Everyone’s connection to music is different. Some generations started with vinyl, while others are just beginning with Musical.ly. Regardless of the era you were born into, we all may listen to the same thing but we interact with music in different ways.
A retrospective on music listening history
If one wanted to listen to music before 1975, you might have to flip a record every so often, manually skip between tracks and always have the next one ready. Record players became focal pieces of the living room. Music was a deliberate and conscious activity, enjoyed alone or in the company of friends. Albums were works of art and the listener was the curator. Vinyl music was delicate and stationary, causing the listener to forge a physical and emotional connection with their favorite record.
In the 1980’s, vinyl was replaced by cassette tapes when the Walkman was released. You could stuff a backpack full of cassettes to bring to a friends house, but collections were still limited to how many you could carry. Cassettes had a new trick: fans could not only buy music, but now had the ability to record mixtapes. For the first time, music could be tailored to the listener and it was portable.
Hunting down those rare vinyls or listening to a DJ spin bootleg mixes until sunrise was still a thing in the 1990’s, but now binders that used to carry your homework suddenly started filling up with mix CDs. The CD gave you the ability to burn mp3 files and listen to more music with better sound quality. CD burners in every PC gave people more power for creativity than ever before. The Napster generation had begun and music discovery started to shift. The freedom to share anything that was once digital and listen to it offline was now possible. As the internet became pervasive, the now defunct file-sharing sites such as Mp3.com and AudioGalaxy started to appear alongside Napster.
This is when and where my personal connection to music truly began. iTunes was an incredible way to store all of my audio files. I would discover music on Napster, add it to my iTunes, burn CDs to share with friends, or load it into my iPod to carry around with me. I would spend hours downloading music, listening and pruning, and then putting together playlists that I knew certain people would enjoy. I constantly had friends asking for this track or another copy of that CD. Music was still a communal experience that could be shared with countless individuals. Burning CDs allowed music lovers to share the weekly catch with (less passionate) friends through a physical medium.
My love for music continued to evolve together with the progression of technology and music — suddenly there existed an entire world of music blogs with endless amounts of musical content. Each blog had their own perception, their own musical flavors, and best of all…. it was free. All of a sudden, there were concerts that I had to go to and my iTunes library was growing exponentially. At this time in my life, music was solely about finding the perfect track and then finding someone to share it with. I don’t think I ever considered if the artists I was listening to were even getting paid.
Where are we now?
That timeline brings us to the current state of music today. How many readers pay $9.99 a month for access to ‘every song on the planet’? Where do you go to find new music? If you were to spend hours building Spotify playlists but decide to cancel your account, what happens then? You would lose everything.
Music lovers pay more today than ever before for music with the average consumer spending $120 per year. Yet our connection to it is dissolving. Somewhere along the years, the listeners have lost control over how they connect with music. Through the digital evolution of music, sites have started to become concerned with keeping the accessibility of their content scarce. Blogs no longer allow free downloads, and artists have moved over to Soundcloud, or even worse, an online streaming service that required yet another registration.
I no longer need to own music and that is okay, but when I start to lose the ability to share if you’re not on Spotify or Apple Music, my recommended playlists amplify the echo chamber that is social media — I wonder how we got to where we are today.
After all, how can an algorithm suggest a song that is completely different from anything I’ve ever heard. How do I translate that to something to gift someone? If I wanted to burn a CD off a Spotify playlist, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. When was the last time you opened Deezer and said, “I am going to search for an artist I have never listened to and I want his second album”?
It doesn’t happen. Instead, we rely on recommendations from machines, playlists curated by Bieber’s publicist, or worse — a passive like from a friend. Music consumers today have a pretty good deal — paying so little for so much. It would take over 283 years to listen to everything on Apple Music.
Streaming services have disassociated me with what made me fall in love music. The full cycle of discovery — searching, downloading, listening, and sharing. It’s been augmented with poor attempts at automation, leaving users disconnected.
As my generation gets older, we’re not going to be able to open our Spotify playlist and go back fifty years. We are not going to be able to pull out crates of records and know they still sound great. Even though the world is going digital, we cannot lose our connection to music.
I know you all must be thinking, there must be a solution. What if we had a digital music locker that we could own, control, and no company could delete? At Ujo Music, that’s what we’re building. A persistent artistic identity not only for musicians but for the fans as well. Right now, artists are disenfranchised, unable to retain and enforce ownership over their works, unable to get paid fairly. However, as we explored this problem we realized it’s not a one way street. Ownership has been stripped away from both sides of the music industry, consolidated into the hands of a few. Isn’t it time we took that power back?
After all, where does your music live?
This article was written by Jesse Grushack, who leads product on the Ujo team. If you’d like to discuss some of the ideas in this blog post, feel free to reach out on Twitter or Jesse@ujomusic.com.
