YouthMusic

Quora Answer : When did the music industry decide to hide established quality music up to the 80s from the younger generations, so that they could sell new engineered music without having to compete with the older music?

May 19, 2020

It didn't.

The music industry actively FIGHTS new music.

Think about it. The music industry already made a major investment in established artists. If the younger generation would just prefer to consume older music from the existing big name artists, no-one is going to be happier than the music industry.

It owns all the recordings, the studio time is a sunk cost. It already has dozens of albums from those artists it could sell. And existing videos to promote them.

No, the industry has no incentive to kill off old artists and bring in new ones.

The kids do that, all by themselves.

Partly this is inevitable. A teenager wants role-models. Someone just a couple of years older than themselves who they can identify with and see as a kind of path-finder to follow (or dream of following)

The problem is that existing stars get old, and a 16 year old doesn't want to identify with a 40 year old as a role model. The 16 year old wants role models who are somewhere between 18 - 25. A bit older. But young enough to feel a connection with.

So there's a "biological" component.

The other component is that tastes evolve. And young people want something to differentiate themselves from the sound of their older siblings and parents. They LIKE novelty. They want something of their own.

The music industry, far from driving this, is struggling to keep up. Just when it thinks it has found the formula, the kids change the rules again.