Music streaming services hand consumers the virtual keys to the megastore, allowing unrestricted access to its stock for the duration of their subscriptions. Although customers are left in possession of nothing on allowing their payments to lapse, spending subscription money on downloads or physical media instead will not amass anything like as much music. The economic logic of streaming is reflected in consumer adoption. In a BBC News report assessing 2018’s music sales, Mark Savage[1] asks ‘Is this the end of owning music?’, pointing to a 23% decline in CD sales to 32 million in the UK in favour of streaming. Niche enthusiasm for vinyl, he reports, ‘also began to plateau, with 4.2 million records sold, a rise of just 1.6%, said the BPI.’ Savage adds that the BPI[2] estimated that 142.9 million albums ‘were either streamed, purchased or downloaded’ in the same period. The article quotes the Entertainment Retailers Association’s Kim Bayley’s assertion that, despite its recent decline, physical music sales still represented ‘about a £2bn business’, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) Savage also found the independent record shop Banquet Records’ Joe Tolley in bullish mood about the prospects for vinyl:
“I don’t buy it that physical music is necessarily competing with streams. We all access music and film on the internet, and that’s fine and healthy and valid, but you wouldn’t look at the Mona Lisa on your phone and think it’s the same thing as going to see it in a gallery.”
“The reason vinyl sales are at a 25-year high is because people are rejecting this part of modern society where everything is immediate and nothing means anything.”[3]
Recorded music and other artworks
The difficulty with Tolley’s Mona Lisa analogy is that the painting itself is the intended point of consumption — Leonardo da Vinci painted it in the necessary expectation that his audience would view his canvas directly — while musicians make recordings in the expectation that their audiences will consume copies of their work. As the conceptual artist and painter Michael Craig-Martin puts it in an interview with Daniel Rachel:[4]
In the music industry, when you buy a record it’s as close to the original work as is possible. An artwork bears no relation. There is only one.[5]
The diffusion of recorded music media means that there is no ‘authentic’ way in which to hear it. The ephemeral nature of popular music means that it is heard principally on the consumer devices that are prevalent at the time. As an art form it has typically been consumed ubiquitously rather than in rarified settings in which it is the centre of attention (like a painting in a gallery) and, arguably, its more authentic place is as an integral part of everyday life rather than at the heart of an ‘occasion’. While Tolley allows that accessing music online is ‘fine and healthy and valid’, his Mona Lisa simile insists on the superiority of other media (vinyl in particular). It may be an objective truth that some audio equipment renders recorded music with greater fidelity than others, but this can make hearing it more about listening to the technology than listening to the music. Perhaps, though — as I will go on to explore — this is always the case.
Tolley attributes the marginal resurgence in vinyl sales (the above figures show that records amounted to around 3% of the equivalent music streaming market in 2018) to disillusionment with a digital culture of instant gratification — ‘everything is immediate and nothing means anything.‘ This recalls Hepworth’s[6] observations about the lack of substance (both physically and socially) of online music. With this line of reasoning, the act of collecting music on physical media imbues it with value and meaning. This is a factor of the effort involved in assembling a collection and of the selection of recordings included. Physical music collections express personal identity and biography because they require collectors to discover music that is significant to them and go to the effort and expense of acquiring it. The value added by the investment of time, effort and money in assembling a physical collection is absent from music streaming because those with a subscription find themselves with instant access to many times as much music as they might ever have assembled in a lifetime of collecting. Indiscriminate access to almost anything also negates the concept of a collection because it entails just choices of listening and not of what is available to hear. While curation remains a key feature of music streaming platforms in the shape of playlists, tapping and swiping a touchscreen to assemble online compilations is a dilettante activity compared to building a physical collection. The more expedient the method of acquiring and listening to a recording, it seems, the less ‘meaningful’ that recording becomes.
Music and medium
Marshall McLuhan[7] also insists that a medium determines its ‘psychic and social consequences’, minimising the significance of its content:
[The] “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or a northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or the content of the railway medium. The airplane, on the other hand, by accelerating the rate of transportation, tends to dissolve the railway form of city, politics and association, quite independently of what the airplane is used for.[8]
In the same way, audio recording did not introduce music or melody or counterpoint or rhythm but it massively expanded and accelerated the way in which music could be consumed. As David Byrne[9] points out:
Before recorded music became ubiquitous, music was, for most people, something we did. Many people had pianos in their homes, sang at religious services, or experienced music as part of a live audience. All those experiences were ephemeral — nothing lingered, nothing remained except for your memory (or your friends’ memories) of what you heard and felt. […] A host of factors contribute to making the experience of live music a far from objective phenomenon. You couldn’t hold it in your hand. Truth be told, you still can’t.[10]
Music’s ephemeral essence
The apparent ability of recordings to dispel the fleeting nature of music is another illusion of the medium. While it is possible to replay recordings at will, the music remains momentary, enduring only for as long as its playback. The subjective experience of the listener is as ephemeral as ever. The association of life experiences with particular recordings is as much a matter of memory as before music could be recorded. The upscaling of distribution allowed by recording might well account for a song’s presence at the formation of a memory, but, as with live music, experiences of songs shift with every replay.
When Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) asks Sam (Dooley Wilson) to play the forbidden As Time Goes By at Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca[11] she does so to indulge in melancholy reminiscence of the time she spent with Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in Paris before fleeing the Nazi invasion. Her reverie is shattered when Rick arrives to challenge Sam about playing the song he has told him never to perform. Following a tense reunion with his former lover, Rick gets drunk and asks Sam to reprise As Time Goes By. Knowing the pain the song will cause his boss, Sam demurs, but Rick insists: ‘You played it for her and you can play it for me. […] If she can stand it, I can. Play it!’ Sam obliges, plunging Rick into a montage sequence recalling his Parisian romance.
A latter-day Rick or Ilsa could summon As Time Goes By without troubling Sam, but their experiences of the song would change in the same way as having it performed afresh by the house musician. The experiences and emotions aroused by a piece of music are not etched, magnetised or digitised into a recording along with its sound waves, but are part of the ephemera of each playback. Because recordings have typically taken the form of artefacts — records, cassettes, CDs — these objects have given the impression that music is something that, as Byrne puts it, you could ‘hold in your hand’. This is a phenomenon, though, of the medium, not of the music.
Music ‘becomes less of a thing’
McLuhan determines the relationship between a medium and its content as follows:
Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content.” The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.[13]
It follows from this that recorded music consumers focus so much on its ‘content’ that they fail to notice the impact of its various media. It seems to me, though, that music technology has a way of drawing attention to itself. Those who collect records, for example, are record collectors, not music collectors, and the focus is as much on the medium as on the music. McLuhan observes that media have a kind of onionskin relationship with each medium having another as its content. This means that even if consumers are aware of mediation at one level, they are not necessarily aware of it at the next. Those who make a show of using music technology, for instance, might not see their activity as conspicuous consumption, recognising only that they are ‘listening to music’. They are also expressing their identities through the activity, though, and, in so doing, making it the ‘content’ of another mediation. Of course, technological trendsetters are well aware of the significance of their selecting certain audio equipment and what this ‘says’ about them. This shows that each layer of mediation is capable of conscious recognition and application by consumers.
Byrne sees potential for progressive technologies to return music to its unrecorded origins:
As music becomes less of a thing — a cylinder, a cassette, a disc — and more ephemeral, perhaps we will start to assign an increasing value to live performance again. After years of hoarding LPs and CDs, I have to admit I’m now getting rid of them. I occasionally pop a CD into a player, but I’ve pretty much completely converted to listening to MP3s either on my computer or, gulp, my phone! For me, music is becoming dematerialized, a state that is more truthful to its nature, I suspect. Technology has brought us full circle.[14]
Byrne goes on to suggest that recorded music’s ubiquity and abundance has devalued it. This has led, he argues, to music fans reawakening to its social function, now attaching greater value to the relatively scarce communality of live performances than to the plentiful isolation of digital playback. ‘The technology is useful and convenient,’ he writes, ‘but it has, in the end, reduced its own value and increased the value of the thing it has never been able [to] capture or reproduce.’
A ‘seamless web of mediated and privatized experience’
Byrne’s idea that the ‘dematerialization’ of recordings will return music to its primal, live state seems to leave music fans with no way of expressing their identities through musical taste except via cherished gig-going memories and, perhaps, their associated merchandise. It is now not only unremarkable to have access to an extensive archive of recorded music well beyond the reach of even the most prolific LP or CD collector, the relevant technology is also commonplace. Cal Newport[15] observes that a busy city street in the early 1990s would have featured relatively few commuters wearing headphones connected to a personal hi-fi, but:
By the early 2000s, […] if you stood on that same street corner, white earbuds would be near ubiquitous. The iPod succeeded not just by selling lots of units, but also by changing the culture surrounding portable music. It became common, especially among younger generations, to allow your iPod to provide a musical backdrop to your entire day — putting the earbuds in as you walk out the door and taking them off only when you couldn’t avoid having to talk to another human.[16]
Instead of forming part of statements of identity, portable audio technology has become a way of creating enhanced personal space. As Michael Bull[17] puts it:
[The Walkman] enables contemporary urban users to create a seamless web of mediated and privatized experience in their everyday movement through the city and to enhance virtually any chosen experience in any geographical location. Walkman sound is direct, with the earpieces placed directly in the ears of the user, overlying the random sounds of the environment. Walkman users can aestheticize both the mundane everyday of the city streets and the faraway spaces they visit with their Walkman sounds. Indeed, the everyday and the far away appear to become increasingly similar in the experience of many Walkman users.[18]
Edgar Wright shows Bull’s ‘mediated and privatized experience’ as the central theme of his 2017 film Baby Driver.[19] The introverted ‘Baby’ (Ansel Elgort) is a getaway driver who cues music on a series of iPods to pace high-speed escapes from crime scenes and to choreograph more mundane activities like a visit to a coffee shop. He also uses music to mask the tinnitus from which he has suffered since a childhood car accident. Baby’s immersion in his musical microcosm alienates him from the criminals with whom he is forced to work as they interpret his introversion as a mental deficiency. When Baby starts a romance with Debora (Lily James), a diner waitress, they bond when she tells him her name and he asks, ’Like the song?’ She is aware only of Beck’s Debra[20] but Baby is thinking of Debora by Tyrannosaurus Rex.[21] This is one of the few moments in Baby Driver when the characters share a mutual connection through the music, most of the remainder of which is Baby’s personal soundtrack and so also that of the film.
Notes and references