Old Art is Strangling New Art

Why is older content dominating every artistic field?

Every day around 2 p.m. a flood of teenagers walks past my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen when the local high school gets out. A few weeks back, I found myself walking in the middle of a group of those teens, and to my surprise they were blasting a song from my teenage years — Blue by Eiffel 65.

Setting aside the lyrical brilliance of “I'm blue da ba dee da ba di”, it struck me as unusual that kids today would be bopping down the street listening to music from before they were born. For most of post-WW2 American history, youth culture has been defined in opposition to previous generations. Listening to the same music your parents did is stereotypically uncool. My father used to joke that he listened to both kinds of music — Country AND Western — and I certainly wouldn’t have been caught dead as a teenager listening to his goofy old records. But this cross-generational sharing is becoming less and less unusual over time. Older music commands a larger share of people’s attention than it has in previous years.

In fact, older media of all types is flourishing. Whether it’s books, video games, music or movies, there’s been a renaissance of older media getting more attention, money and market share. But unfortunately for current artists, it seems to be at the expense of new media.

That Old Time Rock n’ Roll

Recording industry groups break down music into two groups: current and catalog. Current is typically defined as anything released in the last 18 months, and catalog is anything older than that. Traditionally, current sales were more important to record labels than catalog. In 2010 current music was 57% of industry sales, with catalog taking 43%. But in 2015 catalog sales overtook new albums for the first time. And the trend continued for the rest of the decade.

Data from Luminate shows that by 2024, catalog had increased to take 73% share of the music industry when considering total consumption (streams, physical sales, digital sales, etc) with current music comprising just 27% of revenue.

A 30% decrease in market share for new music seems astonishing, but the signs are everywhere. There’s evidence that the top hits of any given year are taking less and less of the market. For instance, Ed Sheeran’s song Shape of You was the top hit on Spotify in 2017 with 1.4 billion streams. Despite Spotify quadrupling its userbase from 2017-2024, the top hit of 2024 (Billie Eilish’s Birds of a Feather) only reached about the same number, 1.7 billion streams.

The hottest trend in the business of music doesn’t have anything to do with current artists - it’s older artists selling the rights to their catalogs. The list of artists (or their estates) selling their back catalogs is a who’s who of music royalty. Neil Diamond, Whitney Houston, ZZ Top, Tina Turner and more have all made deals. And those rights are reaching eye-watering sums for artists (or their estates) who choose to sell. Bob Dylan got an estimated $300 million for his rights. Bruce Springsteen? $550 million. Michael Jackson’s catalog commanded $600 million and Queen’s catalog sold for more than $1 billion! Almost every one of these deals is from the last few years, as the music industry and financial firms have realized the dominance that older music is enjoying.

Older artists are so lucrative that we’re seeing absurd efforts to extend their reach. Biopics of artists like Queen, Bob Dylan and Bob Marley are the hot trend in filmmaking. Studios are frantically digging through the archives of dead pop artists for discarded songs to release posthumously. Fans are creating AI-generated reproductions of older artists. They made a Whitney Houston Hologram Tour! That’s where the energy seems to be in the music industry.

The Backlist’s Back

The trends are just as stark in the book publishing industry. Publishing differentiates between the frontlist (newly released books from the current year) and the backlist (everything else). According to data from Circana BookScan, in 2005 sales of new titles accounted for 48% of total sales. By 2023, that number had fallen to only 30%. Let’s add the data on new book share of market to our previous chart:

Aside from the hard numbers, anecdotes about this shift are everywhere. The publishing industry’s press constantly frets about their reliance on backlist sales. Book influencers on social media are now just as likely to brag about getting cool editions of classic books or to give advice on how to read more classics as they are to talk about newer books. The publishing industry is fully aware there’s a problem with frontlist sales – they just don’t know what to do about it.

IPs and Franchises

We can’t really talk about older films dominating the box office in the same way we’ve talked about books and music — with rare exceptions, if you’re seeing a movie in a theater, it was recently released. But we can examine a similar idea: the share of films each year that are newly created scripts and ideas vs pre-existing IP, remakes, and franchise films. And those franchises have seen a dramatic increase in popularity over time.

In 2005, franchise films accounted for just 47% of box office receipts. By 2015 that had increased to 72%, with only 28% going to new movies. The trend has continued downward — despite a bump in 2023 driven by smash hits Barbie and Oppenheimer. 2024 was the worst year on record for original movies. Last year, franchises took as astonishing 86% of box office revenue, with original/non-franchise movies only capturing 14%.

Take a look at the highest-grossing movies from 2024. You have to go all the way down to #15 (It Ends With Us) before hitting a single movie that’s not a sequel or a franchise installment for already established IP.

Putting all the data together, it’s clear this is a cross-industry trend:

If you’re trying to make truly new and original movies in Hollywood today, you’re in a tough spot. There are only so many physical theaters and only so many screens in operation in a year, so the number of movies that can be released widely is (essentially) a set number. If franchise films take up more screens, original films get less. It’s a zero-sum game. And the data shows that both the total number of widely released original movies and the dollar amount those movies make is in steep decline - not just in share of screens, but in absolute numbers. If you’re in the business of creating original movies, business is grim.

Ready Player One?

Here’s a list of the top ten PC video games by player count that I pulled for a post in September 2023. Superimposed are the years that each of the ten games were released:

The average age of the top titles is eight years old. Only a single game in the top ten of September 2023 was actually released in 2023. And one of the ‘younger’ titles is the latest Call of Duty title - part of a franchise which is essentially the same game re-released every year or two.

The methodology for determining the most popular games can be a little bit funky, but no matter which list you look at (here’s an alternative calculation updated for 2025) the charts are dominated by games averaging almost a decade in age. Video games are a much younger industry than pop music, films or book publishing. They’re also subject to technological change that disadvantages older games, as newer games have more features and better graphics. So the fact that decade-old games are still dominant by player count is frankly astounding, and speaks to the power of the cross-media trend we’re seeing.

According to analyst Matthew Ball, half of all gameplay time on Steam in 2024 was given to titles more than 8 years old. And 35% went to games 1-7 years old, leaving a miniscule 15% of playtime for games released in 2024.

Source: Matthew Ball, The State of Video Gaming in 2025

The situation is actually worse than this chart describes, because the 15% includes franchise titles like Call of Duty, FIFA, and NBA2K that release annually but are essentially the same game every year (with minor updates). Removing those franchises, in 2023 only 6.5% of playtime went to original games published that year! Some years-old titles are so popular that Hall dubs them ‘black hole games’: games that suck in players like a black hole, never to release them. Those players may go from being generalized gamers to specifically FIFA players, or Fortnite players, etc. They're so dedicated to a particular game they essentially leave the market for other games.

Why is this happening?

The dominance of older art across many industries is partially just an issue of volume. With every decade that goes by, contemporary artists have more past material to compete with. Release a book, album, or video game today and you’re implicitly competing with every book, album, or video game that came before you – and the ‘came before you’ category keeps getting bigger as time marches on.

But that doesn’t explain why this trend has accelerated so fast across so many artistic fields in just the last decade. If old content is pushing out new content, why is it happening? Is it demand? Is this simply what consumers desire? Is it the supply side – are corporations pushing older content, regardless of people really want? Or is it something else?

There are some arguments to be made that this is a demand-side phenomenon. For one thing, the US population is getting older. Today there are more senior citizens as a share of the population than ever before. Perhaps it’s not surprising they’d prefer to listen to music from their generation, read books that are older, or play video games that are older. And with so many older consumers, nostalgia for remakes, reboots and sequels at the movie theater makes sense.

There are other indications that people are genuinely interested in older media. The subreddit /r/patientgamers is a community of more than 700,000 people who deliberately play older video games because those games are often deeply discounted a few years after release. There are numerous trend pieces floating around about how Gen Z is listening to their parents music, or in love with older TV shows. And the popularity of media franchises like Harry Potter or the Marvel Cinematic Universe is real and enduring – corporations might push a certain type of product, but all those Disney Adults seem to genuinely like what they’re offering.

But it can’t just be a demand-side issue. For every genuine fan of an older franchise or artist, there are plenty of voices complaining that they want something fresh, new, exciting. Why aren’t media companies delivering? It might be because the heads of major media companies are famously risk averse – they’re interested in what is guaranteed to sell and rarely interested in gambling on risky projects. In 2020, after Billie Eilish’s smash debut album and sweep of the Grammy Awards, pop critic Jon Caramanica gave this anecdote about his interviews with record label executives:

“Every time I’ve stepped foot in a label over the last year, it’s just “How do we get another Billie Eilish? How is this artist like Billie Eilish? How is this rollout playing like Billie Eilish? How is this music video like Billie Eilish?”

And it’s not just the music industry that’s risk averse. Movie studios are notoriously frightened of taking risks. Ironically, one of the buzziest new TV shows is Apple TV’s The Studio, where Seth Rogen portrays a studio executive who wants to make artistically complex films - but is bullied into making ‘The Kool Aid Movie’ instead, because the marketing department thinks it will make more money. Rogen’s fictional executive isn’t much of a stretch from reality. The Hollywood Reporter has written about how Warner Brothers’ joint studio head Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy are famous for championing independent and risky films, but their future as executives is likely tied to the success of the Minecraft movie.

From a broader perspective, it’s understandable that conformity is the norm because most of these industries are struggling. Book sales have been stagnant for more than a decade. The gaming industry is mired in a years-long slump. Movie theaters haven’t recovered post-pandemic. And while the music industry has seen strong growth thanks to streaming, it comes after several decades of catastrophic declines in revenue. On top of that stagnation, the costs to produce a blockbuster movie, a AAA video game title or an A-list album are skyrocketing.

Because of stagnant revenue and increasing costs, executives in artistic industries really need to make sure the projects they promote will succeed. Much like an NFL coach facing a 4th down late in a close game, they’re faced with very high leverage decisions. And also like NFL coaches, executives are overly risk averse. When it’s clear that a single decision could either make or break your final outcome, humans tend toward risk aversion. They’d prefer an outcome with low uncertainty even if the expected value of that outcome is lower, and they especially prefer lower risks when their career is on the line. Businessmen used to say that nobody gets fired for buying IBM, and today’s equivalent is that nobody gets fired for proposing another superhero franchise.

There’s one additional factor beyond the supply or demand side factors that may be causing the push towards older media - the seamless distribution of content that the Internet allows. Thanks to platforms like Steam, Spotify, and Amazon it’s easier than ever to get anything you want in any creative field. In the 1990s, if you wanted a book or an album, you’d have to go to a physical store to buy it. And because physical stores have limited shelf space, they almost always focused on recent releases. These stores would carry some older classics, but they centered their business around selling new stuff. It would have been prohibitively costly to carry a huge backlist of older content.

Digital systems cut directly through that problem. Shelf space for books isn’t a limitation on Amazon. You never run out of digital copies of a game on Steam. You can search for an obscure sci-fi novel from 25 years ago just as easily as you can search for a newly released book. The creation of frictionless online search killed a crucial advantage that new material had always carried over older material. And as more and more people began shopping online, the prominence of older media began to rise.

The Implications

Whatever the reason for this trend, it’s clearly evident across many kinds of media. One of the important questions to ask is cui bono? Who benefits from this?

• IP holders for popular movie franchises, video game franchises, book series and music catalogs

• Established, already successful artists and creators (and the estates of dead artists)

• Tech aggregators and platforms

On the other side, those who are struggling are the artists on the opposite side of those categories - people creating new works of art, people starting from scratch, and independent storefronts. It would be one thing if these industries were all growing at a fast clip. We could console ourselves by saying that new media is simply growing at a slower rate than old media. But that’s not the case. Creative industries are stagnating, and it’s getting harder and harder for artists in any field to get by.

Many of these fields are also seeing a middle-class pinch. The death of the mid-budget Hollywood movie is a well-documented phenomenon - these days, you’re either an indie film or a massive blockbuster, with few movies in between. Video games have a similar dynamic emerging. There are more indie video games than ever before, but at the same time the budgets for top titles are ballooning to hundreds of millions of dollars in many cases. Top video games like Fortnite and top artists like Drake or Taylor Swift are still pulling huge numbers. They aren’t in trouble - but middle-class and independent artists might be.

I’m bummed out about all this. I think there’s something special about people who write new books, develop new games, or produce new music. Frankly, it takes a certain kind of arrogance to do that. In a world where folks can read Orwell, Austen or Shakespeare at the click of a button, you need to be arrogant to think someone should read your novel instead. When fans can easily listen to the Rolling Stones, Nirvana or Whitney Houston, why should they listen to your album? That’s arrogance, but without that kind of artistic bravado new art would never get made.

It’s mostly pointless to tell people which art they should care about. People like what they like, and that’s fine. But if you consider yourself someone who appreciates the value of new writing, new games, and new music, keep all this in mind. Spend some time exploring new albums. Take a chance on a new book instead of a classic. Maybe even subscribe to a Substack or two! Without new works, culture grows stagnant. It’s great to value the old, but I hope we can do that without endangering the new.