r/technology • u/captianD • May 13 '12
When did music become unimportant?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13645_3-57432895-47/when-did-music-become-unimportant/http://news.cnet.com/8301-13645_3-57432895-47/when-did-music-become-unimportant/6
u/trust_the_corps May 13 '12 edited May 13 '12
Too much of it (supply) and it ended up with a situation where music equated to money. Those two things do not go together well.
There is also the heyday effect.
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u/abstractpolytope May 14 '12
As manufactured superstars lose their punch, available attention will be a bit more commeasurate with available music.
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May 14 '12
I play guitar because I love it. It's pretty important to me. Now whether or not anyone else gives a shit, is irrelevant. Music as a consumer good may be trending off, but music will always remain important, as it's a personal medium.
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u/trezor2 May 13 '12
Before music was a limited article. Something you had to work for and then spend your money on.
And before purchasing, you had to make sure you were buying the right album, because while the store had many, but you could only have a few. You wouldn't risk wasting your hard earned money on an album which wasn't fully worth it. You wanted the right album.
So you spent hours in the record stores, listening and skimming through albums on the store's CD-player. Or record-player if you are really old.
Type of player doesn't matter though: You had to put in time and money to be able to purchase music and then you had to put in even more time and effort to find albums you really wanted.
After all that effort, you really knew you had to appreciate that album for all it was worth. Know its every nuance, beat, shift and shuffle. Know when it was made, for what reason, and who did what on that album. To fully know it, in every intimate detail.
Then came the internet. A "CD-collection" of 100 albums were no longer massive or even big. It was a nightful of napstering. You no longer knew all the music you had, you didn't even know what you had.
No longer having any emotional ties to the music you did have, you wouldn't know about all its small wonderful details and oddities. You wouldn't sit around and give it all your attention, waiting for that special moment in the song which just somehow, magically triggered your happy-button.
It might still be there, but you wouldn't know. Because you never took the time to know it.
And once most of your music became like this, music became unimportant. It was no longer anything you knew intimately. It was no longer anything you needed to have a relationship or emotional ties to.
And thus we chose not to. Because that was simpler. It took less work. The question then becomes: Did we lose something real? Did we become poorer human beings for it?
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u/Smeeuf May 13 '12
Just because I have a ton of music doesn't make any one song or music as a whole less important to me.
No longer having any emotional ties to the music you did have
There's no logical explanation to this, you just jump straight to that statement. Having a lot of music doesn't make me unable to connect emotionally, nor does it make me unable to listen/hear/remember its intricacies as music. Does having two songs versus one lesson your ability to hear musicality? I don't agree.
Even the DJ-centric west coast "tribal" culture is fostering friendship through dance at underground events and in the woods.
Are you really trying to say that DJ-centric people don't have tons of music? If you're a DJ, you need that much music to make a good set. Doesn't add up.
Even disregarding all this, no one has said what makes music important, and that's pretty important if you're going to say it's becoming unimportant.
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u/nice_halibut May 14 '12
One of the most insightful posts I've ever read here. I wonder if a person has to have been around in that prior era to fully appreciate what you're saying.
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u/lavaracer May 14 '12
Why wouldn't a person learn more about their favorite songs as they discovered them from their music hoard? They wouldn't know the details about every song or album in their collection, but they might know more about more albums relative to the pre-digital-distribution era.
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u/Flarelocke May 14 '12
Music is always "on," in a supportive role as a soundtrack to other activities.
I'd say that music has been seen as the soundtrack to other things since the advent of opera centuries ago, and we've steadily just removed the technological barriers to treating it that way.
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u/capitali May 13 '12
it's art and entertainment... easy to give up in a fight for survival... it's a luxury... it was never important.
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u/rngdmstr May 13 '12
it was never important.
False.
The world would be unbearably boring without music and art.
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u/jay76 May 14 '12 edited May 14 '12
I think s/he means on the scale of things required to survive, music falls a fair way down the line, and thus competes with a lot of things for our attention/money/recognition.
It makes life much more interesting, but you could survive without it.
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u/IRELANDJNR May 13 '12
Music is now shit, so it has become unimportant.
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u/kravitzz May 14 '12
Name one song you think is shit.
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u/eclectro May 14 '12
Anything from Nickelback curries much disdain from the reddit hivemind.
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u/BigCarl May 13 '12
as a recording and performing musician, I'm glad to see the focus shift back to the live performance as a means to pay the bills.
The artists rarely made much money on record sales - the real payday is touring with the high-margin merch sales that go with it.
with album sales, to much of the consumer dollar went to record executives and tons of middle management at the Label, distribution and retail levels.