Does music need a new definition of frontline and catalog? Let’s ask George Orwell.
From fascism's rise in interest to frontline music on the streaming charts, a George Orwell essay offers some guidance about the meaning of words.
Rethinking the origin story of frontline and catalog.
There’s this popular narrative you’ll hear in prominent places from prominent voices in music, and it goes something like this: In 1991, Meat Loaf’s 1977 album Bat Out of Hell started dominating the charts again following a shift in format from vinyl to CDs. In order to prevent older music from reentering the charts, chartmakers like Billboard introduced the frontline and catalog paradigm: Only “frontline” albums released in the last 18 months (1.5 years) were eligible for the charts. Anything released before that 18-month cutoff was considered “catalog.”1
The complicated reality, according to Billboard’s Michaelangelo Matos, is that Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell did not actually chart on Billboard’s Top Pop Albums chart (I was a toddler, so if you have evidence to the contrary, please let me know), but it absolutely would have—along with a number of other older records—had retailers not been excluding older releases from their self-reported rankings. Once Billboard started incorporating real-time sales data from SoundScan, they actually created the catalog rule (and Top Pop Catalog Albums chart) to recognize how popular older music like Bat Out of Hell actually was. Ultimately, the frontline and catalog paradigm spawned from an interest in privileging data over hype.
Practically speaking, the birth of the frontline and catalog paradigm codified what was already a natural state of affairs: Label attention and marketing budgets went to new or frontline music, and old or catalog music became more of a passive affair for labels. Given the inherent limited capacity of physical record stores, triaging record promotion according to release date made sense at the time; in the streaming era, there is virtually infinite capacity and supply, meaning consumers have instant access to new music and old music all in the same digital storefront. As such, release date is arguably less important today, because there are no supply and capacity limitations, and it’s potentially all new music to a streaming listener—a hypothesis that viral TikTok hits have borne out in the last few years.
Given this format change, some (including myself) have pointed to examples like Fleetwood Mac and Kate Bush as evidence that we should redefine what frontline and catalog mean, i.e., extend and/or nuance the frontline and catalog paradigm. Unfortunately, we often get so hung up on words that we lose the thought those words were meant to represent in the first place.
Google searches prove Orwell right about the meaning of words.
Most people know George Orwell as the author of 1984, arguably the most widely read critique of totalitarianism. Most people don’t know Orwell as a passionate proponent of democratic socialism and grammar. Contemporary political discourse would probably put these two versions of Orwell in contradiction with one another, and that’s exactly why Orwell was such a zealot about the precision of language.2
In his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, Orwell identifies five main indicators of political and linguistic degradation:
Dying metaphors: Metaphors lose their meaning through overuse and a loss of visualization, which is why mixed metaphors and misspellings are so common, e.g., it’s toe the line and not tow the line. If you visualize the former, you see exactly why that metaphor works. If you try to visualize the latter, it doesn’t make any sense.
Operators, or verbal false limbs: Simple verbs like “reveal” offer more clarity and concision than verb phrases like “make itself known.”
Passive voice: Confusing the subject and the object of a sentence can diminish clarity and remove agency or responsibility from the subject. For instance, “a raise was given to the employee” vs. “the employee received a raise.” The former suggests the raise was a favor handed down from on high. The latter recognizes the employee’s agency in earning the raise.
Pretentious diction: When you use big words even though simple words will do just fine.
Meaningless words: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another…. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.”
This fifth indicator echoes on almost 80 years later. If we look at US Google search trends for the words “fascism” and “fascist” over the last 15 years, spikes in interest correlate with key periods of political turmoil, from the start of Donald Trump’s presidency to pandemic lockdowns and the 2022 midterm elections.
Interest in fascism is apparently bipartisan—i.e., both Trump opponents and lockdown opponents show interest in the concept—suggesting that each side thinks the other side is fascistic. So, not only does fascism remain meaningless, but Orwell would likely argue its meaninglessness is a reflection of today’s political divisiveness, with each side using the term for glorified namecalling and not as reasoned political critique.
Ironically, Orwell’s own name is invoked by all sides to accuse political enemies of being fascistic, anti-democratic, and totalitarian. And that speaks to Orwell’s larger point in this essay: imprecision in language is both a cause and an effect of the decline in political discourse: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” While Orwell breaks many of his own rules in this essay, the idea that language can both limit and expand thought is particularly valuable when considering an arbitrary music industry paradigm like “frontline” and “catalog” music.
Maybe we don’t need new definitions. Maybe we need a new paradigm.
In 2022, I co-authored a report for Chartmetric about the success of catalog music on TikTok. The data we analyzed suggested that the tracks generating the highest volume of activity on TikTok were released within the last 5 years. In other words, the Fleetwood Mac and Kate Bush examples were the exception and not the rule.
While TikTok virality does not necessarily equal meaningful streaming growth, the point we were trying to get across is that catalog doesn’t mean “from another decade.” In fact, it usually means 3 years ago. So yes, per Luminate’s findings, consumption of catalog music may be up year-over-year, but extrapolating that out to “consumers are abandoning new music for old music” is a hype-driven, though admittedly understandable, conclusion to draw.
Consumers may have equal access to old music and new music, but the streaming charts are still dominated by frontline releases. In keeping with the Pareto Principle3, 2022 and 2023 account for around 80 percent of charting tracks this year, while release dates between 1977-2021 account for only 20 percent of charting tracks.
You could make a very persuasive (and difficult to refute) argument that this sort of distribution is the very result of labels funneling their marketing budgets to frontline releases … but that’s what they’ve always done. Producing chart-topping hits is kind of their mandate, and frontline hits are still, well, hitting the charts. That said, charts represent only a sliver of the music that’s available on streaming platforms, and they are probably waning in influence. So, even if consumers aren’t necessarily abandoning new music for old music, they may be increasing their consumption of catalog music from the last few years and listening to the latest hits.
There is an increasing amount of chatter regarding whether labels know how to break artists anymore, and it’s certainly possible that the frontline and catalog paradigm is contributing to this anxiety. If so, then rather than contemplating the definitions of words alone, maybe we should be evaluating our thoughts as well. It’s certainly easier to call someone a fascist rather than engage with their ideas; it’s also easier to allocate marketing budgets according to a simple timeframe rather than let the data lead.
Don’t forget, the frontline and catalog paradigm developed out of a data-driven desire to recognize the popularity of older music. While the meaning of words may be malleable, the thoughts that precipitated them tend not to be, so it might be worth focusing less on release date and more on leading indicators of success. When something in your catalog is starting to show signs of life, follow The Sugarhill Gang’s advice: jump on it.
Information is abundant, and time is not—but that doesn’t mean we should only see the trees. The proliferation of information should help us see the forest.
The frontline and catalog paradigm has not always been defined by 18 months. When Billboard first introduced the Top Pop Catalog Albums chart, the cutoff was actually 24 months, i.e., 2 years. Billboard didn’t truncate that window until 2008, coincidentally (or not) when Spotify first hit the market: https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/new-chart-parameters-for-billboard-nielsen-soundscan-1314506/
There are plenty of issues with Orwell’s analysis, not least of which is the fact that language is always changing. The meaning of words is always in flux. That said, there is something to be said about maintaining clarity and precision of language and thought—especially in a world where everyone has their own conception of truth.
The Pareto Principle, or the 80-20 rule, is a mathematical phenomenon whereby 80 percent of output is determined by only 20 percent of input. In theory, if we examined the revenue generated by these charting tracks, 20 percent of them would account for 80 percent of the revenue.