Is listening to music even cool anymore? Sure, everyone has their "workout playlist" or their "study playlist", but how many people really deep dive into things these days? Sadly, I think that video games have replaced music. I see kids having the same deep emotional attachment to certain games that their parents once had to certain albums. It's hard to compete with that dopamine rush.
Perhaps you are right that music simply isn't getting the same respect it has in the past. A similar situation prevails in the world of poetry, or so I'm told. Interesting perspective on video games—I will have to think on that further. I've often thought of video games as an aspect of lifestyle aesthetics and a certain conception of "the good life" but I've never thought of them as being a replacement for music.
I'm on the fence about whether video games can be considered art. There are a few that I think are beautifully crafted and conceived, but is that enough to make something art? It's an interesting question.
In my opinion, video games are indeed an art form, or at least a legitimate artistic medium, but one that just hasn't realized its potential. As far as I know, there are no Hitchcocks or Truffauts in the world of video games. The industry is thriving, but there are no big fish working within it who have something profound to say through the medium. At this point in its history (again, as far as I know) the video game industry does not attract philosophical, literary types.
Interesting reflections! Providentially, I was also reflecting on music yesterday.
I purchased my first 45 (turntable speed, not caliber) in the early '70s and my first 33 (album) shortly thereafter. We occasionally listened to my grandparents' old-even-then 78s. I would record with cassette tapes via a microphone dangled over my AM radio, but the quality was terrible.
As such, I recall my music consumption habits (and thinking) being shaped by:
1) Awareness of imperfection, spoilage, and scarcity, and thus that one's experience was bound to be fleeting. Vinyl wears. Tapes break and degrade. I recall being fussy about cleaning records for dust, learning how to set the turntable needle super-carefully so not to scratch the record (this was before automatic tone arms were common). I got peeved if someone ran across a room, skipping the record, perhaps permanently. In nominal dollars, a "single" cost roughly a dollar... same as today. Which means that in today's (real dollar) terms a single (or any amount of music) cost many times as much as now.
2) Tight ties tie to time and location and thus the necessity to negotiate for playing resources. A few folks I knew had eight-track tape players in their cars, but everyone knew the format was doomed and that the quality was mediocre, and so therefore so was the selection. Headphones were wired. My fam had one turntable, one set of speakers, one set of headphones, and one cassette tape player. (We were upper-middle-class.) The resulting dynamic was like getting ice time for hocky or pool time for swimming. You took what you could get. Back then, a decade before the Sony Walkman, radio was the main portable format and that meant waiting and waiting and waiting until your song came on.
It strikes me that the character qualities all of this paucity required of us--patience, care, forbearance, recognition of others' needs, awareness of the fragility of things in this world, thankfulness for getting a modest amount of listening time for what one enjoyed--are great losses which have also degraded our cultural and familial cohesion.
Those are very good points. Along with many other things, the experience of listening to music has suffered as a result of our age's continuing atomization.
I have a similar experience as yours about having to share the music. In our house we have a Spotify duo account, but several of my kids are old enough to want to listen to their own music. So we have to take turns and negotiate with each other. That's a good thing.
Great view on the future of streaming, and one I think more avid music listeners are considering in their day to day.
In my music listening journey I have considered using Youtube Music and Spotify together to navigate as Spotify tends to catalog in genre and Youtube Music can play videos, live performances, personal uploads or more unofficial or foreign pieces in a playlist format as well as create playlists and generate playlists like Spotify. If my listening searches were not as cataloged on Spotify I could see myself just using Youtube Music but there are some more personal touches that in my opinion make Spotify a worthy streaming endeavor.
I am constantly refining my searching habits. Streaming often feels like staring into a blank space that needs more human intuition, and as the web seems to shrink to a predominantly more marketable space I think a lot of great art and artists will continue to slip through the hands of even the most curious of listeners.
Your future predictions on music sharing and spaces of discovery do sound enjoyable and possible! I agree that playlists and intimate sharing pretty much beat any other form of discovery.
Yes, Spotify certainly works very well for what it does; the temptation to use it poorly is rather strong in my case, and I have to deliberately choose to give music the attention it ought to deserve. I also use Youtube for some things, especially for more avant / experimental approaches towards music; and, of course, for live performances.
I thought about attentiveness in music while listening this morning and you are so right, it is easy it seems to passively listen to music and that does dampen the quality of the experience, challenging the ears and brain to experience the full impact of a song is certainly a worthy skill to practice ty
Fripp, Bruford, King Crimson, and Yes? You should talk to my husband; you have similar musical tastes! I get excited every time I see such artists mentioned online because I know he'd get a kick out of it too. I don't see them come up often!
Also, I respect your daughter's affinity for 21st Century Schizoid Man. I can only hope my own future children will have such good taste. A phenomenal song from a phenomenal album by an amazing band
My experience with music is pretty eclectic, and only goes back to the CD era. I recall setting foot in a dedicated music store once, when I was a young kid. Beyond that, all of my music was transmitted from online music retailers or via CDs onto an MP3 player or iPod, and later, on my Spotify account or the cell phone app for the same.
My personal musical tastes are uncouth and rough, ranging from superhero film soundtracks to classical hymns to the music of U2. I confess not to having given much thought to how I approach the experience of listening to and enjoying music. Heck, my experience listening to live music is mostly limited to suffering through my old church's insufferable rock 'n' roll worship music. Ay yi yi...
Is listening to music even cool anymore? Sure, everyone has their "workout playlist" or their "study playlist", but how many people really deep dive into things these days? Sadly, I think that video games have replaced music. I see kids having the same deep emotional attachment to certain games that their parents once had to certain albums. It's hard to compete with that dopamine rush.
Perhaps you are right that music simply isn't getting the same respect it has in the past. A similar situation prevails in the world of poetry, or so I'm told. Interesting perspective on video games—I will have to think on that further. I've often thought of video games as an aspect of lifestyle aesthetics and a certain conception of "the good life" but I've never thought of them as being a replacement for music.
I'm on the fence about whether video games can be considered art. There are a few that I think are beautifully crafted and conceived, but is that enough to make something art? It's an interesting question.
In my opinion, video games are indeed an art form, or at least a legitimate artistic medium, but one that just hasn't realized its potential. As far as I know, there are no Hitchcocks or Truffauts in the world of video games. The industry is thriving, but there are no big fish working within it who have something profound to say through the medium. At this point in its history (again, as far as I know) the video game industry does not attract philosophical, literary types.
Interesting reflections! Providentially, I was also reflecting on music yesterday.
I purchased my first 45 (turntable speed, not caliber) in the early '70s and my first 33 (album) shortly thereafter. We occasionally listened to my grandparents' old-even-then 78s. I would record with cassette tapes via a microphone dangled over my AM radio, but the quality was terrible.
As such, I recall my music consumption habits (and thinking) being shaped by:
1) Awareness of imperfection, spoilage, and scarcity, and thus that one's experience was bound to be fleeting. Vinyl wears. Tapes break and degrade. I recall being fussy about cleaning records for dust, learning how to set the turntable needle super-carefully so not to scratch the record (this was before automatic tone arms were common). I got peeved if someone ran across a room, skipping the record, perhaps permanently. In nominal dollars, a "single" cost roughly a dollar... same as today. Which means that in today's (real dollar) terms a single (or any amount of music) cost many times as much as now.
2) Tight ties tie to time and location and thus the necessity to negotiate for playing resources. A few folks I knew had eight-track tape players in their cars, but everyone knew the format was doomed and that the quality was mediocre, and so therefore so was the selection. Headphones were wired. My fam had one turntable, one set of speakers, one set of headphones, and one cassette tape player. (We were upper-middle-class.) The resulting dynamic was like getting ice time for hocky or pool time for swimming. You took what you could get. Back then, a decade before the Sony Walkman, radio was the main portable format and that meant waiting and waiting and waiting until your song came on.
It strikes me that the character qualities all of this paucity required of us--patience, care, forbearance, recognition of others' needs, awareness of the fragility of things in this world, thankfulness for getting a modest amount of listening time for what one enjoyed--are great losses which have also degraded our cultural and familial cohesion.
Those are very good points. Along with many other things, the experience of listening to music has suffered as a result of our age's continuing atomization.
I have a similar experience as yours about having to share the music. In our house we have a Spotify duo account, but several of my kids are old enough to want to listen to their own music. So we have to take turns and negotiate with each other. That's a good thing.
Great view on the future of streaming, and one I think more avid music listeners are considering in their day to day.
In my music listening journey I have considered using Youtube Music and Spotify together to navigate as Spotify tends to catalog in genre and Youtube Music can play videos, live performances, personal uploads or more unofficial or foreign pieces in a playlist format as well as create playlists and generate playlists like Spotify. If my listening searches were not as cataloged on Spotify I could see myself just using Youtube Music but there are some more personal touches that in my opinion make Spotify a worthy streaming endeavor.
I am constantly refining my searching habits. Streaming often feels like staring into a blank space that needs more human intuition, and as the web seems to shrink to a predominantly more marketable space I think a lot of great art and artists will continue to slip through the hands of even the most curious of listeners.
Your future predictions on music sharing and spaces of discovery do sound enjoyable and possible! I agree that playlists and intimate sharing pretty much beat any other form of discovery.
Yes, Spotify certainly works very well for what it does; the temptation to use it poorly is rather strong in my case, and I have to deliberately choose to give music the attention it ought to deserve. I also use Youtube for some things, especially for more avant / experimental approaches towards music; and, of course, for live performances.
I thought about attentiveness in music while listening this morning and you are so right, it is easy it seems to passively listen to music and that does dampen the quality of the experience, challenging the ears and brain to experience the full impact of a song is certainly a worthy skill to practice ty
Fripp, Bruford, King Crimson, and Yes? You should talk to my husband; you have similar musical tastes! I get excited every time I see such artists mentioned online because I know he'd get a kick out of it too. I don't see them come up often!
Also, I respect your daughter's affinity for 21st Century Schizoid Man. I can only hope my own future children will have such good taste. A phenomenal song from a phenomenal album by an amazing band
Cool! Glad to hear of a fellow aficionado. Fripp & co. are indeed amazing.
My experience with music is pretty eclectic, and only goes back to the CD era. I recall setting foot in a dedicated music store once, when I was a young kid. Beyond that, all of my music was transmitted from online music retailers or via CDs onto an MP3 player or iPod, and later, on my Spotify account or the cell phone app for the same.
My personal musical tastes are uncouth and rough, ranging from superhero film soundtracks to classical hymns to the music of U2. I confess not to having given much thought to how I approach the experience of listening to and enjoying music. Heck, my experience listening to live music is mostly limited to suffering through my old church's insufferable rock 'n' roll worship music. Ay yi yi...