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Ongoing History of New Music
The 100 Greatest Rock Moments of the Millennium So Far - Part 10: (10-1)
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Alan Cross
Hey, it's Alan and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music, early and ad free on Amazon Music included with Prime. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You might say all kinds of stuff when things go wrong, but these are the words you really need to remember. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. They've got options to fit your unique insurance needs, meaning you can talk to your agent to choose the coverage you need, have coverage options to protect the things you value most, file a claim right on the State Farm mobile app, and even reach a real person when you need to talk to someone. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there Hear that? Spring is here and the Home Depot has great prices on grills to make this season yours. So if you're working on improving your hosting skills, you're going to want the next grill 4 burner gas grill for $229 and of course, pair it with the next grill 8 piece grill tool set. Now get outside and show off those new skill. Shop a wide selection of grills under $300 at the home Depot. People who study such things say that the human brain, this folded lump of fat that's between our ears, has a pretty good hard drive. The average adult brain has a capacity of about 2.5 petabytes. Put another way, that's 2.5 million gigs, which is a lot. We're talking personal memories, facts, academic education, learned behaviors, and muscle memory. There are also special places where things like musical memories and lyrics are stored. Some memories remain solid, barring some kind of injury or illness. But because we're always experiencing new things, we forget other stuff as new experiences crowd out the old. As a result, things fade. Significant details about something can start to fade away within days or even hours or minutes, depending on circumstances surrounding that memory. Some will become corrupted, which is why eyewitness accounts are often considered unreliable in court. And it's not like we can download a backup of our memories. At least not yet. This is why it's a good idea to do a little maintenance on the hard drives in our heads. And that can be as simple as doing a refresh. How? By stopping for a little history, A quick study in where we've been, what we've done, and what's happened to us. Think of it as pressing F4 on a keyboard a bunch of times. John Lennon said, Life is what happens when you're making other plans. And the more time goes by, the more plans we might have made. And inevitably we Forget some of life. And that's why if we want to know why things are the way they are and where things may go in the future, we gotta stop and hit F4 every once in a while. This is such a program. It's part 10 of the 100 Greatest Rock Moments of the millennium so far. How many of these things do you remember and have you even thought of them in this way? Let's find out with moments 10 through number one. This is the ongoing History of New Music podcast with Alan Cross. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross. Ranking things in order of importance or influence or quality or anything else like that is hard because doing something like this is loaded with subjectivity. There's plenty of room for argument and dissent. Anyone who makes up, say, a top 100 list like this one is just looking for trouble, right? Yet here we are, the tenth and final chapter in a series seeking to rank the most important, most influential, most impactful moments, events, developments and people in rock in the 21st century so far. If you've been following along since the beginning, you may have disagreed with some of the things that have been presented and, and in the order in which they appeared on this list, which is completely fine because that's part of the fun. But now it's time for the top 10. What are you going to make of these judgments? Again? This is my list. These are my rankings, these are my opinions. These are the 10 most important things to happen to music in the first 25 years of the millennium, according to me, just saying, do with this information what you will. At number 10, I have the death of the 12 year pop and rock cycle. This is a dance that extends back to the early 1950s. Basically, it says that when rock is on the ascendant in terms of popularity and influence, pop is on the descendant and vice versa. If we take rock's birth date sometime in, let's say 1951, and there are reasons for that, trust me. It gets bigger until 1957, until there's a collapse in public and corporate interest in rock and roll. Rock then goes into a decline while pop music surges. That cycle then reverses itself in 1964 with the arrival of the Beatles in America and sustains through to about 1970 when pop again reverses its course and takes over for the next five or six years. This plays out again and again. Rock comes back with punk in 1976 and begins to fade with a new generation of pop stars in 1982 and 1983. Another rock comeback happens in 1990 and continues with alternative and grunge through about 1996. Then pop comes back and rock is declared dead. But spoiler alert, it's not. And it roars back in 2000 and 2001. Rock remains dominant until about 2008 before falling off a cliff, as again, public sentiment embraces pop. This should have meant a rock revival somewhere after 2014, but it didn't happen even when Donald Trump was elected for the first time in 2016. And remember, regressive reactionary Republic administrations tend to wake rock from its slumber. Well, it didn't happen. Instead, contemporary music went flying off in all directions all at once. Why? Well, streaming and the decline in influence of the traditional gatekeepers radio, record stores, record labels, music magazines, and cable music video channels. Radio is still a factor in the world today, but it has to compete with the on demand convenience of streaming. Record stores certainly aren't what they used to be. Instead of developing artists over years, record labels are chasing streams in social media. So many music magazines have disappeared. And cable music video channels. Do they even exist anymore? Certainly not in the old school way. Streaming has made it possible for all of us to be our own music directors. We can now choose everything about our music consumption. And there were more genres than ever, which means that there's no more consensus, no more universality about what we should all be listening to. The monoculture in music that we had before the Internet is gone. All the consumer behavior that went into creating and sustaining the 12 year pop and rock cycle have pretty much disappeared. Therefore, it's impossible to predict where popular music is going, at least in the ways that we used to. Now, admittedly, that was an inexact science, but the cycle held for more than 50 years now. Good luck figuring out the future. This was one of the bands that put new life into rock with the last great turn of the cycle in the early 2000s. It's the Strokes. I will do my best. The strokes from 2001, the last time we saw an old school upswing with rock in the 12 year rock and pop cycle, a cycle that I think has been irreparably broken by our adoption of streaming for number nine on this list of the most important things about music and rock in the millennium. I've got file sharing and music piracy. This is a big subject, but I think we can summarize things like this. Piracy has always been a problem in the music industry, an issue that goes back centuries. I look at the history of this with my podcast Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. There's an episode called the Music Pirates that talks all about this. Modern music piracy began in the early 1990s, and by the time we reach January 1, 2000, it's starting to really get out of control. Music consumers who were fed up with high CD prices and the phasing out of the CD single, and the sentiment that more and more albums contained just one or two good songs, basically declared that they were as mad as hell and they weren't going to take it anymore. So music consumers and music fans took it out on record labels and artists. Rip us off, huh? Well, we're going to rip you off in return. When the industry and artists tried to sue fans for stealing music, they only made the problem worse. In 2000, about 2.5 billion CDs were sold around the planet. The industry was drowning in money. But piracy and file sharing came along. Sales crashed by more than 75% over the next 10 years. The effect on the industry was insane. Massive revenue declines, job losses. Artists were dropped from rosters. Costs were slashed. The labels relationships with their retail partners. Record stores were destroyed. The record labels, paralyzed by confusion, unable to understand this technology and hampered by antitrust laws, were backed into a corner. Steve Jobs came to the rescue with itunes. Streaming platforms soon appeared further eating into sales. Revenues dropped every year from 2001 to 2014. That's about 15 years of decline. It wasn't until 2015, when the industry began to figure out streaming, that things began to improve. In 2016, as streaming crept deeper and deeper into the mainstream, it overTook physical sales, CDs and vinyl in terms of revenue. But we'll get to that. For now, though, let's just concentrate on how music piracy and file sharing nearly destroyed the recorded music industry in the 2000s and then forced it to completely reinvent itself for the digital era. Meanwhile, artists were also affected. Heritage acts like the Doors and the Eagles and the Beastie Boys, who were once accustomed to having their albums sell millions of copies each year as people collected music for their libraries, saw those royalties shrink drastically. Older acts had to come out of retirement to play live again. Meanwhile, newer acts had to adapt to the fact that they could no longer make money by selling pieces of plastic. Now, here's a fun who was the most pirated rock artist of the millennium? Metallica was hit hard. So was Green Day, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Coldplay. But no one, no one had their music pirated more apparently than then. Linkin Park. Especially material from their Hybrid Theory album. Linkin park, the most pirated rock act of the 2000s. If there's a silver lining to this, piracy forced Linkin park to become one of the most savvy bands in the world. When it came to online presence, they're pretty good at dealing with piracy and their fans. Moving to item eight, it's gotta be the death of David Bowie on January 16, 2016. Bowie had been battling various health problems, including a heart attack, for about a dozen years. But then in mid-2014, he was diagnosed very quietly, very secretly, with liver cancer, and the prognosis was bad. Knowing that his time was limited, Bowie threw himself into his work, recording new music and developing a stage musical called Lazarus. His final public appearance was on December 7, 2015, when the musical had its opening night. Just a little over a month later, he was gone. Bowie's death marked the end of an era. Few people have been as influential as he'd been over the course of a career that extended about 50 years. That influence included music, fashion and art. So much of what he did and what he accomplished remains absolutely timeless. More than one pundit has pointed out that after Bowie died, so much of the world seemed to go to hell. My favorite meme is something that originated with actor Simon Peggy. If you're sad today, he's talking about Bowie's death. If you're sad today, just remember the world is over 4 billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the same time as David Bowie. David Bowie's last ever performance came on May 19, 2007. He walked on stage ahead of a Ricky Gervais show at Madison Square Garden and introduced Ricky with a song he made up for Ricky's TV series, Extruds. Just wish he'd die so depressed of being useless Fatty blows his face off he blows his bloated face off but the TW probably miss see his partner's answer. Bowie's last proper performance was a fundraiser in New York on November 8, 2006. His last headlining set was at Germany's hurricane festival on June 25, 2004. And his last album, Black Star, came out on Friday, January 14, 2016, two days before he died. It's an excellent record that also has many references to mortality and his impending death. I could go on, but I think we'll be thinking about Bowie and playing his music and mourning his death for some time yet. That's why I've got that terrible Monday morning when we found out that Bowie had died. As number eight on this list for number seven, we have to talk about a resurrection. And that's the new interest in vinyl. If we go back to the late 80s and early 90s, all predictions said that vinyl was dying. Nothing could save it. CDs were the future, and for the most part, the public agreed. The only people that really cared were old school record collectors and DJs who for a time continued to spin records on their Technics SL1002 hundreds. I remember being on the radio in 1999 and saying that that particular Christmas could be the last time we would be able to buy a new turntable. They would soon be phased out and for the next eight or nine years it really did look like vinyl was dead. It wasn't though. But vinyl was definitely on life support. CDs, digital downloads and music piracy were killing it. But around 2006 and 2007, indie bands started being contrarian and maybe ironic by embracing vinyl. Audiophiles contributed too, refusing to go digital. A group of independent record store owners in Baltimore started meeting in 2007. They were very depressed about how things were going and the main question was how do we keep people coming to our stores to buy records when everything is going digital? Then someone mentioned Free Comic Book Day. This was an initiative launched by some comic book stores as a way to attract people and had become very, very successful. Could indie record stores do something similar? Thus was born Record Store Day, an annual celebration of vinyl and the stores that sell it. It's held on the third Saturday in April. The first Record Store Day was on April 19, 2008, and about 200 stores participated. And the reaction was encouraging. In fact, it was so encouraging that other retailers like Best Buy, Target, Walmart and Urban Outfitters started stocking vinyl as a hedge against declining CD sales caused by music piracy. From then on, vinyl sales saw double digit growth year after year after year. Record Store Day is now supported by about 1500 stores around the world and artists ranging from the Foo Fighters to Jack white to Paul McCartney to Billie Eilish to Taylor Swift. A Black Friday edition was introduced. And during the Pandemic, there were multiple Record Store Days to help keep indie record stores alive. In 2020, some countries began reporting that vinyl had outsold CDs in terms of both revenue and units out the door, including the US and the UK. And in 2024, more vinyl LPs were sold in Canada than CDs for the first time in about 35 years. Bottom line, an idea based on comic books floated at a meeting of indie record store owners. Not only saved their businesses, but but also brought vinyl back from the dead. Let's Go back to that first Record Store Day. Organizers needed a big artist on board to help give the events legitimacy. The biggest endorsement happened at a San Francisco record store called Rasputin Music when Metallica showed up for an autograph session. Again, the date was April 19, 2008, and people waited in line for up to three days to meet them. Record stores are disappearing. We want them to stay. Bay Area rock legends Metallica have long been outspoken about the role of digital downloads in the music business, going back to the days of Napster and illegal file sharing. Now they're headlining for independent retailers. It was a place to meet other like minded individuals. You know, you'd see someone in the heavy metal section that you never saw before and I would go up to them and say, hey man, you're into metal. I am too. The independent stores that hold this event spin it this way. These aren't just CD racks. These goes out of style. But this is what happens when the digital world collides with old school analog values. You can call it old school or we're dinosaurs or whatever, but I grew up going to a record store, hanging with my friends, just going through stuff, you know, we weren't texting each other. What was the new thing in that? Metallica and St. Anger. They are one of the biggest supporters of not just Record Store Day, but the entire vinyl resurrection that we've seen since 2008. That's number seven on our list of the 100 biggest things in rock of the 21st century. Number six is coming up. This episode is brought to you by 20th Century Studios. The Amateur when his wife is murdered, Charlie Heller, the CIA's most brilliant computer analyst must trek across the globe and use his only weapon, his intelligence, to hunt down her killers and enact revenge. Starring Academy Award winner Rami Malek. An Academy award winning award nominee, Laurence Fishburne. The amateur rated PG 13. Only in theaters April 11th. If fashion is your thing, eBay is it. EBay's where I find all my favorites. From handbags to iconic streetwear. All authenticated for real this time. A little supreme, some Gucci. I even have that vintage Prada on my watch list. That's why eBay's my go to for all my go tos. Yeah, ebay. The place for new pre loved vintage and rare fashion. EBay, things people love. This is the 10th and final episode in a series documenting the 100 greatest moments, events, people, contributions and happenings in Rock since January 1, 2000. And we have reached number six on the list. By the time The Napster crisis was in full effect in 2000. The record labels were panicking. A few years earlier, they thought that all this talk of mp3s and digital music was a fad. Once people figure out how inferior digital files are to physical CDs, they'll come running back. That was their thinking. But by 2000, they realized that they'd been wrong. Everyone was engaged in music piracy and something had to be done. But what? How? Most everyone at the labels were way, way behind. They had no idea how this new technology worked. Most employees, including executives, didn't even have computers on their desks, which is not an exaggeration. So how best to tackle this unprecedented crisis? Well, let's start selling digital files ourselves. We'll have online stores that we own. Well, couple of problems with that. First, the record labels had to think about their retail partners, the thousands of stores that for decades had sold their product. If they went digital in a big way, they'd be blowing up a symbiotic relationship that extended back more than a hundred years. Second, most music consumers will not shop at a store that just contains, let's say, Universal releases or Sony releases or Warner releases. They don't want to guess what label has which artist. Any store has to stock everything. It's got to be a one stop shop. Third, the labels just couldn't get together and build their own online music store. Antitrust laws would kill any such attempt. The labels were already under scrutiny for a price fixing scheme involving CDs, which is a whole other story. So the idea of the labels also controlling digital sales was a non starter. The best the majors could do is create two online stores. There was Press Play, which was a joint venture between Universal and Sony, and musicnet, which handled bmg, EMI and Warner. And both were disasters. Each service was difficult to use. They came with all kinds of restrictions and were loaded with complicated digital rights management safeguards to prevent any music files you bought from being shared. The public hated both storefronts. Press play lasted about two years before it was shuttered in March 2003. Musicnet hung on a little bit longer before it was sold off for parts. In 2005, the savior of the recorded music industry turned out to be Steve Jobs. He visited all the labels and basically told them, look, you don't know what you're doing, and even if you did, you'd do it wrong. I have this new thing called iTunes. It's a media player that works better than anything out there. And you've heard of our ipod? Yes, it's Made for digital music. A thousand songs in your pocket. License me songs for an itunes music store. So ipod users and whoever else can legally buy digital music, all songs should sell for 99 cents. We'll take 30% for our troubles and you can have the other 70%. Take it or leave it. Now, without going into a book length description of what happened next, the five major record labels, knowing that they were completely out of their depth and terrified that their business was being gutted, agreed in 2002 to let Steve sell their digital music. The itunes music store was introduced in April 2003. It was Mac only at first, but it opened up to windows users that October and that changed everything. The ipod became the fastest selling consumer electronic product to that point. People started buying clean, uncorrupted, official digital tracks to fill their ipods. And although privacy was still a problem for years, this was the first proper shot at solving the situation. It also turned Apple into a technological powerhouse. On January 1, 2001, about 10 days before the itunes music player was revealed, Apple's stock price was just 39 cents. A year later, it was still around 39 cents. In 2003, when the iTunes music store went online, it was 32 cents. But then a year later it was 1 16. And then 2005, 254. It was 297 at the end of 2006 and 597 a year later. And by this time, the itunes, the ipod and the itunes music store had saved the music industry not only from music piracy in itself, it also saved apple. At one point, Apple controlled 70% of all digital music sales worldwide. And today Apple has a market cap of about $3.5 billion trillion dollars. My first ipod was a silver mini that I bought in the fall of 2004. And I'm not sure, but I think the first song I bought to put on this thing was this one, YouTube from November 2004 and from the era when itunes, the ipod and the itunes music store were dragging the recorded music industry kicking and screaming into the digital age. Number six on my list of the 100 most important moments in rock so far this century at number five. I have to say it was the impact of social media on music. Again, this could be a book length explanation, so I'm going to try and summarize things best I can. Social media and music really began to come together with the debut of MySpace, something that we talked about on episode one of this series. Then there was the massive impact of YouTube. That was the topic on episode 8. Today we have X threads, Bluesky, TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts. Each of those have made it easier for songs to go viral. Even a quick 20 second clip can be enough to turn an old song, a forgotten song or an obscure song into a global hit within hours. This is because algorithms detect trending sounds and push them out everywhere. If you're an artist of any level, social media makes it possible to get to the feeds of people around the world without the need for record labels or any kind of traditional marketing and promotion. Social media has become a tool for all musicians when it comes to building fan bases without any record label meddling. We also need to consider the role of SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or even the big streamers like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and all the rest of them. Artists can have direct connections to their fans. And it's not just through songs either. Social media involves dance trends, memes, rollouts, trailers, teasers, collaborations and all manner of interactive campaigns. And thanks to the live streaming abilities of Instagram Live and TikTok Live and Twitch and all the others, artists can set up appointment viewing for performances, interviews and other highly personal connections with their fan base. The result has been new levels of fan engagement, the building of communities around artists, fan driven content, and untold levels of interactivity. On the downside, social media has encouraged the rise of playlists over listening to albums. Social media is all about short attention span consumption of content. This has led to shorter songs and greater emphasis on hooks. There's even a name for snippet culture. Labels often demand a constant stream of social media posts from their artists with pressure to regularly go viral, something that leads to quick burnout. So many artists are on social media that competition for attention is intense. That can lead to gimmicks, trends, outrage, memes and other things that become prioritized over genuine artistic expression. And because no one knows how the algorithms work, and because they're always being tweaked, an artist never knows if something that works today is actually going to work tomorrow, because the rules will have changed. Meanwhile, social media has taken over from traditional talent scouting. The armies of A and R, people who used to spend hours in smoky clubs going through demo tapes and following up on tips have been augmented and in some cases, let's face it, replaced by armies of interns on computers going through all the social media platforms. For artists that have popped up in some way, without social media, we wouldn't have Justin Bieber or Selena Gomez, Shawn Mendes, Halsey Megan, Thee, Stallion, Calvin Harris, five Seconds of Summer and many others. They all came up the social media route. Here, for example, is a Korean American bedroom pop singer who goes by the name boy with UK. In 2021, he had a song blow up around the world thanks to TikTok. Boy with Huke, who went viral with TikTok and then landed a major label record deal. It's nice, but the downside of the social media and music relationship is that we've seen an uptick in one hit wonders and artists find it very difficult to follow up on that one big hit song. We've also seen a flattening of music. Social media seems to favor a certain style. When a trend is identified, everybody chases it and we end up with long periods of time where everything seems to sound the same. The effect of social media on music has really only begun, and this is something that's going to play out over the next years and decades to come. Number four on this list of the most important things in rock this century will make almost no sense to anyone who exists outside of Canada, but since this is a Canadian program and podcast, there's no way I could ignore it. And this is Gord Downie's cancer diagnosis and the final tour of the tragically Hip. On May 24, 2016, a press conference was held. Gord Downey, the Hip's beloved singer, had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, a very aggressive form of brain cancer. After he had a seizure. He'd already been undergoing radical treatment. But this type of cancer is impossible to eradicate. It is incurable. The country was shocked. The Hip had essentially become Canada's house band. Despite all the challenges, though, the Hip announced one final Cross Canada Tour, starting on July 22 in Victoria and ending with the hometown show in Kingston on August 20th. This was the most emotional musical tour Canada has ever seen, and the final show was officially watched by 11 million people in a country with about 35 million people. But you know what? I think that number has to be larger because that 11 million doesn't take into account the number of mass listening and watching parties across the country and around the world. I think the true number has got to be at least twice that. Even the Prime Minister came out to the last show. In what other country would you see that happen? After that gig, Goard plowed himself into work, writing and recording new music and working hard on Canadian reconciliation efforts with its indigenous people. And when he died on October 17, 2017, the whole country was thrown into mourning. The best social media post I saw that day was Canada Closed Death in the Family let's pick things up with the Hip's last song from the final concert and disappointing News Can Be Dead, the End of the Tragically Hip and the Death of Gord Downie, a very Canadian number four on the list of the 100 most important moments in rock so far this century. 97 down, just three to go. What might they be? They're all coming up next. At Patron, we craft our tequila using high quality natural ingredients without additives. No sweeteners, no extracts, no secrets. In fact, Patron's secret ingredient is that we have no secret ingredients. Just 100% additive free tequila. Made with 100% Weber Blue Agave water and thyme. Patron 100% additive free tequila. Visit patrontequila.com to learn more. The perfect way to enjoy Patron is responsibly Copyright 2025 imported by Patron Spirits Company Coral Gables, Florida Tequila 40% ABV Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Ebglis. 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Tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about eglis and visit ebglis.lilly.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979. Hi, I'm Donna Friesen from Global National. Life moves fast these days and we want to make it even easier for you to get the news you need. That's why you can now get Global National Every Day as a Podcast, the biggest stories of the day with analysis from award winning global news journalists. New episodes drop every day. So take this as your personal invitation to join us on the Global National Podcast. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts. We're down to the final three most important moments People, things, tech and events in music during the first 25 years of the 21st century. And fully describing the impact of each of these three next items would fill many books. But we don't have that kind of time here, so I apologize in advance for having to be succinct. And number three, it's gotta be Covid. There was a good two years when so much of life on planet Earth came to a halt. No concerts, no festivals, or any live music at all. Artists struggled financially, venues struggled to stay open. Many people associated with music were forced to leave the business because all their work dried up. For a time we had to make do with virtual concerts and very controlled livestream events, which in turn fed into something that we already talked about the rise of platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Zoom, Instagram Live, and TikTok. Speaking of TikTok, it exploded as a place to discover new music. There were more online chats, Ask Me Anything sessions and content that could only be accessed online. This of course, ties into what I said earlier with items 5 the impact of social media on music. Revenue came from crowdfunding, a reinforced push on selling merch, and platforms like Patreon locked at home, we turned to streaming music services more and more. Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube saw big spikes in users. Others went deep into vinyl, seeking to maintain some kind of physical contact with the music. Some new releases were put on hold. Some artists used the time to write and record new music, eventually resulting in an era of COVID music. Did you notice all the songs about isolation, alienation, lockdowns and resilience that came with and following Covid? Yeah. Related to that are the thousands of people who got into producing music at home during the lockdown. Relying on the gear available had the side effect of additional flattening of music. As everybody used the same programs with the same plugins. New hybrid models began to take hold, things that eventually blended some kind of virtual experience with a live one. The whole NFT thing was a direct result of new direct to fan models. And when the crisis lifted, there was good and bad news. The good news is that people ran out to see music in record numbers. The bad news is is that concert Ticket prices went up because of the post Covid inflation that affected every single segment of the world, including the music business. Bottom line, COVID 19 was unspeakably awful, but it did accelerate the music industry's transition into the digital realm. And the effects will be felt not only on the industry, but also on music fans. Here's a story Derek Whibley of some 41 told me. After the restrictions were lifted, the band wanted to tour Europe. But when they started planning things, they found out that there were no tour buses available. Many had sat idle for two years and weren't ready to be put back into service. The buses that were available were very expensive to rent because they were in such short supply, so only acts like Metallica could afford them. Which left some 41, an internationally successful multi platinum band rolling through Europe in just a rented van. Like the old days. Number three on this list of the 100 greatest, or in this case most devastating moments of the 21st century in music. So far, the COVID 19 pandemic number two was big. Very big. We started the millennium the way we finished the last one, buying pieces of plastic at record stores in huge numbers. But then this millennium, the Internet hit and suddenly sales started dropping, largely because of music piracy. We've talked about that a couple of times while going through this list. It was an awful time for the recorded music industry. It took everyone about 15 years to figure out how to adapt. And in 2016, it finally happened. Revenues started to go up because the industry embraced streaming. Today, 25 years into the new century, streaming provides at least 75% of all record label revenue. Spotify now has 625 million users every month and is a $125 billion company, more than the entire recorded music industry put together. And at Last count, about 202 million songs are available to stream for free, or something very close to it. This is information we've already covered as we've gone through this list. So let me focus on something else. That's the effects of the move from physical media to to digital media. That's my point here. First of all, streaming pays out much less than the sales of physical formats. Of course it does. It's an apples and oranges thing. Streaming payouts can be more or less equivalent to what an artist gets when their songs are played on the radio. Only this way, a stream of your songs could be heard around the world. But there's a downside to this. The revenue from physical sales has all but disappeared. For most artists, to compensate, they've had to find new ways to make money, merch, touring, licensing, things that we've covered elsewhere on this list. We now have a thin layer of very successful artists on top, below whom are millions upon millions of struggling artists, thanks to the new economic realities created by streaming. Streaming has changed how music is composed. Because no one gets paid until a song runs for at least 30 seconds, the goal is has become to hold a listener's attention for all costs for that first half a minute. That means shorter intros, putting the chorus up front, and putting as many sugary hooks as possible into those first precious 30 seconds. And streaming has changed the way we consume music. Because streaming music is so easy and cheap, we're now using it to soundtrack everything we do. And in many cases, this means having music on in the background just to fill the silence. Now, we've done this for a long time, but it's different now. We've created a situation where a lot of us are hearing music but not listening. It's become organized noise that goes in one ear and out the other. Oh, pleasant noise, to be sure, but it's not like the old days when a CD would go into a machine and you'd pay close attention to what was coming out of the speakers as you went over the artwork and liner notes and everything else. This is known as lean back listing. The concept where we just click play and let the music come to us. That's the opposite of lean forward music, which means actively seeking out material to listen to. And then we absorb it and we study it and we appreciate it. And that too has affected how things like algorithms work, the kind of music composers are chasing, and our general attitude towards the endless supply of music out there. Again, whole books have been written on the topic of how much music has changed with streaming when it replaced physical music media. Let's go back to the issue of low payouts for the streaming platforms. If you only get paid for 30 seconds for a song, why bother writing a song that's any longer than 30 seconds? This is the contention of a fiercely anti Spotify British indie group called the Pocket Gods. They made their point over a series of albums where none of their songs were more than 40 seconds long. Again, why bother if any labor beyond that would be uncompensated? Get on your Spotify playlist. Who's I got it. We will. Get on your Spotify. That's it, 39 seconds from the Pocket Gods. The song is called who Do I have to Sleep with to get on this Spotify Playlist. And this Leads to the thing that I believe to be the most important thing that we've seen in rock. In fact, for all music so far this century, this finally is number one. And that is the wholesale devaluation of music. When the 2000s began, we were paying between 10 and $20 for a single CD. To acquire this piece of plastic, we had to work X number of hours at our jobs to earn enough money to travel through time and space to a record store. Because music was so expensive to acquire, we were very particular about how we spent our money. In other words, which artists deserved our financial investment. We then returned home and put the CD on the stereo, and we would listen to that CD over and over and over again until we knew all the songs and hopefully we liked more of them than we hated. If the balance went the wrong way, our financial investment in that artist with our hard earned cash, was considered to be a failure. Today, music flows like water. Just open up the streaming tap and here it comes. Like I said, 202 million songs at our disposal. With 100,000 ish new songs being uploaded every single day, the result is an oversupply of product that costs the consumer pretty much nothing. When that happens, the product is devalued in every conceivable way. You don't like this song? Fine. Hit the skip button. And a lot of people skip songs. According to some Spotify numbers I saw a while back, 25% of users will skip an unfamiliar new song in the first five seconds. Another 29% will skip it within 10 seconds, and a further 35% will be gone by the time the song is 30 seconds old. No investment plus no risk plus short attention span plus an interest in hearing versus listening. And the equation for the devaluation of music as both an art form and a commodity is pretty much complete. Oh, listen, we still may value music emotionally. Absolutely. And it's still very important when it comes to culture. We still love music and it's an essential part of our existence. But monetarily, we're not paying for it like we used to. It's a great bargain. But what about compensating the artists for their talent and labor and creativity? We often hear about music fans complaining that platforms like Spotify don't pay out very much. But many of these same people aren't paying for their music at all. They use Spotify's free tier. Those who do subscribe are paying less than $20 a month for all the songs in the universe. Ask them if they'd be willing to pay more if it meant that the artist would be paid better. What do you think? The answer is almost always no. Music has become a low cost, low margin commodity that requires a lot of money to make, but with little compensation in return. And there is little indication that this situation is going to change anytime soon. And it will continue to impact how music is made and by whom for a long, long time. So this, the devaluation of music, is my pick for the most important thing to happen to rock and all music so far this century. Now, to illustrate my point, I want to take you back to March 9, 1987. This was the day U2 issued the Joshua Tree, one of the biggest selling albums of the 20th century. Track one opens with a synthesizer arrangement fading in from the silence. It changes chords several times over the first 40 seconds. It's a very cinematic effect, conjuring visions of a sunrise or sunset over something like a vast desert. It's a scene setter for things to come. At 40 seconds, the edge starts playing a chiming arpeggio in a strange time signature as the synth chords continue to build. Then at 1 minute and 7 seconds, the time signature shifts and Adam and Larry come in with the rhythm section. The energy builds and builds for another 35 seconds before Bono finally starts singing. One minute and 46 seconds in. I wanna run, I want to hide I wanna tear down the walls hold me inside. That's one of U2's best tracks and one of the greatest songs of the 20th century. Now let me ask you, in today's world, where so much hinges on grabbing someone's attention in the first five seconds of a song, would such a track such as that have a hope in hell of being as successful today? I got my doubts. But discuss among yourselves the devaluation of music. The number one most important thing to happen to rock and all music so far this century. At least that's how I see it. Let's run through Chapter 10 of the Most important things to happen to rock in the 21st century so far. At number 10, the death of the 12 year rock and pop cycle thanks to the rise of on demand music technology. At number nine, it's the crisis created by filesharing and music piracy. At number eight, I have the death of David Bowie, something that many of us still can't get over. At number seven, it's the improbable return of vinyl as a favorite form of music format. Moving to number six, it's the introduction of iTunes, the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, in that order. Then we have the impact of social media on music. At number five, the final tragically hip tour and the death of Gord downey. At number four, COVID 19 and its still lingering effects on music at number three. Number two was the near wholesale replacement of physical music media by streaming vinyl, excepted of course. And at number one, and I'm sorry it's such a bummer, it's the devaluation of the monetary value the world places on music and how much people are willing to pay for it. Now, I'll say this again, this was my list, reflective of how I've seen rock in the 21st century evolve and develop. Your own top 100 list will probably be different based on your own experiences and observations, but I Hope these last 10 programs sparked thought and discussion about music. How we listen, how we support, and how we value those who provide it to us. I'd love to hear your reactions. Drop me a line@allenallencross ca if you can visit my website, ajournalofmusicalthings.com, discuss, argue, debate, but for God's sake, pay attention to what's happening in music. We can meet up at all the social media platforms. If you missed any chapter in this series, we have all available as free podcasts. And one last thing, don't forget about my other podcast, Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry, which discusses the many intersections of true crime and music. Technical production for all this is by Rob Johnston. We'll talk to you next time. I'm Alan Cross. Something terrible has been happening to all the people I've slept with. New on W Network. It's me. I'm killing people. Breakups. They died in the order you slept with them to die for. Here are life is in danger. What? What? Jesus. I will solve this. Starring Academy Award nominee Stephanie Shue. Dating is already impossible and now people are dying. It's like, can you. I cannot. Laid. All new Mondays only on W Stream on Stack tv.