NextGen Merseyside
Youth Music’s new report, The Sound of the Next Generation, chimes loudly with our experience here in Merseyside.
It is no understatement to say that these are revolutionary times, technologically, politically and socially, and that young people’s musical lives have been transformed forever amid the tempest.
As a project manager and music mentor, I have observed at close quarters the shift in young people’s engagement patterns and seen in microcosm the picture painted by Youth Music at a national level.
Perhaps the clearest marker of change, as noted in the NextGen report, is the increasing redundancy of genre definitions and the use of music by young people as a tool to shape their moods.
This is not a wholly new phenomenon – as music lovers of all eras would attest – but has accelerated drastically with the rise of playlist culture and the congealing of artistic identities in the cauldron of machine-curated taste.
On the ground this can feel a tad vague. “What music are you into?” I asked a Year 8 tutee at a Sefton school. “Just calm stuff, really,” came the reply.
But what is calm? Which key is calm? Who are our captains on the sea of calm?
He couldn’t say. He just typed ‘calm’ into Spotify and went with the flow.
His classmates, similarly, showed scant attachment to genres, instrumentalists or artists, creating a discordant sense of opportunity and unease on the part of their tutor. Challenging them to come up with an artist on whom they could agree, can you guess which tousled troubadour they chose?
Looming large at the centre of Youth Music’s wordcloud of respondents’ favourite musicians, Ed Sheeran has been a unifying thread between the hundreds of young musicians we have encountered as a project since his emergence nearly a decade ago. Across all backgrounds and postcodes, his songs, sound and eclectic yet accessible style have cut through to young people in a way that no other artist has in recent times – and he shows no sign of going quietly any time soon.
Our experience further chimes with the report’s findings on young people’s longitudinal tastes. Older is emphatically better, where bands are concerned; a phenomenon explained in part by the new economics of the music industry and the trend towards investment in solo artists.
Staying with the wordcloud, it is telling just how few modern bands the present generation has to choose from. This is great news for ageing music leaders but begs the question to young people: where are your bands?
Are they out there shivering in the cold? Is this the calm before the storm? Or is the post-war popular combo going the way of the washboard?
This makes little odds to many young music makers, as the report points out, producing beats at home, writing raps on their phones, and building vibrant musical eco-spheres independently of tone-deaf schools.
How this disconnect is fixed eludes us still, but Youth Music’s recommendations for a 21st century music education light the fuse for a much-needed debate.