Music consumption vs. experience

Ever since the Beatles, music has been on a path of consumption rather than experience. I mean, it's really the Beatles that started what we think of as "pop music," so, as with so many other things, it all comes back to them. Sorry, guys, but I guess it comes with the territory. Remember Pink Floyd? Or Grateful Dead? People would wait and wait and wait until they finally had that vinyl, probably the one record they would get that month, or even longer. They’d take it home and either they’d crank it on their stereo or they’d put on their headphones with the curly wire and drift away, enjoying every second of the music. Maybe they’d gather all their friends to listen to the record and be blown away together.

Now, people download music from musicians they’ve never heard of, from people they’ve never met, dozens at a time, hundreds in a day, so much music that they forget everything they’ve downloaded and don’t even listen to all of it. Even average computer owners and internet users have songs easily numbered in the thousands. Five Thousand, ten thousand, fifty-thousand songs. Before the late nineties, an A&R rep or collector like John Cusack’s character from hi-fidelity, could scramble all his life to assemble the most staggering collection of music he could, and he would still never come close to the number of tracks some sixteen-year-old in Indiana has. Cusack’s character could arrange his entire album collection in the order he procured them (autobiographical), while the kid in Indiana hasn’t even listened to every album he has.

Back in the day, there were, like, ten bands. And you were a fan of maybe two or three of them, and you were a die-hard fan, and if you lived during that time, you’re probably still a fan. Now, anyone can record a record for maybe a thousand bucks, and they don’t have to package it in any way; they just put it online. Kids are exposed to ten new bands everyday, often bands that they like, at least to some extent, with the help of things like Pandora and last.fm. And they’ll post links to the band on their myspace, or become a fan on Facebook, or tweet about how “OMG Waking the Cadaver is teh shizz. TOTALLY CEREAL LOL”

But the chances are that these kids won’t like that same band this time next year. They’ll listen to the band, use the band, and then throw them away.

I single out “kids” because it’s generally the youth that support bands the most, especially smaller bands and in live settings. It’s also kids who change their interests and identities over and over again.

But all of this has just really changed the way music IS today. It’s made it grow artistically into things that are sometimes genius and sometimes ridiculous, and both ends of the spectrum start with the same potential for exposure, and the music gets out there, good or bad. That would be a good thing, except it’s made us value music less and less. This is far beyond pirating music, because it’s not even really about ownership, but accessibility. There’s not a whole lot of difference between having a song on my hard drive and having to look it up on the internet. It’s out there, almost all of it, any time I want. Youtube, myspace, last.fm, I can hear it when-the-hell ever. So is one song, or one album, or even one artist as important to me as they would be to a music fan twenty years ago? Absolutely not. Most bands, I wouldn’t even notice if they were gone. There’d be a dozen bands that sound just like them—and I mean that, just like them—TOMORROW.

I hear people now saying that they listen to “everything.” Most of the people I know who have said that, it comes off kind of ignorant, because I’ll play them a genre of music that, for one, they didn’t even know existed, and for two, they hate it. Loathe it. And that’s fine, but it sure does poke holes in your assertion of listening to “everything.” Because I bet I could find a half-dozen other genres that would make you cringe, too. Just because you listen to top 40 stations and you like everything you hear doesn’t mean that you like “everything.”
There are some people, however, who listen to almost everything. And I think these people are in many cases a symptom of what music as consumption (as opposed to experience) is doing to us. These people don’t like all of that music. They can’t just flip a switch from Ne-Yo to August Burns Red to Madonna to MGMT to George Straight to Daft Punk to Johnny Cash to Lady GaGa to Cannibal Corpse to Nickelback (okay no one likes Nickelback anymore, whatever) to Radiohead to Anberlin (of course the list goes on). These people don’t like all of this stuff. What it is, is they get a thrill out of hearing something NEW. They experience a kind of relief that approaches elation when they finally discover music, no matter how bizarre, tasteless, boring or inane, that doesn’t sound totally familiar to them.

Mass consumption of music is destroying identities, even as fierce marketing, aimed at music aficionados, attempts to sell identities.