Why music has become one of our closest companions during the pandemic
Estelle Liu | Assistant Illustration Editor
The pandemic offered an opportunity to explore new genres and artists.
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In March 2020, the world seemed to stop for some. Stores shuttered, schools let out and the streets were empty as COVID-19 spread across the world. Though this meant many people spent a lot more time inside, it also created more time to explore and indulge in creative interests, like music.
In the first few weeks of the pandemic, music streams dipped for the first time in years. But once they recovered, they soared. There was a 7.4% revenue growth in the global recorded music market in 2020, according to International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s 2021 Global Music Report. It also showed $21.6 billion in global music revenue — the highest revenue recorded to date.
This growth wasn’t immediate, though. According to Alpha Data, via Rolling Stone Magazine, music streams in the U.S. dipped 8% when the pandemic started in March, before finally climbing back up in May. This initial dip was attributed to retail stores closing, people no longer listening to music on their commutes to school and work, as well as delays with recording and performances on the side of artists.
But once people began listening to music again, the streams shot upward, which the IFPI report said “more than compensated for declines in revenue across other formats.”
In Syracuse University’s Bandier Program, students study music trends and statistics on the business and label side, but during the pandemic, some of these students reported music becoming more emotionally important to them. The quarantine was a prolonged period of fear and unpredictability for many, and for Payton Dunn, a Bandier sophomore and co-host of WERW radio show Six Figures Under, music was a channel to express and indulge in emotion.
“My listening doubled over the year,” Dunn said. “I was listening to the most depressing music I’ve ever listened to, but as things have opened up again, I was listening to even more upbeat music than I was before.”
Dunn curated his music to match the situation he found himself in, which, in unprecedented times, often meant looking for new music to match the changing culture and environment of a quarantined America.
That meant exploring more experimental genres like hyperpop, an exaggerated and electronic music that pulls from many tropes of pop music while sounding more progressive and avant-garde than pop itself. Dunn said he started indulging in this newer genre during the pandemic.
“It’s also become cool to listen to just super experimental genres of music, like way out there,” Dunn said. “Because the more you listen to the music the more you seek out different flavors and get interested in what it is.”
Shannon Kirkpatrick | Presentation Director
Communities inevitably form niche genres like hyperpop. Because similarly narrow genres grew so much in popularity during the pandemic, Dunn said, those communities formed virtually on servers like Discord, where people can join specific chat rooms and share in discourse without any physical barriers.
Dunn said hyperpop overnight sensation Bladee was one of his favorite artists, who then rose in popularity through constant interaction and communication on sites like Discord.
The IFPI report showed a 10.1% drop in revenue from performance rights — a category which includes live performances — the first negative statistic in that area after over a decade of growth. Because most concerts and live shows were canceled, creating virtual spaces where listeners could still engage with music and people with similar musical taste became all the more important.
Bandier junior Jack Barsh said that in a time when he was listening to so much more music, he needed to explore new avenues of finding music, which meant working with his friends to share and curate new playlists on Spotify.
“I asked some friends to help me discover other artists that might be more indie, so I now have a bunch of playlists that people made for me in a different genre than I normally would listen to,” Barsh said.
The junior added he also started listening to pop singers like Charli XCX, Summer Walker and Kehlani — many of whom have become some of his favorite artists that he still comes back to — through recommendations by his friends.
If not for this newfound enthusiasm for exploring new music, Barsh said he may not have ended up finding these artists.
“It’s not like I don’t give them the chance, it’s just that I like to stick to what I know I enjoy, so (the pandemic) kind of just pushed me to do something like this,” Barsh said.
Barsh said that when he wasn’t streaming the playlists curated by his friends, he was still taking in other forms of music media like NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts and Genius’s “Verified” lyric explainer videos, both of which garner more streams for artists in the same way as TikTok by promoting the song across platforms.
TikTok — which had 100 million U.S. users by August 2020 — played a major role in the discovery of new music over the course of the pandemic. Bandier Program professor Ulf Oesterle teaches multiple classes on music business and emerging technologies, but he’s also extremely prevalent on TikTok as a creator, with some videos that receive millions of views.
Shannon Kirkpatrick | Presentation Director
Oesterle said TikTok has been huge in changing the way people discover new artists, and that during the pandemic, TikTok’s tightly tailored algorithm was able to replace other settings like clubs and parties where new music was typically brought into the mainstream.
During the months at the start of the pandemic when streaming slowed down, Oesterle said people turned first to TV and video streaming apps rather than to music, but TikTok is one place where video actually supplemented music streams.
“TikTok has replaced a lot of environments,” Oesterle said. “Their algorithm really sets it up to serve you content that they know you’re going to like based off the millions of people that are on watching the same types of content.”
Even after 2020’s initially jarring dip in streams, growth in physical and digital recorded music revenue could still climb to the highest level recorded, illustrating that music was one thing that kept many people stable even though an unpredictable year.
“Whether it’s returning to that old song that always makes you feel good … or finding something new that makes you feel like you can relate to the content of that song, music has been the constant companion for a lot of people,” Oesterle said.
Published on September 6, 2021 at 11:43 pm
Contact Sydney: sypollac@syr.edu
