Most people's musical taste is stuck

You wouldn't eat instant mac & cheese for every meal, this would make your body very sick. So, why do the musical equivalent to your mind?

mid-12th C, vellum illuminated manuscript by unknown artist. Here, the damned are locked in (or freed from) an open animal mouth by an angel, the hellmouth is simultaneously the entrance to hell and part of hell itself. The crush of bodies, which would become a motif in later depictions of hell, also alludes to the idea that the damned will be many while the righteous will be few.

I came across an interesting story the other day on the statistical analysis of when “we” (read: many of you) stop finding new music. As someone who not only writes original music but constantly seeks new artists and creative works (I share some of the cool ones I find here, trying to do my part) it’s astounding to me others live in a self-imposed state of aural creative purgatory. You don’t stop trying new restaurants, finding new cinema (even if it’s frequently terrible) or discovering new visual artists. You don’t go into an art gallery and demand to see a series of works you’ve already viewed 100 times. Imagine how empty that would be. So why music? Arguably the most important form of art that people seem to care the least about broadening their relationship with.

First I want to break down some of the charts shared in that story.

A New York Times analysis of Spotify data revealed that a user’s most-played songs often stem from teenage years, particularly between the ages of 13 and 16. Of course, the data here is extremely biased being Spotify users (Spotify as a platform hates indie artists and their algos are biased to pop, which has no substance - it’s basically just big music-chosen AM/FM radio online). It’s also just one place people get music.

YouGov survey data also indicates a strong bias toward music from our teenage years, a phenomenon somewhat consistent across generations. Note, you can see the trend going down in time, that “pop” music is getting worse. The internet blew up the pop star factory, and the data here is just beginning to show this.

Looking at both these charts it’s difficult not to conclude Americans on the whole are socially conditioned to remain stuck in an infantilized or at least arrested state of creative development. Note: you might be happier if you extracted yourself from this and instead kept growing.

The author of the original post also shares this thought I had to comment on:

Reading these studies proved an existential body blow because I am 31, apparently on the precipice of becoming a musical dinosaur. I like to think I'm special—that my high-minded dedication to culture makes me an exceptionally unique snowflake—but apparently I'm just like everybody else. I turned 30, and now I'm in a musical rut, content to have an AI bot DJ pacify me with the songs of my youth. 

This is so incredibly bleak, and hopefully not emblematic of how you personally view your relationship with music or any form of art. If you are content to keep your creative world small and experiences constrained to nostalgia or spoon fed via algos without question, ask yourself why that is?

Some reports say there’s as many as 100,000 new songs uploaded to major music platforms per day, but it’s probably closer to 30,000, and realistically just 1,000 of those should be worth anything to you personally. The numbers vary according to different research you can Google, but I guess the point is no matter how you slice it, if you’re stuck on nostalgia only you’re missing so much. I personally scour the digital record bins of Beatport for new releases and still go to physical vinyl shops, so can personally attest there’s near-limitless high quality, legitimately inspirational music you could have to enrich your life and expand horizons if you spent even a little time here. Others are even doing the work for you, you can access human curations via the same amount of clicks as the big label drivel.

In the internet age, still listening to popular music is like still getting all your news from CNN or never venturing out of the frozen food section at the grocery store. Technology was supposed free us from increasingly nihilistic institutions, but many remain in the dark. And the opportunity cost is just so high (once you venture out of the paint by numbers pop prison, you’ll see, the crafted product by artisans is just that much better).

If you were part of Napster/filesharing revolution, rave or even punk scenes in the late 90s/early 2000s, you might be someone who grew up in a culture where you didn’t succumb to listening to music on the agenda of random suits in Hollywood. To these people, music is seen as something exciting and chance to always be sampling many genres and styles from unknown/obscure creators doing interesting and different things. It’s an infinite well of creativity and enrichment of life. You’ll never get bored hunting for new tunes and nihilism is basically impossible, even Nietzsche famously stated, “without music, life would be a mistake.”

It’s pretty much assured that popular artists today have a comically limited shelf-life and artists none of us have heard of will have timeless influence and still be enjoyed by future humans over generations. There’s an inverse equation here that the more popular something is in the short term, the faster it will be forgotten to history. Corporations produce banal, soulless works which are spoon fed to the masses, now simply through streaming services instead of radio. Why you’d want to be part of this I’m unsure, but rest assured all bad music will eventually disappear as Ted Gioia writes. You get the soundtrack to your life you deserve, do you want it to be something iconoclast and different or do you enjoy being programmed by committees with the creativity of a piece of plywood.

Over the last 20 years, musical foundations like reading and composing music are disappearing with the percentage of people that can read music notation proficiently down to 11 percent, according to some surveys.

Most people can’t even read music now, so that plays a role, but I actually don’t think you have to be able to read music to seek out and appreciate interesting works. Just like you don’t have to be a professional chef to enjoy a meal at a creative restaurant and not eat frozen nuggets from the kid’s menu every time you go out (the pop music many listen to as outlined above was chosen at the same level of development as the nuggets). Your consciousness requires the same high quality nourishment as your physical body, and modernity will take both from you if you let it.

Wrapping up…

We’re in a creative dark ages for pop culture, but also creative renaissance of indie work from artists you've never heard of. It’s really up to you which is preferable and depends if you want to poison your mind with the aural equivalent of seed oils making us sick vs nutrient-rich works. And look, you’re never going to beat the low bar of AI creativity unless you personally ingest proper creative works. I just can’t imagine wanting your world to remain so small, formulaic and decided for you.