by James Wallace Harris, 1/17/24
I am fascinated by how works of pop culture become popular and then how they are forgotten.
I read this article, “The Percentage of Music on Streaming Services That Was Never Played in 2023 is Staggering” that got me thinking. Most music streaming services now claim to have catalogs of over one hundred million songs. This report is based on 158.6 million songs, with the following breakdown of plays:
79.5 million had 0 to 10 plays
42.7 million had 11 to 100 plays
30.0 million had 101 to 1,000 plays
6.4 million had more than 1,000 plays
The report said 45.6 million of that first group got no plays at all, but ten songs in 2023 got one billion plays. This says a lot about pop culture. 86.2% of all those songs got less than one thousand plays. I guess that’s the background radiation of pop culture interest, showing how quickly society forgets.
I wonder if I played any of those songs with less than a one thousand plays during 2023. I wonder if I play a song that no one else played at all in 2023. I wonder how many people also play the same songs I play all the time from my favorite playlist.
When I was young, I wanted to hear the current hit songs and albums, read the latest books, go to the movies that just came out, and talk with my friends about the TV shows which broadcasted last night. Now, in old age, I’m years behind, and make no effort to keep up with current pop culture. I desperately cling to the past, hoping not to forget. I feel like I’m one of the characters at the end of Fahrenheit 451 trying to preserve a book.
My focus in old age is to find the best music, movies, books, and TV shows from all time. The trouble is digging through the mountain of old pop culture artifacts and finding the archeological gems. I work to remember what I love, but also find new loves before they are completely forgotten. I find those new loves by finding people who still remember them.
Of the roughly sixteen million albums that’s been recorded, how many are worth remembering and playing? Even if I played an album a day, and I lived another thirty years, I doubt I could listen to more than ten thousand of those sixteen million albums. There’s too much to remember.
It’s great that streaming services offer us access to all those songs, but they will be forgotten. That’s an immense amount of creative effort that’s disappearing from our collective consciousness. It’s also true for books, movies, and television shows.
How much can a culture remember of its best creative efforts? I once speculated that less than one hundred novels from the 19th century are remembered by the average bookworm. Literary scholars could name more, but I doubt even many English professors could list two hundred novels from the 19th century off the top of their heads.
Lately, I’ve been watching old movies from the 1950s. IMDB says there were 4906 movies made between 1950-1959 in their database, of which 165 were released in theaters. Here’s their list of the 165 in order of popularity. I would guess I’ve seen about 140 of them. But then, I was born in 1951. How many of these movies have been seen by people born after the year 2000? I have a tough time getting friends of my own age to watch old movies from the 1950s with me. However, I’m often surprised by young people on YouTube that have channels devoted to old movies. But what percentage of their age group are they? 0.001?
There’s always a percentage of the population that loves to explore old pop culture. I maintain a database system that identifies the most remembered old science fiction books. I follow people online who specialize in remembering old movies, old music, and old books. Only one of my friends is like me and searches out old books and movies. Is there a word for people like us, who cherish remembering old pop culture? It’s different from plain old nostalgia.
I’m currently reading The Game-Players of Titan by Philip K. Dick that was written in 1963 and published in early 1964. In it, characters from the 22nd century collect old records from the 20th century. I wonder if that will come true. Or will the music from the 20th century just sit on some computer, rarely played even by scholars? In the novel, Dick has his characters agree that a song, “Every Valley” by Aksel Schitz (book spelling) is their favorite vocal recording. I could find this (slightly different spelling):
Is this what Philip K. Dick couldn’t forget.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
Part of this is that, by a certain age (and I’ve kind of reached it myself), you realize you are never going to keep up with the torrent of pop culture.
Another part is that you’re old enough to remember all those cultural products that were declared “masterpieces”, “classics”, and “timeless” by the critics and the public. And no one takes a look at or listens to them anymore.
You abandon hype and faddishness and, whether directed by others or entirely on your own, you seek out that something that you missed and are curious about its value.
Hanging on to data of one sort or another is my forte/flaw.
I’m uncomfortably reminded that, sitting nearby in a corner where it’s out of sight, is my old iMac. I’ve been lugging it around for years because there’s STUFF on it that I don’t want to lose. It literally hasn’t been online in 8 years! Through 3 moves! (Luckily I still have the original box, sturdy, with the plastic strap handle on top LOL)
There was a time that I regularly purchased music on iTunes, which I kept locally on my iMac in my iTunes library. When I got a new computer, the old iMac sat around offline unused, except for occasionally listening to old iTunes purchases. My unwieldy version of a humongous iPod Nano.
After years of ignoring iTunes, one day I went online on my newer computer and logged in. I listened to an old song: “hmmm that’s not quite how I remembered it, I must be imagining things.” But no, song after purchased song didn’t sound quite right. Come to find out, iTunes had replaced the originals with – I guess you would call it upgraded – slightly different versions. WHAT?!! So naturally I’ve held on to my old iMac with it’s original versions of songs I purchased, just to spite them.
Or as my mother would have said: cutting off my nose to spite my face.