Born In The Wrong Generation

or, nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

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If you watched the World Cup, you might have noticed that the England teams’ victory lap at the end of games was accompanied by a rendition of Oasis’ Wonderwall. Released in 1995, the song was a hit before most of the England team were born. It is, at least, more contemporary than Sweet Caroline, the song of the last major tournament England played in: the Neil Diamond classic came out in 1969, before even I was born.

In 2025 there’s demand for 15 million Oasis tickets in the UK, even though the data suggests they don’t have that many fans (since 2000, they’ve notched up 12 million album sales/equivalents). ABBA sell a million tickets to a show where avatars sing songs popularised in the 70’s and 80’s. The new franchise for film studios is the ageing or dead musician from the 20^th century, be it Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan or Whitney Houston. From Manchester’s Warehouse Project to London’s Drumsheds, dance music brands popularised in the eighties and nineties are revived with pension-age DJ’s at the top of the bill. As I wrote in a piece called The Golden Age, we have the weird spectacle of “classical rave” as a British phenomenon, where picnickers dressed in black tie sip champagne while string ensembles play Big Fun and Pacific State.

Flag by Corbin Shaw

What drives this thirst for old music? Why don’t younger generations champion the music of their peers? In 1990 football fans sang New Order’s World In Motion, a contemporary anthem from a band that were the same age as many of the fans. That younger generations today would embrace the music of their parents and grandparents is doubly odd when you consider that in Britain, wealth is trapped in the accumulated assets of older generations who further benefit from economic policies that subsidise their living standards. You’d think the young would make music to express their fury to each other and to older generations, as they’ve done throughout youth movements since the Second World War.

In The Golden Age, I speculated that nostalgia reflects a lack of hope. The news narrative tells us that social mobility has stalled and economic prospects are bad. Young people can’t get on to the property ladder, something which in my lifetime was always a badge of class status and professional and personal success. The obsession of electronic music culture with the concept of Rave, I argued, was as much about that movement’s perceived role as a catalyst for entrepreneurship, invention and social renewal as it was about music. The idea that, through the act of putting up some speakers in a disused warehouse to organise a dance, you could spawn a whole new industry away from the influence or input of mainstream culture seems like a dream today.

The obsession with Oasis might tap into this: that a bunch of working class lads from Manchester could beget a musical movement so big that they’d sell out Knebworth twice over and (allegedly) take cocaine in 10 Downing Street seems beyond belief in today’s socio-economic paralysis.

In a report tied to the roll-out of an ad sales product, music video platform Vevo said “65% of Gen Z feel nostalgic for eras they were never alive to experience, something Vevo calls “borrowed nostalgia.” This was tied to ““shared nostalgia,” a collective memory shaped by reboots and widely circulated content rather than personal experience…Millennials and Gen X reported “borrowed nostalgia” at 55% and 54% respectively, below Gen Z‘s rate. One in three Gen Z respondents went further, saying they feel they were “born in the wrong generation.””

The Vevo study reinforces the idea that younger consumers see then as better than now, albeit it’s a survey supporting a commercial goal, not a piece of academic research. What’s evident is that tech firms are now pushing ad products for brands to leverage this idea that consumers crave a past they never experienced.

So far I’ve focused on the cultural factors that drive nostalgia. If we can summarise these as representing the demand for older music, what of its supply?

In mature markets, streaming services switched their focus to retention as the most critical lifecycle metric. Since retention is highly sensitive to the subscriber experience – engagement, session length, frequency of visit, etc. – apps are optimised to those factors. As explained in Stvdio’s recent analysis, the unfamiliarity of new music creates friction, whereas older, familiar music does not, leading to a higher chance it will be presented to listeners.

New music is risky for investors. The hits of yesteryear are fully recouped and have much more predictable consumption curves than new music, which takes years to break now, on top of in-built DSP retention risk. This makes older music attractive to capital seeking steady cashflows.

The perspective of “capital” - the system of investment that sits outside music culture - is to view recorded music like any other asset that can be exploited to generate returns. What is the least risky, most cashflow-generative action to take? In different markets, for example consumer goods like Ketchup or Marmite, the tendency is to launch products adjunct to the core brand. If purchase is a function of awareness and availability, then an existing, well-known brand will have a higher probability of retail selection and eventual purchase than launching a new brand out of the blocks. Walking through the aisles of our local supermarkets, we are presented with Marmite crisps or Marmite-infused cheese.

We now see this perspective at play in music. Capital is pulled away from the development of new music and is reinvested in catalogue. In the packaged goods example, the owners of brands anchor a new product on a timeless brand due to the accrued goodwill that brand carries, and it is this approach that capital encourages in today’s music business.

“Name and likeness rights” are now developed as the apex of the artist’s rights in terms of value. They allow for the creation of biopics, immersive exhibitions, Broadway musicals and, of course, 3D avatar performances. A recent example is the investment by PopHouse, one of the founding investors of the ABBA avatar show, in Iron Maiden’s name & likeness, recording and publishing rights. As detailed in Music Business Worldwide, “Pophouse and Iron Maiden launched their first collaboration during EddFest: the Infinite Dreams Museum Experience, a walk-through exhibition built around the band’s 50th-anniversary book…The two are also filming Iron Maiden’s Run For Your Lives world tour for a cinematic project, and Pophouse said future plans include a digital universe centered on the band’s mascot, Eddie.”

Not only are these expressions of artist identity new forms of revenue that anchor on the artist’s brand, they allow that brand to re-energise the artist’s connection to wider culture. This adds value to other rights, especially those linked to music playback. If a younger music fan sees a biopic of an old or dead artist (for which label and publisher will be paid sync rights) that fan may be turned on to the artist’s music and buy into their cachet in an accelerated way otherwise hard to achieve.

Michael’s Jackson’s recent biopic is the perfect example of this strategy at play. Already smashing the box office record for the highest-grossing biopic, as reported by MBW, “Jackson’s catalog streams nearly doubled in the days after Michael‘s wide release, rising 95% from the weekend before its opening…Billie Jean has since returned to No. 1 on Spotify‘s Global chart, more than four decades after the single’s 1983 release…Jackson was also the most-played artist on YouTube in the UK over the past month…and topped Spotify‘s UK chart in the month after the film’s release”.

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Where some investors see AI as a threat to the downstream value of recorded music catalogues, others see it as a philosopher’s stone that will turn old catalogues into gold. To go back to the Marmite analogy, in their worldview AI has the ability to create infinite new low-risk Marmite variants tied to the parent brand that consumers will enjoy. Marmite Ketchup. Marmite-smelling wallpaper. Marmite cars, Marmite plasters, Marmite soup.

Capital connects many different businesses that profit from nostalgia, from repertoire owners to media enterprises. There are financial interests in seeing this trend persist. But let’s not be fooled that it is an inevitability. Not every commercial product has the same characteristics.

Capital wants to find and exploit old music and treat it like Marmite’s equivalent, but how dull does that make our lives? Where is the vitality and energising quality of new music? Does anyone really want - or need - Marmite soup?

In society and culture, the wind will change and we’ll be hopeful rather than pessimistic, forward looking rather than regressive. People will switch from looking to the past to anticipating the future, at which point commerce will follow. When music fans explicitly look for new music, then distribution platforms will prioritise it (as detailed by Austin Daboh, this is good commerce, as successful entertainment brands have historically always hitched their success to new musical movements).

I look forward to that moment. It’s time to pull down the Wonderwall.