2020 was projected to be a massive year for the music industry. The culmination of a steady rise in ticket sales meant that the year was set to be the largest grossing ever in terms of live music, with more tickets sold than ever before. In an industry that over the years has become increasingly reliant on live music sales as a main revenue source and where the consumption of actual recorded music has taken the backseat as a loss leader in terms of profit, these projected sales were central to the industry’s other successes as well. Indeed, more than 50% of the $50 billion industry’s revenue comes from live music, and it has been this revenue that largely fuels labels and artists’ own incomes.
“This was going to be the biggest year ever,” said Jeff Dorenfeld in an interview with the HPR. After decades of experience in the industry, from time spent managing multi-platinum bands like Boston to touring with acts like Sammy Hagar and Ozzy Osbourne, Dorenfeld now works as a professor at Berklee College of Music.
“All of that is based on the fact that in the last 20 years, more genres can sell out arenas,” he said. “For years and years there have always been genres getting lots of airplay, but they weren’t able to do arenas and stadiums. … [But now] all these genres have major artists. That’s never been true before.”
A couple decades ago, it was only rock or pop artists who could garner the fanbase needed to fill up the tens of thousands of seats in an arena. Now, access to recorded music has been increasingly democratized through streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, which has made it easy for anyone to listen to a massive library of music and thus foster increasingly diverse tastes.
Genre has also become increasingly fluid in recent years because of these platforms, as seen in the work of established industry firebrands like Billie Eilish and Harry Styles. In fact, 78%of young people say they cannot be defined by a single genre they listen to. “We’re moving towards a far more genre-fluid, genre-less environment … because the melding of influences across genres has become so prevalent,” said Robert Weitzner, a professor at Drexel University who focuses on the intersections of technology and music, in an interview with the HPR.
That has meant that countless more genres have been able to gain enough relevance and increase their fan bases to the point that they, too, could sell out entire arenas. In the lead up to 2020, many of them were beginning to.
As has been the case with many industries, however, the pandemic has pushed the music industry past the brink of “business-as-usual” and into a realm of extreme uncertainty. For months, planned summer releases were pushed back to account for these “strange and unprecedented times.” Concerts, too, were postponed a couple months, then a year, and then cancelled altogether.
The pandemic “really took [the music industry] down to nothing,” said Dorenfeld. “I mean, every festival was canceled. Every tour was cancelled. Every show was cancelled. Every club was cancelled. Everything.”
Even just a six-month shutdown in live music was expected to cost the industry over $10 billion. Now, It has been well over six months since live music has been able to exist as it once did, and losses keep building up dramatically.
Despite these mass cancelations, artists have done what they do best and have gotten creative with regards to performing their music. In place of concerts and festivals, the pandemic has brought to the fore a myriad ways for artists to engage with their fanbases. From Zoom meet-and-greets to live-streamed concerts, artists and label executives alike have sought out new ways to satisfy eager consumers. One of the biggest musical events of the coronavirus-era, for example, was a livestream event by Korean pop band BTS that made over $20 million in profit.
Many artists have also taken to writing music in and about isolation. Musicians as disparate as Pitbull and Charli XCX released music that was both written and recorded during the early stages of coronavirus quarantine. And from Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber’s “Stuck with U” to Tyga and Curtis Roach’s Tik Tok anthem “Bored in the House,” the theme of physical isolation — however trite — prevailed for much of the summer.
In many ways, this “new genre” spurred on by the coronavirus — a sort of “pandemic pop” rooted in themes of isolation and uncertainty — is not so much a genre in the traditional sense that it has a unified musicality and instrument base. Instead, it is a genre formed from the combination of an introspective creative process and relatable, empathetic messaging — and one that proves uniquely positioned to reflect and serve the COVID era that artists now create in.
The very experience of creating in isolation, however, is not a wholly new phenomenon.Indie artist Fenne Lily’s critically acclaimed sophomore album, “BREACH,” which was released in mid-September, was written mostly while in a self-imposed, pre-pandemic period of isolation. After months of touring in support of her debut album, “On Hold,” Lily chose to take refuge for about a month in a Berlin hotel room in the hopes that a drastic change of pace and scenery would bring about an increased connection with her own self.
After “On Hold” focused mostly on romantic relationships, “it felt like a natural step to start writing more about my own relationship with my mind, and my surroundings and my family,” Lily said in an interview with the HPR.
Soon enough, however, the pandemic meant that an otherwise uncommon experience became undeniably prescient:
“When I took myself away to Berlin to start writing by myself, I kind of thought that was a unique position to be in,” she said of the now commonplace experience of self-isolation. “Nobody that I knew at the time had taken a month away from the society that they were used to … and now [the record] has been released into a world that is very similar to the world that I chose to put myself into during that period.”
Standing now as an early blueprint for this new pandemic-induced genre, much of the songwriting throughout the powerfully honest record is rooted in Lily’s experience of isolation and introspection. Songs like “Someone Else’s Trees,” for example, exist as thoughtful reflections on the intersections of family, isolation, and the self. Pulling from the time Lily almost died as a child and her mother’s reaction to it, the track’s heart-wrenching honesty is levied by lyrical confessions that can only arise from being alone. “I’m not afraid to die / More so to be alive / I know in this and more I’m not alone,” Lily sings over soft guitar strumming. The lyrics, paired with the hollow production of the track and the aching harmonies that cushion Lily’s voice, give listeners the sense that the song is one which could have only been created from a place of solitude.
In alignment with the new genre brought about by today’s pandemic-induced isolation, the song seems to be built on both the empathy that Lily feels towards her mother (“And I never heard you scream until the night I couldn’t breathe”) and the empathy she feels towards herself. She admits to fearing life more than death, but gives herself the same type of comforting reassurance that most now turn to amid the pandemic: she is not alone. The track then serves as a reflection of vulnerability amid isolation, while providing listeners with the comfort of knowing that said vulnerability is welcome through introspection, not pushed away.
On another track, “I Used To Hate My Body But Now I Just Hate You,” Lily explores the relationship she has with herself through reflections on a past romantic relationship. “I still see you as some kind of reassurance / That someday I’ll be understood,” she sings, recognizing the ways that the relationship wasn’t perfect, but acknowledges the faults without the usual daggers of a break-up song. She’s honest with herself and her past, a feeling only furthered by the song’s open, simple instrumentation. The track is candid to the point of breaking, a result of the possibilities offered by isolation.
Just as the Berlin isolation shifted Lily’s relationship to the world and the self, so has the pandemic catalyzed a similar shift in other artists’ relationships. The pandemic has changed, too, the very representation of relationships that musicians show in their art. The new genre has shifted to move away from hyper-saturated, sugary tracks to more empathetic, pandemic-induced musings and relaxing music.
The shift is seen even on the level of streaming platforms, where nearly a third of Americans get their music. “We’ve seen some massive shifts in user behavior,” Spotify’s Chief Executive Daniel Ek said of the change in listening patterns early on in the pandemic. “People are listening more to classical and chill music.”
As exemplified by Taylor Swift’s “Folklore,” which stayed at the top of the Billboard charts for five consecutive weeks, the albums that people have been drawn to during this age of isolation are those which are stripped down, raw, and empathetic. Rather than sing about her own former flames and desires, as she is known to do, Swift’s new genre release centers itself around the stories of others, told through lilting acoustic melodies and lowkey, folk-style production.
“I mean, you can’t put out a big top stadium-oriented album in the middle of a pandemic. … And artists are going through the same isolation, loneliness, and upside down living that we’re all going through, and their job is to express that,” said Weitzner. “That is a more stripped down and intimate and lonely kind of experience for everybody. So that’s naturally going to be part of the creative process for the next couple of years.”
As evidenced by Swift, artists working in this new genre are turning inwards, sharing stories that reflect the good amid the chaos. Still, the sense of powerlessness that comes with living during a pandemic has meant that many feel less motivated to continuously create amid the countless converging crises that have come to define the year 2020. At a time when more and more countries are going back into lockdown, death rates are at record levels, and world leaders fail to heed science’s warnings to keep the coronavirus under control, to write music in the same style and quantity as prior to the pandemic — endless songs about going out to a bar on a Saturday night, for example — can feel forced and disingenuine.
“Being a dick isn’t cool anymore,” Lily said, paraphrasing fellow indie artist Frances Quinlan from rock band Hop Along. “Nowadays, it’s cool to be introspective and emotionally intelligent, and I think just subconsciously it will fall into music.”
The new genre is bedrocked on that very shift to introspection and emotional intelligence, as it forwards the empathy-driven messaging that categorizes the new genre.
For Lily, this shift has manifested in a desire to tell more interpersonal stories. “For me, music has always been a reflection directly of what’s happening in my life,” she said of her usual writing process. “But because nothing is happening in my life, … I’m going to have to start reflecting things that aren’t necessarily directly happening.”
“Elliott,” the fourth song off of “BREACH,” was the first song Lily wrote that wasn’t directly rooted in her own experience. Instead, what started off as a song about a man she met at a hardware shop who had become disillusioned with his rock star ambitions soon evolved to include her father’s story as well. Rather than focus on Lily’s personal struggles and emotions, “Elliott” exists as a sonic patchwork of other people’s experiences as seen through her eyes, making it a radical show of empathy.
When not much is happening in the immediate, personal realm, these outward-facing tracks serve as an exercise in minimizing the distance between relationships, both for the writer and the listener. In a pandemic characterized by an overwhelming sense of isolation and loneliness, such empathy is necessitated and widely embraced by artists working in the new genre’s framework of honest messaging and introspective creative processes.
“I think as much as this pandemic has made people feel isolated, it’s also introduced the expectation that you will be empathetic to people. … By just wearing a mask, you’re showing that you care about other people to an extent,” Lily said. “So I think that that empathy and involvement in other people’s experience is something that will naturally work its way into my music more, because it’s a daily practice.”
Unlike the period of isolation Lily committed herself to when “BREACH” was written, the pandemic brings real-world consequences and no end-date or ability to be controlled — all factors which make the role of meaningful music and the new genre that much more important.
“I think, especially at a time of upheaval, music that makes you feel comforted and supported and not judged and understood has more of a place in the world. And I think that that will definitely continue the harder the shit gets,” said Lily. “I think there’s almost kind of responsibility for art to be a space where things don’t have to be difficult and cruel and polarizing.”
Especially now, as any sense of an end to the pandemic continues to slip further and further away, people need to feel connected in some way to the art they’re consuming. The shift to more deliberate and meaningful music-making then, to this new genre that centers itself around empathy and kindness — like the work of Fenne Lily does — serves as the much-needed zeitgeist and beacon of hope for an era battered by crisis.
“I hope that there’s imagination and escapism in the music that I make and that other people will be making the future,” Lily said. “Because to be reminded of this year? It’s not something that I’m excited for.”
Image Credit: This image is in the public domain.
