Marketing Monday Written by Jon for July 27th

It's harder than ever to become a superstar.

Let's be real, your odds have always been small. But in 2026, they're even smaller than ever, for at least two reasons.

1) You're competing against all the music that's ever been made.

You will find this hard to believe, but for most of human history, we haven't been able to pull up and stream any song that's ever existed on our iPhones.

Between the creation of the phonograph and the advent of the internet, it used to be that your selection of available music was pretty limited; if you wanted to hear a specific song, you had to own a physical copy of it or hope to hear it played on the radio. New releases mainly competed with other new releases for air time and record sales. The Beatles were rivals with The Rolling Stones, not Frank Sinatra or Mozart.

Today, for better and worse, everyone has every song ever made available at all times in their pockets. So not only is there more new music released every year, which makes the total number of available songs in the world look like this:

But it's also true that people are choosing, more and more often, to listen to older music rather than new music, so that streaming choices look like this:

Which only makes sense, because...

2) There are no longer many mainstream distribution channels for music.

Pop culture has fragmented.

For a few decades – the decades that produced the musicians most people can probably name – pop culture was well and truly popular culture. There was a mainstream: Everyone watched the same few TV channels, listened to the same few radio stations, and knew the same news. All of this meant that record labels could push a song to the big channels (via payola, but that's another story) and virtually guarantee that everyone in its target audience would hear it.

They could make a song familiar through sheer force.

Today, for better and worse, that's much harder to do. You can still spend money to break big – hey, Stella Lefty – but you have to strategically fire a barrage of bullets rather than just pressing the "Put it on MTV" button. Thanks to algorithms, there are now as many channels as there are people, and there are very few truly popular platforms left.

(There are still a few big platforms left: huge movie soundtracks, major festivals, major sporting events. But these things usually aren't much help for new artists. Good luck breaking a new artist at the World Cup in a stadium where everyone wants to see Shakira or Justin Bieber.)

The upshot is that, even with money, it's harder for record labels to break new acts, now. Because we're more likely to pay attention to things we're familiar with, and we're more likely to be familiar with older music that was distributed through mainstream channels.

(Two smaller reasons it is harder to make music big today:

• The world population is aging, which compounds the situation I've just described. In a world where more people are older, fewer new artists are likely to break through, because older people are even more likely to listen to older music.
• I think we've culturally devalued music by putting it into formats – like streaming and TikTok – that are inherently ephemeral and less conducive to deep attention.

But let's not chase those rabbit trails today.)

All of this to say that there are more old superstars than new ones; I'll go out on a limb and guess that a bunch of your favorite artists made it big before the internet was the main mode of music-listening and algorithms dominated distribution.

So, is there no hope you'll ever make it?

Don't be dumb. Of course there's hope. But it's not in your likelihood of becoming a global superstar (if it ever was). It's in your ability to connect deeply with the right people.

From here on out – or at least for the foreseeable future – I'm betting there will be fewer Taylor Swifts. But I also think there will be more middle-class musicians: Artists who make a living on the 1,000-true-fans model rather than the mainstream one.

It's harder to become a superstar now. But maybe that's good news.

– Jon

Jon Anderson Founder @ Two Story Media Surprisingly Good @ Being a Hater

🫆 100% Human Guarantee I wrote this, not AI. Today's random photo: This is the empty lot next to the cafe from which I'm writing this. It's overgrown with a crumbling stone building at the end. I hope it's haunted.

P.S. – Last week I wrote about my own insecurities with music after a week of recording in Nashville. You can read it here.