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39–Rick Beato, Pace Layers, and the Evolution of Music
26 Plays13 days ago
In this solo episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, Eric Pratum explores the decline of album sales in light of Rick Beato’s recent video on the best-selling albums of the 21st century. Rather than attributing the change solely to streaming or market fragmentation, Eric frames the issue through the Pace Layers model—offering a more nuanced explanation for why physical albums have faded and why that doesn’t mean music is in decline.
He walks through the origins of the album format, how it became embedded in our culture, and why innovations like streaming reshape not just delivery methods but how we define and experience music itself. This reflection goes beyond nostalgia to reveal what truly happens when old standards fade and new systems emerge.
Topics Explored:
- Why we’ll never again see albums sell like Adele’s 25 or Linkin Park’s Meteora
- The problem with comparing physical album sales to digital streams
- What Rick Beato gets right—and misses—about the music industry’s evolution
- The Pace Layers model and how it explains slow vs. fast change in culture
- How streaming disrupted not just formats, but the cultural foundations of music
- Why losing a familiar standard doesn’t always mean losing something meaningful
Links:
- Rick Beato’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lel_J1-zxmU
- For more episodes, visit: https://unfoldingthought.com
Join the conversation by emailing Eric at: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
Top Selling Albums and Certification Overview
00:00:02
Speaker
Hey, so Rick Beato recently posted about the top 10 best-selling albums of the century. And I'll give you a couple of clips here, but I encourage you to watch the whole video, which I've linked to in the description.
00:00:16
Speaker
Now, anything over 10 million sales is called a diamond record. A platinum record is a million sales and a gold record is 500,000 sales. For those of you that even remember what these RIAA ratings are from the distant past. Nowadays, for a single to be platinum has to have 150 million
Highlighting Major Album Sales
00:00:36
Speaker
streams. And to have a platinum album, you have to have 1.5 billion streams Coming in at number five, with 18 million units sold, is Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster.
00:00:48
Speaker
That featured the singles Bad Romance, Telephone, Alejandro, and Dance in the Dark, a massively big-selling record, which was one of the later ones released. We'll talk about that in a minute. That actually came out in 2009 on November 17th.
00:01:03
Speaker
Record number four is 25 by Adele, which came out in 2015. There's actually no record on this list that came out that recently. That's 10 years ago.
00:01:14
Speaker
Streaming was already happening by then. It's pretty amazing that this sold 23 million records. You call that Double Diamond. 10 million is diamond, 20 million is Double Diamond.
00:01:25
Speaker
That had the songs Hello, When We Were Young, Send My Love, and Water Under the Bridge on it, and is definitely the last record that will ever sell over 20 million copies. The only outliers are Lady Gaga in 2009 and then Adele in both 2011 and 2015.
00:01:42
Speaker
Another interesting thing is that if you take Adele's two records, 21 25,
00:01:49
Speaker
and you add them together, that equals 54 million records sold. In streaming terms, a platinum record is 1.5 billion streams.
Sales vs. Streaming: Market Changes
00:02:00
Speaker
So that would equal, in today's streaming numbers, 81 billion streams. That's insane. Just to give you a point of reference, Taylor Swift's Streams on Spotify, at least, I think are around 26 billion.
00:02:18
Speaker
That doesn't mean that people aren't selling vinyl and things like that, but there are no 20 times platinum, 30 times platinum records that are ever going to happen again.
00:02:33
Speaker
Okay, so the TLDR here is that the most recently published album on this list came out 10 years ago. But there's a bigger takeaway that some people might find odd.
00:02:45
Speaker
There will never again be an album that sells anywhere near as many copies as any of these have. From Enya's A Day Without Rain as the earliest album on this list, up through Adele's 25 as the latest album on this list.
00:03:00
Speaker
Now, you might think to yourself, well, wait a minute, Eric, with globalization, technology, connectivity, and any number of other things, there are more people listening to more total music than ever.
00:03:14
Speaker
So this can't be true. Or you think to yourself, so many more people can produce music now. So we have extreme long tail issues while there is greater and greater fragmentation in the market. So yeah.
00:03:29
Speaker
There's just not enough people interested in such a narrow range of musical options that an artist could sell that many albums again. And you would be sort of correct, but miss the real driver here.
00:03:42
Speaker
And I'll also say that Rick appears to attribute this to a lack of investment from labels, which is in truth an outcome of the true driver here that I'll talk about in a second.
00:03:57
Speaker
For people over maybe 30 or 40 years old, the album as a term or concept seems synonymous with music consumption. For many people, when they hear that there will never again be a platinum or diamond selling album,
00:04:13
Speaker
their mind interprets that as something like, well, people don't listen to as much music anymore. Or perhaps the stars of today are not as big as the stars of yesterday.
00:04:26
Speaker
But that's not the reality of the situation as it seems to be when Rick compares Adele's album sales to Taylor Swift's Spotify streams.
Evolution of Music Consumption
00:04:36
Speaker
Taylor Swift might have 20 something billion Spotify streams, but her top video on YouTube has 3.6 billion views alone.
00:04:46
Speaker
So comparing Adele's album sales to Taylor Swift streams in a single channel leads you to the wrong conclusion. The fact that no one will ever again sell as many copies of an album as, for example, Linkin Park's Meteora, and this includes Linkin Park themselves, who just released an album this year, can be better understood through the concept of pace layers.
00:05:10
Speaker
So here's where I get nerdy, but the concept is important for understanding what's really happening with music. The fundamental idea of pace layers is that they're aspects of the world, life, humanity, and so on that are foundational and change very slowly.
00:05:28
Speaker
Think for example of evolution, and then a step up from that are things like culture. These are the things upon which everything else relies. At the top level, you have things upon which nothing else relies.
00:05:41
Speaker
And as a result, they can change quite quickly. Fashion, for example. So the hottest styles of the season change, well, seasonally. But the next new thing is always coming out daily.
00:05:57
Speaker
Whether it becomes the next hottest style depends upon time. Okay, so let me tie pace layers back to record sales. Musical records in the form of flat discs were invented by Emil Berliner in 1887.
00:06:13
Speaker
He called this the gramophone, which is a term many people have heard but don't know the origin of, so there you go. The gramophone built upon Edison's phonograph, which was invented 10 years before that.
00:06:28
Speaker
The gramophone was part of the discontinuous process that is innovation. It was the outcome of a thought that was effectively, hey, what if we put music on the phonograph?
00:06:39
Speaker
And while it might seem obvious, it's important that I state that a physical album was far from widely accepted. The reason is that it was a test and there was no already accepted infrastructure, behavioral norms, standard ways of buying albums, and any number of other things.
00:06:59
Speaker
The gramophone was the outcome of what many entrepreneurs do. They ask a question that is, what if we did fill in the blank? Now, most startups fail, just like most science experiments fail.
00:07:15
Speaker
At the level of society or the world or life more generally though, we don't need to be concerned with the failures because we benefit from the success of the new innovations that succeed and then filter down and get accepted or align with these deeper pace layers upon which the higher levels sit and rely.
Cultural Impact of Albums
00:07:39
Speaker
So in the case of the album as a medium, it started as a what if at the level of fashion, according to this Pace Slayer analysis. It worked at the level of commerce or how individuals both transact with one another and also generally interact with the world.
00:08:00
Speaker
We were able to build infrastructure that supported it, from manufacturing, to supply chains, to training people to do the work, and more. And when you get to the deeper, more foundational levels, listening to multiple songs in a single package became culturally accepted, and at the level of nature, human beings have ears,
00:08:21
Speaker
We like music, music is transmitted through sound waves that we can receive and interpret, and probably a hundred other aspects of our nature. So now, the album is passing away.
00:08:33
Speaker
And it's easy to equate that with some statement about music passing away or popularity passing away, as I feel is 100% suggested by Rick's comparison of Adele and Taylor Swift.
Streaming Era and Music Norms
00:08:47
Speaker
But what has happened is that something that worked and eventually came to just be seen as a foundational element of life or culture or media or even just more narrowly music has simply been replaced as the new innovations and standards around streaming music have filtered down through the pace layers and become the new standard.
00:09:11
Speaker
So has much really changed with music? Well, the answer is yes and no. At the lowest pace layers, humans still like music, are capable of listening to information transmitted through sound waves, are willing to spend time and money on music, and more.
00:09:29
Speaker
But the new innovations that started at the level of fashion have replaced older standards that became unnecessary to hold onto once the new innovations became widely accepted.
00:09:42
Speaker
And so to the extent that music has changed, it has been that aspects of music have been impacted at those lower pace layers from how we purchase music to now delivering it via different channels to, for example, laws and regulations about music.
00:10:00
Speaker
I often find Rick's videos entertaining and I'm actually leading a workshop on pace layers next week at a conference. So this was a fortuitous time for his video to come up because we too often mistake the passing of something we view as foundational or a staple as something simply being lost.
00:10:19
Speaker
And yet, I guess it's lost in a way, but in many cases like this, a hole is not left in the world. The world and our standards are reshaped by the new innovations and norms, and those norms make the old standards no longer fit.
00:10:37
Speaker
If you have thoughts or comments, I'd love to hear them, and thank you for watching and listening.