Music in the Age of Its Permanence and Proliferation

What happens when a musician has to compete with every great song ever recorded?

The Dead Sea is a salty body of water bordering Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank. Its name comes from the fact that this middle-eastern sea, due to its high salinity, is inhospitable to almost all life. The water achieved this high salinity because it is an endorheic basin, meaning that it has no outflow to other external bodies of water.

The Jordan River, rich with life, flows into the Dead Sea and deposits its sediments. However, with no outlet — no drain, so to speak — the dead sea has turned into a salty, hostile pool that boasts almost no flora or fauna.

Is music marketplace becoming a Dead Sea — an endorheic basin — inhospitable to new life?

For the sake of our analogy, let us imagine that Spotify’s 70 million available tracks form a body of water like the Dead Sea. The roughly 60,000 new tracks submitted to Spotify every day are like the Jordan River, feeding into the Spotify Sea of music.

The Dead Sea earned its name from the fact the body of water hosts almost no life in its 233.6 sq miles. The sea’s suffocating environment — like the music marketplace—is due to it’s lack of outflow. Photo by Konstantin Tretyak on Unsplash

Because the cost of digital storage has decreased exponentially over time (a phenomenon known as Kryder’s Law), the cost of storing these digital music files in perpetuity is phenomenally cheap and we can assume will continue to approach zero (see also Free: The Future of Radical Price by Chris Anderson). This means that there is practically no additional cost to provide a music file to another listener; in Economics 101 terms, there is no marginal cost associated with music streaming for the musician.

If there is no cost to remain in the music marketplace (the Spotify Sea), the artist — and more specifically their recordings — will remain in the marketplace indefinitely; there is no drainage of the Spotify Sea.

The question that follows is: “Will the music marketplace suffer the same fate as the Dead Sea, killing off any new life that finds its way into its salty depths?”

Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World” (1967) is a timeless song. Thanks to the digitization of music, anyone can listen this song at any time and at any place on earth. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Good music is sometimes described as “timeless.” This seems to suggest that some music has the ability to be as relatable and enjoyable 10, 20, or…