| 1 | lil aaron | "I JUST REMEMBERED I HATE YOU" | YEAR OF THE DOG 5 | The tragic flaw in recorded music as a business, now but also always, is that popularity has no tenure. |
| 2 | Anxiety Attacks! | "There's Nowhere Better Than This" | Never Greener 4 | Would you enter a career field where your expected-income graph looks like this? |
| 3 | pizzagirl | "by the way" | by the way +3 |  |
| 4 | recovery girl | "hurt" | recovery girl & friends (mixtape) | This specific graph is from streaming data, looking at recordings by age relative to each artist's debut, |
| 5 | A Story Told | "Shut Up" | American Made | and current popularity relative to their biggest hit, |
| 6 | $WAGGOT | "rn" | rn +1 | so it's only a flattened approximation of history. |
| 7 | miraie | "mirror" | single | But the story it tells sounds pretty familiar: |
| 8 | Gurldoll | "Control" | single | music careers are most often short, |
| 9 | Ca$hrina | "GIRLS!" | single | and even the resulting heavy survivor bias over time can't save them from a steady average decline. |
| 10 | Elliot Lee | "Queen of Nothing" | Queen of Nothing 5 | But is music unique or even unusual among creative or entertainment fields in this way? |
| 11 | Muki | "Tears In The Rain - sad girl version" | Car Crash Through Your Heart: Part 1 | I don't have this kind of data for others, but I doubt it. |
| 12 | Caroline Polachek | "Bunny Is A Rider" | single | Many, like acting, modeling, ballet and sports, are obviously biased towards literal youth. |
| 13 | Kai Whiston | "Hybrid Child" | Drayan! | Maybe painting and sculpture and writing are less so, |
| 14 | TORRES | "Thirstier" | Thirstier +2 | but I bet their career arcs plotted in relative years still tend to look like this. |
| 15 | CHVRCHES | "Good Girls" | single | I see only two real ways this could possibly change. |
| 16 | As December Falls | "You Say When" | You Say When 5 | The more systemic one would be to arrange society |
| 17 | Autumn Fires | "Seventeen" | single | so that basic survival is not economically conditional, |
| 18 | We Are the Catalyst | "Järtecken" | Shallow Ground 2 | and thus you can spend your time doing art because you can spend it doing anything. |
| 19 | Inner Stream | "Fair War" | Stain the Sea | That is, socialism. |
| 20 | SHE'S | "Take It Easy" | single | The other would be for the current cultural infrastructure of music, like record labels and streaming services, |
| 21 | Sae Otsuka | "僕がキスしたらスタンガン" | スター街道 | to focus on changing the unattended trajectories of audiences. |
| 22 | Eir Aoi | "アトック" | single | Left to their own, historically, music fans have bonded in their youth and then set. |
| 23 | 燐舞曲 | "BLACK LOTUS" | single | People keep listening to whatever they first loved as kids. |
| 24 | Novelbright | "Sunny drop - From THE FIRST TAKE" | single | But I don't believe this is a physiological truth. |
| 25 | ACCAMER | "fluoresce" | single | I think it's just hard to find your music, |
| 26 | NEO BREAK | "REMEMBER" | REMEMBER +2 | and the older you get, |
| 27 | GO TO THE BEDS | "Meaningless" | BLOOD COMPACT 6 | the more other demands you have on your energy. |
| 28 | jon-YAKITORY | "AntiSystem's" | AntiSystem's +1 | This is what having all the world's music online can change: |
| 29 | B.O.L.T | "夕日の後の夜に" | single | not the inherent human fascination with the new, |
| 30 | monoclone | "AMANOJAKU." | single | but the difficulty of remaining connected and aware and open. |
| 31 | MiiS | "Saturn Return Day" | Saturn Return Day +2 | Technological mediation has tended to confront this with, essentially, myopic momentary brutalism: |
| 32 | FATE GEAR | "Battle Against Justice(Single Version)" | Battle Against Justice 2 | hold still and we will feed you NEW MUSIC, and YOU WILL LIKE IT. |
| 33 | Akari Kito | "No Continue" | single | This doesn't really work. |
| 34 | DEAR MOTHER | "Vertigo" | Bulletproof | If you feed people things out of context, |
| 35 | MY FIRST STORY | "告白" | 告白 +2 | and evaluate your success based on their immediate reactions, |
| 36 | PELICAN FANCLUB | "Who are you?" | single | you can only feed them the familiar. |
| 37 | Age Factory | "Sleep under star" | single | What art needs is not passive receptors with artificially boosted capacities, |
| 38 | Varjola | "Riittää!" | Jääkö meistä jälkeäkään 5 | but wide-eyed explorers drawn towards their horizons. |
| 39 | Michał Łapaj | "Shelter" | Are You There | What artists need is not a coin-operated intermediator that dispenses smaller coins, |
| 40 | One Crown | "Nuwe Lewe" | single | but a place to gather people, to listen or participate. |
| 41 | Septem Voices | "Будь собой" | single | What people need is not another three minutes of minimum-effort distraction, |
| 42 | Murakami | "Ночь" | single | but to find the communities in which they are unalone, |
| 43 | Brainstorm | "Glory Disappears" | Glory Disappears +2 | and the ones in which they can discover new universalities inside of themselves |
| 44 | Iron Maiden | "The Writing On The Wall" | single | and new resonances among strangers. |
| 45 | Powerwolf | "Blood for Blood (Faoladh)" | Call Of The Wild | Our online music cities, so far, |
| 46 | Powerwolf | "Where the Wild Wolves Have Gone (feat. Doro Pesch)" | Call Of The Wild | are like suburbs designed by autocrats, |
| 47 | Sabaton | "Kingdom Come" | Kingdom Come +1 | navigable mainly to their centers, |
| 48 | Okkultokrati | "Wolfssegen" | single | and radially anonymous and undifferentiated therefrom. |
| 49 | Woe Betide | "Guardians of the Abyss" | single | They need neighborhoods, and squares, |
| 50 | Deviant Process | "Asynchronous" | single | and intransigent rivers that force them to bend |
| 51 | Cosmophobe | "Visions" | single | and negotiate with arbitrary geometry. |
| 52 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Dead is Dead" | Painful Reminder / Dead is Dead 2 | They need zoning that allows them to adapt and accommodate |
| 53 | Deathsomnia | "Katabasis (Ft. Kyle Kimball)" | single | and nurture and multiply peculiarities. |
| 54 | Godflesh | "GATEWAY" | NEW FLESH IN DUB VOL 1 | They need districts that awake at night, |
| 55 | At 1980 | "California Nights" | single | and noisy parks that you periodically have to clean up, |
| 56 | Alessia Cara | "Sweet Dream" | single | and streets whose names we belatedly realize we need to change. |
| 57 | Natalie Imbruglia | "Maybe It's Great" | Maybe It's Great +1 | They need people to need and fill and break and rebuild them. |
| 58 | Zupermaria | "Løvetannbarn" | single | And parades. |
| 59 | Zola Simone | "Sideways" | single | And reasons for parades, |
| 60 | Baby Queen | "You Shaped Hole" | single | and parades for no reason at all. |
| 61 | Soccer Mommy | "rom com 2004" | single | In this future of the connected music world, |
| 62 | Shannen James | "Separate Ways" | single | there will be more life and more activity |
| 63 | Wye Oak | "Electricity" | single | and more continuity and more joy, |
| 64 | Cherym | "We're Just Friends" | We're Just Friends +2 | and thus inevitably also more money. |
| 65 | YONAKA | "Anthem" | Seize the Power | But also, there will be more possibilities. |
| 66 | Big Zuu | "I Did It" | single | Streaming isn't a record store where you rent a chorus at a time, |
| 67 | joshua epithet | "Eight Years Old With An IPhone" | single | which is why the record store where you bought a song for a dollar |
| 68 | Toddla T | "Shaker (feat. Jeremiah Asiamah, Stefflon Don & S1mba)" | single | was the end of the past, |
| 69 | Lingua Ignota | "PERPETUAL FLAME OF CENTRALIA" | PERPETUAL FLAME OF CENTRALIA +1 | not the architecture of the future. |
| 70 | Thandi Draai | "Jika" | Jika EP 3 | Streaming is a virtualization of the air, |
| 71 | Rey Sapienz | "Na Zala Zala" | Na Zala Zala | so that waveforms persist and may be summoned. |
| 72 | Elvis Blue | "Meer As Genoeg" | single | It allows us to be listeners, not shoppers; |
| 73 | Joel Herttua | "Sä saat sen soimaan" | single | to be singers and selves, |
| 74 | Kirkkovene | "Suomirokkia" | single | not sales representatives or anything representatives. |
| 75 | The Ninth Wave | "Maybe You Didn't Know" | single | Or, at least, it should allow that. |
| 76 | Modern Chemistry | "All The Things I Do To Get To You" | All The Things I Do To Get To You +2 | Streaming makes it possible to contemplate different attention economies, |
| 77 | Blutengel | "Hand in Hand" | Erlösung - The Victory of Light | more decentralized and more powerfully self-organizing. |
| 78 | Anna Meredith | "BPM 100" | Bumps Per Minute | They don't come into spontaneous existence due to their mere possibility, though. |
| 79 | Ballaké Sissoko | "Nan Sira Madi - A COLORS SHOW" | single | We still have to build them. |
| 80 | Bedo | "Dönüyorum Eve" | single | We have to want to build open cities instead of control structures |
| 81 | Bahar Sönmez | "Bilmediğim" | single | with different people in control. |
| 82 | pizzagirl | "al pacino" | softcore mourn | We have to want to listen to each other sing. |
| 83 | recovery girl | "pink demons" | recovery girl & friends (mixtape) | This seems, to me, like literally the least onerous possible demand, |
| 84 | Dan Bull | "Mercybeat" | single | because I believe music is the thing humans do best, |
| 85 | 8-Bit Arcade | "He Said She Said (8-Bit CHVRCHES Emulation)" | By Request, Vol. 139 | and thus that we're at the dawn of an age of utopian potential. |
| 86 | Miura Jam | "Gamushara (Boruto: Naruto Next Generations)" | single | I'm aware, of course, that I am not the first person to believe this, |
| 87 | Grouplove | "You Oughta Know" | single | and that we now have the perspective |
| 88 | Ankor | "Hold On" | single | with which to declare all of its previous believers wrong. |
| 89 | Ha*Ash | "The Unforgiven" | single | But that's how we make progress. |
| 90 | Vishal Dadlani | "The Unforgiven" | single | We incubate the delusion that amazing things have just now become conceivable, |
| 91 | Diet Cig | "The Unforgiven" | single | and thus that previous optimisms have become realisms, |
| 92 | Sergio Rodríguez | "good 4 u" | single | and then we make things better |
| 93 | String Fx | "good 4 u" | single | because we've forgotten how hard that is |
| 94 | The Animal In Me | "Good 4 U - Cover" | single | and we are caught up in a song. |