Retro Trends Leave Us Stuck in the Past

The music industry has always focused on what’s next, but in recent years there has been a shift in focus to re-releases and remasters of older artists.

In the bygone era where music was primarily sold in physical mediums, this made sense. Money would stop flowing into the record label after fans bought all their favorite band’s music, so the label would always have to promote a new band to rake in more sales. 

This is similar to how the fashion industry operates. After buying clothes, a physical product, to fit the current trend, customers have no reason to spend more money, so new trends are introduced to spur further spending.

The music industry, though, has changed with streaming. Money isn’t made from physical sales of music, but instead from touring, merchandise, movies and cross-promotion with brands. Building followings around already well-liked music has become the most efficient way to sell the music industry’s new products.

Record labels of the past needed to promote what was new so customers would buy physical media to keep up with trends. Nowadays, they no longer need to take their chances on funding the artistic movements of youth — instead, executives have chosen to wring dry their proven modes of income, preying on the reliability of nostalgia.

Biopics of popular figures like Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Queen are created to fuel t-shirt sales and streaming revenue. We get watered-down depictions of these people, stripped clean of their flaws and ugliness to portray a false and hollowed-out version of the artist. 

Young, attractive actors are cast, and drug problems are swept under the rug to create a sterilized and sellable version of the past. 

Saturday Night Live’s Jan. 25 episode painted a bizarre picture of this concept when Timothée Chalamet performed two of Dylan’s songs to promote his recent biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” released Dec. 25.

The songs he played were recorded in 1965 and 1970, long before Chalamet was born, and the performance was made even more absurd by the fact Dylan is still alive and touring. 

We’re starved of art that represents our time. SNL used to be a stage for up-and-coming voices, but now it’s disconnected from the youth and yet another example of nostalgia-derived capitalistic endeavors, absent of anything challenging or novel.

Though Chalamet is only 29, his musical performance does represent youth culture and music. The songs he performed, written by a now 83-year-old, may have represented youth culture 50 years ago, but have become outdated. 

This is the favored method because there’s less financial risk in creating media based on what is already liked. Basing movies and merchandise off of old, established groups also allows those products to connect to larger markets because they appeal to multiple generations of people.

Chalamet’s first song, “Outlaw Blues,” is outdated enough he had to cut some of the lyrics. The line “I got a brown-skinned woman, but I love her just the same” was understandably removed. In 2025, the line is uncomfortable, but in 1965, before interracial marriage became legal in 1967, the song was on the cutting edge of progressive politics. 

Instead of modifying old art to fit our current situation, we should shift our focus to modern day art that lives and grows with us.

This is more risky for the music industry, which would rather rest on the crutch of proven profits.

But in the words of Bob Dylan, “If your time to you is worth savin’ / Then you better start swimmin’ / Or you’ll sink like a stone / Cause the times they are a-changin’.”