The Stranger Things Effect: How new media is drawing Gen Z and Alpha's attention to aging media

For years now, we’ve all seen the effects that new media has on younger generations – this is not a new concept. My generation was shaped by movies like Forrest Gump, Wayne’s World, and The Breakfast Club. Even the more recent Guardians of the Galaxy appropriately paid homage to an older generation of groundbreaking music. Without family nights, sitting down watching films with brilliant soundtracks that fit the scenes like avocado on toast or oatmilk and coffee – where would we have learned about oddly specific works of musical genius that surely would’ve garnered far more attention had the US been paying less attention to free love, high-quality drugs and landing on the moon, and more to a dance-app for teens. What have we become?

Well, I’m glad you asked. Whilst on my empirical quest to answer this age-old question – I turned to none other than the magic that is Kate Bush. What does this 66 year-old English pop-artist have to do with the effects of new media on younger generations you ask? The short answer is… everything. According to Luminate (formerly Nielsen Soundscan) Kate earned a Swift 2.3 Million in the first month following Stranger Things’ season 4 release. Now, you’ll notice two things about this sentence if you’re keen. Yes, I did capitalize Swift. Whenever I refer to money from this point forward, you can assume I’m referencing Taylor Swift’s bank account directly, because I’m sure she had a hand in this. And number two, yes, you read that correctly and I bet the three of you that haven’t seen the show are thinking – she must’ve been the main actress. No, my lovely bunch of rock-sheltered shut-ins – this woman had exactly 1 track (Running up that hill) featured in 1 episode of the 8 episode season and it sky-rocketed her into territory she had not seen before including the number 1 song in far too many countries to list – 37-freaking years after its original release.

Kate Bush not only created hope for a new generation of mediocre English songwriters with hopes of becoming a viral hit in 2059 – but, she also solidified the fact that our world as we know it has changed and there are dollars that can be squeezed out of the strangest places if you have a bit of talent, luck, and happen to kick fast enough to keep yourself above the surface of the lexical ocean for 40 years. Now, films, shows, and the TikTok have created opportunities for the tiniest of songwriters to grasp at virality or hit it big again with a new generation of appreciators. Just look at what Deadpool / Wolverine did for Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” Billboard reported that the song had 1.66 million streams in just the first week of the film’s release. In comparison, the track was routinely hitting roughly 500,000 streams a week prior to the #1 film’s release. Not too shabby either, but tripling your streams in a week will be able to afford you all the plastic surgery money can buy.

I think we can all agree that there are singers, songwriters, bands and tracks that justifiably beg for attention and will never see it, and others that will be brought to the light in the coming years and held up by future generations like a crowd-surfer at a Green Day concert – then promptly dropped on their heads about 12 weeks later. Music of the 70s, 80s, 90s and early 2000s does have a nostalgic feel to it because it wasn’t molested in the studio. It will always bring with it the notion that most of it was raw, less diluted, and the musicians recorded because they possessed true talent – not enough money to purchase a recording studio and stream out of their house.

I’ll always promote more CCR, 80’s ballads, heck even some late nineties punk cause a stir in new media that will trigger some feels in new brains – and I think we can expect more of it with a new wave of Millenial directors coming in as well as social media becoming a breeding ground for rediscovering one-hit-wonders and deep-cuts from your parent’s generation. Let’s embrace this together, and watch as obscure artists from 1991 get rich, shall we? Oh, and I’m officially coining his phenomenon, the “Stranger Things Effect.” All royalties can Swiftly be directed to me.