The state of mainstream music: They’re not making stars as big as they used to

Once upon a time, to be 'mainstream' was to rule the world of music. Today? Not so much. Today, mainstream music is just one of many thousands of niches.

Norma Desmond hit on something in the 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard. A silent film stars whose career had been decimated by talking pictures, she refused to change with the times. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” she said.

Fast-forward to today and that quote could be applied to the concept of mainstream music. We still have stars, but the mainstream got small.

Let’s start by defining “mainstream.” These are the ideas, trends, attitudes and activities considered normal, known far and wide, and something in which virtually everyone partakes on some level. Put another way, if the average person knows about something in society, culture or politics, it is part of the mainstream and binds everyone together with common knowledge and attitudes.

Before 2000, mainstream attitude dominated everything. Everyone got their news and culture from television, newspapers, the radio and magazines. We all went to the same movies, watched the same must-see network TV shows, talked about the latest series on the big cable channels and read the same books. When it came to music, we had our preferences, but because there was so much less music out there than there is today, we were able to have at least some awareness of most of the music out there at any given time, even songs and artists we didn’t like.

There were five main cultural gatekeepers back then. Record labels scouted for talent and only signed artists with potential commercial appeal or genuine artistic merit, limiting the number of new albums to about 3,000 a year. If you managed to release a record, you hoped it would be sold in record stores. But stores filtered the supply of available music even more to just what they thought they could sell.

Radio concentrates on playing music that holds an audience for as long as possible, winnowing things down even further. Same thing with video channels. Music magazines were there for backup: news, information, interviews and reviews/recommendations. These publications were often our only real conduit into the personal and professional lives of our favourite musicians.

Those artists who survived all five rings of relentless and vicious cultural filtering became our biggest stars. And boy, those stars were big.

Let’s look at just radio. In the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, we all had one or two favourite radio stations that we depended on for music. We had to wait for our favourite songs to come on, which meant that we ended up hearing a lot of other music as well. If a track we didn’t like came on, fine. We had the patience to wait it out. There was always the promise of something better coming up next.