You’re most likely to know the HAZEY if you’re on Tik Tok, where his single just got so big that it’s now being officially released by Sony Music. I’d say to applaud for this 17-year-old but you’ll want to use those fingers to google a few key terms before jumping in: Scouse. Drill. Balaclava. Love Island. ✨💨HAZEY💨✨

This headline looks like click bait but by the end of the read, it miraculously feels right. What you need to know: the market for new music is tiny and shrinking. The 200 most-played new tracks represent less than 5% of all streams right now, which is about half of what new music was pulling in three years ago. So investment firms are getting in bidding wars over old artists’ catalogs, and record labels are buying up old tunes instead of investing in new ones (though obviously people like HAZEY still happen).

That’s bad for artists trying to get their work heard. “The music industry has lost its ability to discover and nurture their talents,” writes from Ted Gioia, the music historian who published this on his Substack — we make money on feedback loops, not on breaking ground. But artist development aside for a minute, it’s also a timely thought exercise for the rest of the economy: when the demand isn’t for whatever is new, how do you monetize what already exists instead of continuing to push forward?

We’ll address that in a minute, but first, let’s recoup our hope in music: “Musical revolutions come from the bottom up, not the top down,” Gioia says — even if the algorithms won’t feed us anything revolutionary, you can bet a breakthrough is on its way, and it will happen somewhere unexpected, as it has time and time again. You tell me whether to file Tik Tok under “expected.”

Back on my question about monetizing the oldies, let’s take stock of the moment Tumblr is having — particularly among all the Zoomers drifting away from Meta. As friend-of-the-newsletter Kyle Chayka wrote in the New Yorker, that website hasn’t changed in *years,* and it’s precisely that analog reliability that keeps it feeling fresh to brains exhausted by the pace of the internet. The feed has no algorithm; details like post date and authors’ identities often stay shrouded; “It’s harder to be a brand” or even an influencer on there, so performative nonsense doesn’t sour the space. Being on Tumblr is like putting on vinyl and realizing you have to flip it halfway through, right around the time you’d have finally decided to try TalkSpace after its fourth ad interrupts your Spotify.

And you know what else? All that stagnancy still makes money. Tumblr says revenue is up 55% since July, and they’re about to juice it even further with ads targeted specifically at the fandoms hanging out on the site. “It can’t be growth at all costs,” according to the CEO. But they are growing, and growth usually taints the good, so head on a swivel, folks.

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