Never in the Mood for New Songs? Billboard Just Published Its List, and You're Not the Only One

When it comes to getting lazy, people may not have much say in the matter.

On May 22, Pacific time, the 2016 Billboard Music Awards were handed out in Las Vegas. The biggest winners that night were Adele, The Weeknd, Rihanna and Drake. They stand for what American listeners liked most over the past year — and as you can see, what people liked was still the music of these familiar names.

You have probably had the experience yourself: you open your music player, look at the dazzling spread of songs on offer, find you aren't especially interested in any of them, and start playing the songs you have always liked.

Sometimes it feels like you just don't know what else to listen to. Other times it feels like the songs you have never heard of simply can't catch your attention. Either way, you have noticed that your listening is getting more and more monotonous.

It is happening everywhere. More than 30 years of Billboard chart data lead to that conclusion.

In 1980, more than 80 songs reached Billboard's Hot 10, and only 18 of them held that position for more than 10 weeks. Across the whole five years from 1985 to 1989, only two songs stayed in the Hot 10 for more than ten weeks.

Last year, by contrast, fewer than 50 songs ever reached the top 10 — but 30 of them stayed there more than 10 weeks, and nine for more than 20. 2013 and 2014 were leaner still: only 33 and 31 songs respectively entered the Hot 10.

Paid downloads tell the same story.

Recorded-music sales data collected by Nielsen show that 8 million digital singles sold in 2011, and 94% of them (7.5 million) sold fewer than 100 downloads each. 32% sold exactly one download. Meanwhile, 102 singles sold more than 1 million downloads each, making up 15% of all sales. Of the 8 million singles sold that year, 0.001% of them earned one-sixth of the revenue.

Think about it and it may seem hard to believe. On the tide of technical progress, the barrier to making music is no longer so high, and better ways of spreading it have pulled more people into writing it. The music we can hear is plainly more plentiful and more varied than before.

But when the moment to choose arrives, our taste narrows, almost against our will. And what has made us this way is not, in fact, us.

First, only a handful of stars can still get labels to spend money on them

Today's music industry is nowhere near as thriving as it was 20 years ago.

Take the United States. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) puts the industry's total U.S. retail revenue in 2015 at $7.02 billion. Measured in 2013 dollars, that figure stayed above $15 billion through the whole stretch from 1993 to 2002, and came close to $20 billion in 1999.

That is enormous pressure on record labels, which have had to cut spending to keep running — including what they spend on artists. This part of the budget is usually called A&R (artist and repertoire), and its job is to find, train and develop singers and performers.

A&R can account for a third or more of a label's total revenue, but the sum is now shrinking. Warner Music, for one, cut its A&R spending by 21.7% over the ten years from 2005 to 2014. Allow for inflation across that decade and the drop reaches 35.4%.

This is easy to understand. Music has a particular quality: it costs a great deal to make and relatively little to copy. Producing an album often runs to hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars, while pressing or reissuing a copy costs barely a dollar. That makes it rational to release fewer new records and put a bigger bet on one "hit" — and it saves money.

So labels no longer want to invest in many artists. They concentrate on the ones already famous, or with a strong chance of becoming famous. As Nick Gatfield, former CEO of Sony Music UK, put it: "You can't have 50 artists sitting on your long-term development roster — you'll go broke. You need some quick money, you need superstars."

Chris Anderson once argued that once consumers find products closer to their own taste, and can afford them, they stop paying attention to bestsellers. A smart company would then halt its spending on blockbusters and move its profit center to the "long tail" — the niche products a traditional brick-and-mortar business might never make. Here, though, the long-tail theory seems to have failed.

In fact, even YouTube, the long tail's most devoted believer, has begun to waver. Its executive Eric Schmidt said: "You can pursue a long-tail strategy, but you had better not ignore the head, because that is where you actually make money."

Stars have their own ways of stretching a song's run

Music used to be sold whole, as albums, and listeners heard every song at once. But an album often took two or three years, sometimes longer, to make, and during that gap artists and their songs gave listeners little reason to think of them.

iTunes opened up more possibilities. Albums no longer had to be sold in one piece; they could be broken into single tracks. That gave stars a way to keep their songs in public view for longer.

They release one single at a time, spacing them out, so people take far longer to hear the shape of the whole album — and stay curious about the next track.

In 2013, Justin Bieber did this with Journals, putting out one song a week for ten weeks; fans spent two and a half months getting to the full album.

Taylor Swift did it better. 1989, released at the end of 2014, is still selling today. For that album she put out a new music video every three months, lifting sales of the single while holding attention on the record. On January 15 this year, she released the video for "Out of the Woods."

It worked. In 2014, 1989 sold 5.7 million copies within two months, the best-selling album in the United States that year. In 2015, it sold nearly 3 million more.

A song's run gets stretched out this way, so however many choices sit in front of you, you end up keeping your attention on one artist and one album.

That rich, colorful internet has been narrowing people's musical choices all along

Look closely at how "Gangnam Style" became a hit and you can see how the internet shapes what we listen to.

In July 2012, PSY uploaded the "Gangnam Style" video to YouTube as soon as it was out, and the song drew no particularly warm response at first. Two months later that video was the most "liked" in YouTube's history, and the song had reached No. 2 on Billboard.

Social media fanned the flames. In late July 2012, Justin Bieber's manager Scooter Braun and the rapper T-Pain shared the YouTube link to "Gangnam Style" on their personal Twitter accounts and praised it. More stars joined in, imitating it and remixing it. That made it look like the most fashionable thing going: if you didn't join in, you were behind.

For most people, watching the "Gangnam Style" video, or even doing the horse-riding dance themselves, was not really a choice. Online, the crowd and the mainstream work on you every minute. "What is that thing everyone is talking about?" is a thought people have far beyond music.

Sometimes online chatter sells a record better than a label's big spending can. At the end of 2013, Beyoncé released her self-titled album BEYONCÉ with no promotion at all, not one teaser. The day after it appeared, its sudden arrival was the most-discussed topic on social media, and it ended up at No. 1 on Billboard's 2013 album chart.

Entertainment, music included, cannot escape being an experience good. A consumer really cannot judge whether a song is any good before listening to it, and in that situation, going by other people's recommendations, by popularity and by word of mouth is the easier route.

Communication theory has a name for one such phenomenon: the spiral of silence. When people air their views, and they see an opinion they agree with being widely welcomed, they join in eagerly, and that opinion gets stated and spread ever more boldly. But when they notice that an opinion draws no attention, or almost none (and sometimes gets piled on), they stay silent even if they agree with it.

Online, that spiral has closed around people's musical choices, and the pull of hit songs grows stronger here. Like it or not, if plenty of people are listening and plenty of people are recommending, sooner or later you will listen too.

Have you gotten lazy about listening to music?

Today's music players give people a reason to be lazy about how they listen. Much of the time, we can't be bothered to go find other songs.

In the era of records, listening took some effort. You could pick only one album at a time, and you found songs by stepping forward and back, one track at a time. If you suddenly wanted one particular song from another album — that really was a nuisance.

If you didn't want to spend the whole time swapping discs, you usually couldn't manage to listen only to the songs you liked.

Digital music changed all of that. On a portable player like an MP3 player or a phone, or in software on a computer, anyone could build a playlist. People could put every song they liked into a list of their own, where no other, "unnecessary" song would reach them.

That made listening easier on one hand, and on the other made what people listen to more monotonous. If the songs on that list satisfy you, then the other songs — which might sound good, or might not — hardly seem worth putting on.

At the same time, the platforms that supply the music are helping you get lazy.

These days you don't even need to pick a playlist out carefully — streaming sites and online music stores always have stacks of them ready for you to play straight through. For some people, having those playlists there has worn away part of the urge to go looking for music and choosing it themselves.

And if you like what you hear, you can save it, stored in your own user data. What you play and save then tells the platforms what you prefer, so they can recommend music on that basis — Pandora's "recommended for you" feature, for instance. With enough data, the music they recommend is nearly enough to satisfy you on its own. Which leaves you fewer chances to meet a new genre or a different style.

Perhaps these playlists and recommendation features do lead you to some new music now and then, but in the broad view, more people using the same playlist will certainly narrow what everyone listens to. The play counts shown on some of those playlists really are astonishing — a few come close to 2 million.

Faced with these "convenient" services, people's will to choose for themselves turns fragile. Even the laziness is out of their hands.

Some of the winners at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards:

(Click here for the complete list.)

Top Artist: Adele

Billboard Chart Achievement Award (Fan-Voted): Rihanna

Top R&B Song: The Weeknd, "The Hills"

Top Billboard 200 Album: Adele, 25

Top Male Artist: Justin Bieber

Top Country Song: Thomas Rhett, "Die A Happy Man"

Top Hot 100 Song: Wiz Khalifa ft. Charlie Puth, "See You Again"

Top Hot 100 Artist: The Weeknd

Top New Artist: Fetty Wap

Top Female Artist: Adele

Top Duo/Group: One Direction

Cover image credit: petspyjamas.com