, I would like for the situation to change...while I'm young...ahem...but that's not the point.
Creativity is supposed to be our coin of the realm. It may actually be the only currency that survives the Great Reset! I therefore prevail upon all artists to expand their creativity, deepen their metaphysics, eat healthy and breathe. Our calling is the reason we're here, so let's steer the ship toward the eschaton and tack as needed.
As a musician in a band who literally is our social media guy, this is true. You need authenticity to break through the shitty attention spans. Assuming you have that, I think the key is doing it the old fashioned way. Getting in front of people, in person, playing shows. The more genuine form of social media growth - real people who connected to your music - can follow if you can stick to that.