The modern music industry is all about catering to superfans. But what if the world is making fewer of them?

The music industry didn’t used to think so much about superfans. Sure, the record-store obsessives, fan-club members, magazine subscribers, and radio-station callers in the CD and vinyl era were important – they were seen as the proverbial ‘tip of the spear’ for breaking new music, the people who would recommend new music to less-engaged friends and line up first for tickets. But to make real money, major labels were focused on getting music in front of as many casual listeners as possible, via radio, MTV and print advertising.

Then Napster arrived in the early 2000s, and album and singles sales began to crater. Looking for parts of the music business that weren’t broken, labels noticed that superfans were still reliably buying expensive archival releases from big acts, like Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series and Led Zeppelin’s How the West Was Won. Box sets and, even better, deluxe editions of new albums, featuring a couple new songs and a bunch of old ones, went from being boutique extras to being a crucial part of the business. It also dawned on the industry that artists like the Grateful Dead, who had been cultivating strong relationships with their obsessed fans for years, were actually onto something.

Cut to today, and superfans arguably drive the music business (not to mention superhero movies, politics, cryptocurrency and culture in general). The biggest artists in the world are also experts at speaking to their base, which allows them to do things like release 19 deluxe versions of their latest album. Building ongoing relationships with fans, giving them closer access, and making them feel connected to artists is central to how the modern music industry works.

The problem is: the next generation of music superfans appears to be getting smaller. A pattern of data is backing up what the Atlantic recently called “the ambient suspicion that music doesn’t matter as much as it used to,” particularly for younger people. As recently noted in Stems, 16–24-year-olds — historically the most voracious new music listeners, in that time of life when life-long tastes are formed — are now less likely than 25–34-year-olds to have discovered an artist they love in the last year.

New music has been steadily declining as a percentage of the industry in relation to older music. Part of that is because the music industry is better at making money off of catalog music. But there is also data showing that there is less overall interest in music. Music-related Google searches have been declining for a decade:

To get a picture of interest levels in current music, we looked at the number of Wikipedia searches for songs and albums released in the same calendar year over the past decade: Those have gone down more than 40% since 2016.

So what is to be done? Music biz research company MiDiA thinks that music streaming needs more “friction.” They argue that for more than a decade, Spotify et al. have focused on giving listeners an experience that emphasizes convenience and abundance, when they should be focused on getting us excited about finding new music. The thinking is, music should be less like your TikTok feed or Twitter — a passive experience where algorithms and AI are deployed to give you content you are hopefully going to like, without you explicitly asking for it – and more like video games, where some difficulty is the point.

So what might that look like in music? Potentially, less autoplay and more choices. Last year saw a crop of small services encouraging fans to show more intention in their listening: Their tactics include shutting down the firehose of recommendations, adding editorial curation and community features, and letting fans decide who their money is going to.

On Spotify, it could mean that earning a “Top 2% of Machine Gun Kelly fans” badge might require more than simply not skipping his songs while the algorithm serves them to you. You might be given missions like listening to a certain number of deep cuts to unlock a playlist or access to tickets. Or we might see US streamers try things similar to China’s QQ Music, which just added a special integration for superfans (Spotify has been rumored to be working on a superfan tier for a while.)

For now, it turns out that guy bragging about how he had to walk uphill both ways in a snowstorm to the record store to buy Frampton Comes Alive might have had a point. Compare that to the present day, when the head of one of the world’s biggest music streamers admits that music can sometimes feel like “tap water” coming out of his service. It may be time to rethink how we got here.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Hit me at [email protected].

James Bernard’s work loomed large over my music fandom in the early 1990s. He was a senior editor and later co‑editor in chief at The Source magazine, a key player on the team that awarded albums like  Illmatic and The Low End Theory five‑mic ratings, which framed out the hip-hop canon of that era. A Harvard Law classmate of Barack Obama and one of the magazine’s more politically minded editors, he broadened  The Source’s scope by bringing in voices that weren’t being heard on national platforms: After the 1992 riots he travelled to L.A. to interview residents; he’d also use the magazine to host gangsta‑rap roundtables with Scarface and others at a time when politicians and activists were attacking the genre. James helped incubate a generation of writers in the magazine’s page, from Dream Hampton and Kierna Mayo to Minya Oh and Cheo Coker; there were people who wrote about hip-hop before The Source, but it arguably created the first hip-hop journalists.

His most famous moment came in November 1994, when, just as the magazine was going to print and without the editors’ knowledge, The Source’s publisher, Dave Mays, inserted a three-page story into the feature well on the Almighty RSO — a group he happened to be managing. Bernard had been refusing to cover the RSO amid threats that included their leader, Raymond Scott, telling staffers that they would be “leaving in bodybags” if they didn’t give them a positive review. After Mays’ maneuver, the staff, led by James, resigned en masse. He would go on to co‑found  XXL, a magazine that arguably eclipsed  The Source in the 2000s.

I got to know James in the 2010s on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominating Committee, where we served together on a short-lived hip-hop subcommittee, a place for kibitzing and plotting on how to get LL Cool J and Erik B. & Rakim into the Rock Hall. (And then, more often than not, commiserating after the vote.) He refused to be pigeonholed as ‘only’ a hip‑hop expert; he would champion bands like the Smiths and the Eurythmics along with his favorite rappers in Rock Hall meetings. He was a lot of fun to be around, but he also took the work seriously.

As he had written decades before in one of his last Source editorials before the blow-up with Mays: “Our responsibility is to build hip-hop. And hip-hop cannot be built unless we hold each other up to the highest standards imaginable. … Anybody who hasn’t learned this yet had better grow the fuck up.”

James is survived by his wife, Margarita, and their three children, Hayden, Jefferson and Myla.