Any old fossil like me keen on harrumphing that popular music isn’t what it used to be will have taken a certain snarky pleasure on reading that, last year, no British act figured in the world’s top ten singles or albums for the first time since 2003.
To be fair, 2003 wasn’t the best year for chart music ever; Dido had the top-selling album – going 6x platinum – with Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Daniel Bedingfield and Norah Jones completing the top five. The bestselling single of 2003 was the Black Eyed Peas’ ‘Where is the Love?’, followed by ‘Spirit in the Sky’ by Gareth Gates and the Kumars, R. Kelly’s ‘Ignition’ (Remix)’, ‘Mad World’ by Gary Jules and ‘Leave Right Now’ by Will Young.
Looking back, in fact, this is a ghastly roll-call – but at least there were a few awful British acts if not ‘doing us proud’ then ‘flying the flag’. And anyway, an old fossil like me wouldn’t be comparing the present day with 2003 but with the glory days of my teenage years, when I was lucky enough to grow up to a soundtrack of glam rock dance music and punk, the book-ending pair being thoroughly British.
But as a BBC report pointed out: ‘After years of global domination by stars such as Ed Sheeran and Adele, British music artists have failed to make it into the worldwide annual charts… releases by Charli XCX and Dua Lipa did not make the lists, with the highest-ranked British representative being singer and producer Artemas, whose song “I Like the Way You Kiss Me” was the 15th most popular single of 2024. Previously, UK acts have appeared in one, or both, of the top ten lists every year since at least 2003’.
UK music exports grew by 15 per cent in 2023 – but US music data company Chartmetric has shown that this was largely driven by ‘legacy’ acts such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Queen. Billboard’s UK editor Thomas Smith’s words are even starker: ‘In terms of where the UK is at, it isn’t great. I wouldn’t say it’s an existential threat just yet, but we’re probably not far off. It’s concerning that it’s going down – it feels like quite rapidly.’
But the entire global music industry is feeling the pinch. According to the Mail, Justin Timberlake – once just about the biggest male solo act on the planet – ‘is making changes to his flailing career in a much-needed bid to win back fans’ after low ticket sales and cancelled dates on his ‘Forget Tomorrow’ world tour. Apparently, ‘Justin believes he needs to switch his focus from solo artist and reunite with his Y2K-era boy band NSYNC… after always saying he’d never reform the band’. He faced particular criticism on his tour for ‘performing too many new songs instead of his fan favourites. The “SexyBack” singer was slammed for playing 11 songs from his most recent album, Everything I Thought It Was, which was a critical failure… he was said to be embarrassed when he asked fans to sing along with the album’s single – and quickly realised they didn’t know the lyrics.’
Very much the same thing – but on a far larger and even more embarrassing scale – happened last year to Jennifer Lopez, Timberlake’s female counterpart in the heady days of the Naughty Noughties. When one thinks of all the people in the world one would be least likely to pity, J-Lo is high on the list – supernaturally beautiful, unspeakably rich, one of the rare ‘triple threats’ (world-class singer, actor, dancer) in showbusiness. Yet after struggling to sell tickets and subsequently cancelling a wagonload of shows, the name of the tour changed from ‘This Is Me… Now’ to ‘This Is Me… Live – The Greatest Hits’. According to Variety: ‘The latest rebrand suggests a pivot from a tour focusing on the new album’s songs to one spanning her discography, a move that may entice listeners who didn’t connect with her latest material’. A source told Page Six that the tour was not created solely for the music from her latest album. It is, however, a ‘celebration which includes the new album’.
Why have fans become so discriminating? Personally I find this ‘pivot’ from slavish supplication to pick-and-choose wonderfully refreshing, but it must a bit of a shock to entertainers (rather on a par with their mass endorsement of the Democrats being rejected by the rest of the USA) to find that only a select few can get away with charging the price of a used car for a single ticket. Perhaps the rise of cultural phenomena from tribute acts to jukebox musicals reflects the obduracy of fans who refuse to cough up large sums of money for the honour of being used as aural guinea pigs by overpaid and overindulged troubadours any longer?
‘When a band say “This is a track from our new album”, I take it a chance to visit the toilet or bar’
I asked around: ‘When a band say “This is a track from our new album”, I take it a chance to visit the toilet or bar,’ said G. J replied: ‘When we’re teenagers and our favourite band is the most important thing in the world to us we have an enthusiastic thirst to hear the new stuff. Not so when we’re old and they’re even older; every anthem for doomed youth, whether it be “Sympathy for the Devil” or “Anarchy in the UK” or “Wonderwall”, eventually ends up sounding like “We’ll Meet Again” performed at a sing-song in a care home.’
My husband says: ‘I used to snootily think that reunions only “counted” if the band did some new material and even remember hoping that the Pistols would, which seems utterly ludicrous in retrospect. But I’m sure that’s just the boring blokey muso perspective – I don’t suppose many of those middle-aged broads who pack out Take That concerts are baying for Barlow’s latest. These days I’m more inclined to take the opposite view: it’s actually quite embarrassing when someone old tries to do a lot of new stuff, because it suggests they’re still convinced of their own relevance – and that’s a slippery slope at any age.’
There are a few exceptions, of course. Popbitch recently reported of Kendrick Lamar’s widely-panned Super Bowl half-time show: ‘Media and music industry comment concurred; the half-time show was a platform for a big act to show off their greatest hits to a 100 million-plus armchair audience, not a place to showcase new music. Turns out there’s a reason Kendrick has a rep as one of the most astute artists on the planet; deciding that the multi-million armchair sports fans watching around the world were largely irrelevant, he gambled that maybe 5 per cent could be turned into Kendrick fans, or were already semi-fans who didn’t know he had a new album out. By playing his new tracks, he got a smallish percentage of viewers interested. Bad for the TV network. But that smallish percentage in streaming terms is still huge. Outcome? US number one album, four of the top five in US singles charts, three out of top five in the UK singles chart.’
I’m sure that one of the reasons the recent Oasis ticket-lines were so over-subscribed is that everyone is completely convinced that they’ll do all the hits; this was certainly true of Blur’s Wembley reunion shows a couple of years back when they really made a meal of it. As the Guardian reported: ‘Albarn dons a deerstalker for “Country House” and a Fila tracksuit for “Girls & Boys”, two songs whose crowd-moving, beer-flinging power is only exceeded by “Parklife”, with guest vocalist Phil Daniels emerging from a road worker’s tent like Kramer walking through Seinfeld’s door.’ Some reports pleasingly confirmed that only two songs from the latest album were played; now that’s what I call manners.
The way I look at it, if you’re confident and you know you’ve got a great backlist, you want to play your greatest hits; it’s only the insecure ex-Mouseketeers like Timberlake who need to be recognised as Serious Musicians. It’s not gonna happen, so the sooner he reunites with his NSYNC bandmates (who are all understandably keen) and we are treated to a bunch of men pushing 50 singing lyrics like ‘I was hangin’ with the fellas/ Saw you with your new boyfriend, it made me jealous’, the sooner the gaiety of nations will increase.
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