17 years ago, owl city released fireflies.
Music:
Wall Street has spent $20.4 billion buying your favorite old songs since 2019. BlackRock, Blackstone, Apollo, KKR. They own the music you grew up on, and Spotify is built to keep playing it.
Sony paid over $1 billion for Queen's song collection in 2024. Biggest single-artist deal ever. Warner Music and Bain Capital (a major investment firm) put up $1.2 billion in mid-2025 to buy more old song rights. Concord packaged 1.3 million song rights (Beatles, Beyonce, Pink Floyd, Rihanna) into investment products, like bonds, and raised $1.76 billion. Pophouse raised $1.3 billion for the rights to KISS, Cyndi Lauper, and Avicii.
When you spend that kind of money on old songs, you need returns. Spotify delivers.
Your $12.99 monthly subscription goes into one big pot with everyone else's. That pot gets split based on which songs got the most plays. A play of "Bohemian Rhapsody" pays the same rate as a play from someone who dropped their first song yesterday. The top 1% of artists collect over 90% of all plays. The money flows to whoever owns the biggest song collections. That's Wall Street now.
The system that picks what plays next makes this worse. Spotify retooled it in 2024 and 2025 to favor songs you already know over songs you haven't heard. Autoplay, AI DJ, and Radio loop you back to familiar tracks instead of showing you new artists. Familiar music keeps people on the app longer, which means more ad money and fewer cancellations. New music is a financial risk the system won't take.
In April 2024, Spotify stopped paying royalties on any song with fewer than 1,000 plays in a year. That wiped out about 175 million songs, roughly 87% of everything on the platform. Disc Makers CEO Tony van Veen estimated the lost royalties at $47 million for 2024. That money got rerouted to the biggest hits, owned by major labels and the investment firms behind them.
An AI company called Suno now cranks out 7 million songs every day, enough to recreate Spotify's entire library every two weeks. Deezer, another streaming service, says 28-39% of daily uploads are now AI-generated. A new human artist isn't just competing with Taylor Swift. They're buried under millions of machine-made tracks.
In 2014, older music (anything over 18 months old) accounted for 35.8% of what Americans listened to. By 2024, it hit 73.3%, per Luminate, the firm that tracks this stuff. Fleetwood Mac didn't suddenly get better. Investment firms bought the catalog, the algorithm feeds you what's familiar, the platform stopped paying small artists, and AI is flooding the pipe. Every piece of this machine has a financial reason to play you something old.
I've written about this before, but it's remarkable how much older music is strangling new music.
And the same is true in books, movies, video games. Older media is taking up a bigger and bigger share of the market every year.
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