New Music Plays Second Fiddle to Catalog Titles

The rise of music streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music has not only changed the way people are listening to music, but also what they're listening to. Thanks to the constant availability of practically any song ever written, catalog music - per definition any song that's older than 18 months and outside the top 100 on the Billboard 200 charts - does play a larger role than ever in today’s music landscape.

According to Luminate's latest Year-End Music Report, published in collaboration with Billboard, catalog music accounted for 72.6 percent of total album equivalent music consumption in the United States last year. That includes album sales, digital track sales and streams which are converted into album equivalents. As the following chart shows, the latest figure marks the continuation of a trend that has seen the share of current music decline from 37 percent in 2019 to just 27 percent last year.

The fact that people can and will listen to old music whenever they want has also created a market for the back catalogs and master recordings of past greats, which are changing hands for hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases.