Digital-evangelist-cum-curmudgeon Jaron Lanier was hawking his new book at the NY Times the other day, and this is what he had to say:

Sure enough, some musicians have done well selling T-shirts and concert tickets, but it is striking how many of the top-grossing acts began in the predigital era, and how much of today’s music is a mash-up of the old.

(OK, technically that’s John Tierney summarizing and paraphrasing Lanier, but they are of an accord.)

This is a familiar story, which is a polite way of saying it’s a mindless cliche. Sadly for the Chicken Littles, this particular story is ridonculously easy to evaluate against, y’know, facts.

Be-shambled as it is, the music industry is still big business, and where you have big business you have business watchers and reporters. This means we can discover who the top-grossing acts are with just a few clicks of the mouse. (Well, we can get a damned good proxy for the top-grossing acts, anyway.)[1]

Ah, but wait! There’s a trap, a slimy little trick that Lanier and his ilk might be exploiting. Forbes has a list of the top-earning musicians of 2009. Well, there’s an article that claims to be a list; in fact it’s just highlights from this theoretical list that may exist somewhere. The Forbes article does tell us that the top earners of the year were all old–decades old!–acts.

But lookie: “To compile the list of the year’s top-earning musicians, we considered earnings from album sales, touring, publishing and endorsement deals….”

Since the Eagles learned this trick, legacy super-artists have learned they can charge ticket premiums because their fanbase contains a big bunch of older, better-heeled customers. That definitely gives a boost, but it’s the “endorsement deals” that clinches it. Fame is capital; hold onto it long enough and it grows (and profits) exponentially. If we’re looking at total earnings and not current popularity, then it’s not at all surprising that older acts will top the list. This supports what Lanier says, but it’s orthogonal to what (I think) Lanier wants us to think he means.

Let’s flip it around a bit, cut right to the heart of the matter. Lanier wants us to look at the list of top-grossing acts, conflate “top-grossing” with “most relevant”, see the age of said acts, and then lament over how our culture has stagnated in the last ten years. (The birth of Napster in 1999 is usually taken by such critics to be the birth of the digital era.)

But you know what? We have a huge-ass data point smack in the center of the pre-digital, post-[birth of contemporary pop] era, a single musical moment in which the most relevant acts of the day were gathered together in a single room (more or less). January 28, 1985 saw the final recording session for “We Are the World”. The soloists, with year of first top-20 single noted parenthetically:

1. Lionel Richie (1975)
2. Stevie Wonder (1963)
3. Paul Simon (1965)
4. Kenny Rogers (1968)
5. James Ingram (1981)
6. Tina Turner (1961)
7. Billy Joel (1977)
8. Michael Jackson (1969)
9. Diana Ross (1964)
10. Dionne Warwick (1963)
11. Willie Nelson (1980*)
12. Al Jarreau (1981)
13. Bruce Springsteen (1980)
14. Kenny Loggins (1978)
15. Steve Perry (1982)
16. Daryl Hall (1976)
17. Huey Lewis (1982)
18. Cyndi Lauper (1983)
19. Kim Carnes (1980)
20. Bob Dylan (1965)
21. Ray Charles (1959)

Willie Nelson gets an asterisk because, despite being a well-known and high-charting country musician since the early 1970s, he didn’t hit the pop charts until 1980. I think it’s fair to exclude him from our ciphering.

This gives us an average “age” of 12.4 years with a standard deviation of 8.4 years. When we consider that about a quarter of the artists dated back to the very beginnings of their styles’ entries into popular consciousness, the situation looks even worse for Lanier’s thesis.

That’s the trouble with the cultural Ragnarok types: They’re ignorant of culture, ignorant of history, especially ignorant of cultural history, ignorant of the fact that they’re comparing the elite of their age cohort to the typical of today’s…bah, they’re just generally ignorant. And yet somehow they get column-inches in the paper of record, speaking engagements, publishing contracts, and pots of sweet, sweet money. Oh, and they’re unironically accepted as sages of our age. Ignorance, it seems, really is bliss.

[1] This is the point at which the original post went off the tracks. There was originally going to be an analysis of the average age of the top-selling acts of the last year, but then I found the Forbes article and realized that Lanier was either slimier or stupider than I’d originally assumed.