Is there such a thing as new and old music?

I read a tweet from Doom Trip Records saying there's no such thing as old music, just music you've heard and music you haven't.

This really resonated with me and got me thinking. From a conventional perspective, of course there is such a thing as old music. Classical music is around 400 hundred years old (more if you include medieval and renaissance periods); Big band is around 90 years old, rock and roll around 60 years old and rave is pushing 30.

The first point to consider is what is music? I've previously written about 'real' music vs the music industry on my blog and to be fair it's one of the hardest things to explain concisely and without ambiguity.

Stanley Kubrick once said 'The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it.' Presumably he was talking about film but the principle is the same for music. It's about making a connection with the listener, evoking some sort of emotional response.

So this means that we can rule out a lot of popular music. I'm not saying all popular music but the sort that gets played on the most commercial of radios, the sort that you have to listen to and buy now, the sort of music that if you don't listen to it, you are not on trend and what you are listening to - although the listeners of this type of music won't care - is most likely rubbish because they haven't heard of it. If you listen to this music in six months, that won't count because it's out of date. This is more of a product than music and one with a very short shelf life to be bought and consumed at a specific moment in time.

Another factor is the changing landscape of the music consumer. Even in the relatively short period of about 20 years, there's been a huge shift from physical only media of tapes, CDs, and vinyl to digital and streaming services, both paid for and free internet radio. Interesting we are now seeing a resurgence in physical media such as vinyl and tape. This has also been accompanied by a rise in technology that makes releasing music easy and cheaper. There has been a huge increase in the number of releases partly driven by the fact it is now a relatively easy process for artists to produce pro-quality sounding music. self-release and promote themselves and their work on social media. The downside is because anyone can do it, everyone is doing it making it very difficult to get your music heard.

And this is why we need to think differently about music and stop applying timescales because they are irrelevant. There is so much being released it is impossible to keep up to date with every release, even if you're only listening to a specific style. Thinking about music in terms of music you've heard and music that you haven't is a much more appropriate way to approach it.

There's so much great music out there to be discovered. Some may well have been recorded a number of years ago but if you've never heard it before, it's new to you and that makes it new music. Similarly if it takes a while to get round to listening to a release, it doesn't matter because it will be new to you whenever you listen to it.