Fresh from the revelation yesterday that I currently have a troll whose decided it wants to bore me to death, I noticed with interest the revelation that 66% of all audio streaming in the USA is of catalogue material, rather than new. For the purposes of this, anything released longer than 18 months ago counts as catalogue material.

This isn’t a terribly surprising revelation in itself. The industry has been aware of greater interest in archive material for a while – this is why entire music catalogues are being purchased by large publishers for sometimes huge amounts of money. David Guetta recently raked in $100million in a deal with Warner Music, for example.

It’s also rather damning in other ways. Is music that’s coming out now simply not good enough to compete with what went before? Or is it just being drowned out by the interest in older material – as seems to be happening in house music?

Oh well. Perhaps my distinctive brand of “cheap house”, as my troll puts it, will gain traction in a few years. If it does, it’ll be me having the last laugh…

Hat tip to Music Business Worldwide for this story.