Teenagers in my flat and their music
For the last week or two, we have had several kids (including two teenagers) in our flat. Conditions are cramped.
But the oddest thing is their reaction when I put on certain types of music, in particular a capella.
And it’s not like I play albums of a capella music when they are around: I’m talking about Dead Can Dance, Fleet Foxes and so on. But when something a capella comes on, they start cracking up or else scrunching up their face in bafflement.
I find this very nearly incomprehensible: Could it be that most listeners of popular music are so used to drums, bass, beatbox, guitars, that anything with just the human voice doesn’t even register as music anymore?
The way they listen to music is also odd, but this I understand to be the way young folks listen these days. That is, they don’t. They’ll have music on while playing videogames or checking email, and I doubt they even make it all the way through a song most of the time.
And of course, they don’t perceive music in terms of ‘albums’ but in terms of just songs, or tracks.
One of them told me that he has paid for maybe 100 songs but has downloaded thousands. And no, I didn’t try to lecture him. And given the way he listens to music, I’d bet he hasn’t even listened to the vast majority of those songs. And you know what? That might grow into a far better paradigm for music: You sample zillions, but hopefully pay for entire albums of the stuff you actually listen to. Arguably, the result will be more more entering the music market, but spread all throughout that “long tail”. (The bad part is that there will be no more pop music millionares.)
It’s an odd world.