On 13 November U2 release their first album in nine years, and I already know it will be the most important record of the week. I know because I have been told, repeatedly, by people who haven’t heard it either.
There is no scandal in that. U2 have spent fifty years earning a crowd, and announcing a world tour a month before the music exists is simply how a band of that size moves. What interests me is everything around them. Something like a hundred thousand new tracks reach the streaming services every day. By the time Carnaval De Luz arrives its week will already be spoken for, and the seven hundred thousand or so other records released alongside it will be competing for what is left of the light.
It would be easy to call this new. It isn’t. Radio had its programme directors, record shops had their end-of-aisle racks, and there was always a man in a good suit who knew which door to knock on. The gate has simply moved indoors. Britain’s competition regulator found that more than sixty per cent of streams go to 0.4 per cent of artists, and this year the BBC reported that most of what we play is at least five years old. The past is very good at keeping its seat.
Meanwhile we are all looking the other way. Almost every conversation about music now is a conversation about AI: how much of it there is, how to label it, how to keep it out. Fair questions, and the services are right to ask them. But a filter only removes what is bad. It cannot find what is good. Clear away the synthetic flood and you haven’t made room for the next great record; you have given the giants a tidier stage.
It tells you very little about what is good, and nothing at all about what is coming.
So where does great music get in? Not, I think, by chasing the door. Attention has the same temperament as sleep: the harder you try for it, the further it retreats. A chart is a map of what was loudest last week. It tells you very little about what is good, and nothing at all about what is coming.
Most of the music I love reached me sideways: a friend’s car, a support act I nearly skipped, a song played twice in a kitchen at one in the morning because nobody could quite believe it. That still happens here. Someone finishes a take, the room goes quiet, and a few weeks later a person who was in that room is playing it to someone who wasn’t. No one decided that. Nobody had to be let in.
There will always be someone standing at the door. It was never the only way into the house.
Roc Gardner
ESCAPE®, Pioneertown
Source: BBC News, “Why the charts are full of old songs, and so are your playlists”, October 2026. bbc.com