Warning: Spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn’t heard ‘The Ongoing History of New Music’ radio show/podcast series on music in the 21st century.
This weekend marks the finale of a 10-part Ongoing History of New Music series on the 100 most important things, events, moments, people and tech seen in music since the beginning of the millennium.
It’s been an interesting journey going back through the last 25 years. Making the list was difficult enough. But how to order things from 100 to one? What’s the most important of all the items on the list?
I thought long and hard about this. Was it music piracy? The death of David Bowie? The final Tragically Hip tour? The introduction of the iPod and smartphone? I wanted to end the series on a high note, but in the end, I had to go with a real downer. I apologize in advance, but I think you’ll see what I mean.
When the 2000s started, we paid between $10 and $20 for a single CD. To acquire this piece of plastic, we had to work X hours at our jobs to earn enough money to travel through time and space at a record store. Because music was so expensive to acquire, we were very particular about how we spent this money. Which artists deserved our financial investment?
We then returned home from the store and put the CD on the stereo. We listened to the album over and over again until we knew all the songs backward and forward. Hopefully, we ended up liking more of them than we hated. But if the balance went the wrong way, our financial investment in that artist was a failure.
Physical music libraries were also treasured possessions. Not only did they reflect our personalities, histories and emotions, but they were also expensive to assemble. You might know the pain of someone breaking into your car and making off with your precious CD binder.
Not anymore. Today, music flows like water. Just open up the streaming tap and here it comes in a never-ending gusher. The latest figures say there are 202 million songs available on any of the streaming music platforms, with about 100,000 new songs being uploaded every single day. That’s three million new songs a month and 36,000,000 a year.
This is too much. Way too much. The result is an oversupply of a product that costs nothing (or something very close to it) to the consumer. When that happens, the product is devalued in every conceivable way. And it has happened to music.
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People may insist they are passionate music fans and cannot do without it, but because we don’t have to pay for it, our basic relationship with music has changed.
Let’s take Spotify, for example. A monthly individual subscription is $12.69 in this country, less than the price of a single CD in the olden days. That monthly spend now gives us access to essentially every song ever recorded.
Don’t like the song served up by the algorithm? Hit the skip button with impunity. And a lot of people skip songs. According to some Spotify numbers I saw a while back, 25 per cent of users will skip an unfamiliar new song in the first five seconds. Another 29 per cent will skip it within 10 seconds. And a further 35 per cent will be gone by the time the song is 30 seconds old. Would anyone have done that if they’d paid full price for that piece of music?
Here’s another thing to consider: Are you listening to music or just hearing it? Listening involves concentrating on what’s coming into your ears and contemplating what the artist is trying to say and how the songs make you feel. Hearing is putting something on in your earbuds to soundtrack your walk to work. It’s also background music for work, focus, study and just to fill the silence.
No investment + no risk + today’s shortened attention spans + hearing vs. listening and the equation for the devaluation of music as both an art form and a commodity is complete.
Oh, we may still value music emotionally and it’s still very important when it comes to culture; it’s an essential part of our existence. But because we’re not paying for it like we used to, I postulate that we don’t regard it with the same reverence.
Little thought is also given to compensating the artists for their talent and labour. We often hear about music fans complaining that platforms like Spotify don’t pay out very much. But ask them if they’d be willing to pay more if it meant that artists would be paid better and their answer is “HELL, no!”
Now consider that many of those same people aren’t paying for their music at all. Because they use Spotify’s free ad-supported tier, they pay nothing at all for their music. In other words, they may love their music but not enough to pay for it.
For consumers, music has become a low-cost, low-margin commodity that requires plenty of money to make but provides little compensation in return. There is little indication that this situation is going to change any time soon. And it will continue to impact how music is made and by whom for a long, long time.
This — the devaluation of music — is my pick for the most important thing to happen to music so far this century. Sorry to be such a bummer.
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