Music Blog

When I first heard about Napster in 1999, I found the widespread willingness to share inspiring. It was pleasant to picture a community free from the binds of capitalism. And I enjoyed the way Napster graciously exposed millions of users to music they might not hear otherwise. I saw the end of the underdressed pop star and the bloated rock band and a new appreciation for lesser-known artists. I saw traditional hierarchies morph into democracies and in it everyone had a fair shot. But it didn’t take long for the picture to shift from utopian connectivity to isolated detachment. I began to picture people sitting in the dark before the glow of their computer screen downloading thousands of songs, moving through virtual space to accumulate as much music as computer storage space would allow, rushing to acquire, forgetting to listen. And in retrospect, I can see that Napster was setting the stage for today’s music consumer culture, wherein searching, not discovering—the act, not the outcome—takes precedence. 

Today, Napster is a Best Buy-owned music website whose users pay a subscription fee to stream millions of songs, “when they want and where they want”—a trend that is becoming the norm among many listeners. The shift to streaming music debunks the need to own it, and that, in itself, isn’t a bad thing, but the opportunity to constantly pour music down the canals might be, particularly when the music no longer feels like one’s own. The transition away from owning music—from absorbing music into oneself—into an acceptance of music as selected and played by a distant source removes the listener from the emotional capacity of an intentional experience with music. The movement from owning to streaming is a movement from depth to breadth, from lasting intimacy to passing transparency.

Today’s listeners participate more frequently in streaming services than they do personal collections, meaning that more often than not a machine is determining what they listen to rather than their own personal inclinations. Initially, a streaming music site lets users choose, but after analyzing their selections, the site then chooses music for them. And after an extended period of streaming, the site has done enough analysis (and subsequent recommendations) that it is able to not only meet the user’s preferences but also to create them.

Today’s streaming music subscription services, such as Pandora and Last.fm, grant users access to massive mountains of music, meanwhile studying listening habits so they may eventually establish them. While these sites render the illusion of freedom, they limit the experience, control it and, in fact, in a strange and yet predictable reversal of roles, define it. The site says, Do what you want with me, use me to hear whatever you want, whenever you want, use me to feel free. And then the site follows the user’s every move, advising them on every step, until it is the site—not its subscriber—that is dictating what is played and how it is heard. Suddenly, the user is disconnected from free will and subjected to a stream of selections chosen by technology, or specifically in Pandora’s case, by the Music Genome Project. Just as the Human Genome Project is breaking human beings into unimaginative pieces and devaluing the mysterious elements that make humans individuals, the Music Genome Project is breaking songs into derivative fragments and devaluing the mysterious elements that make songs special.

At the turn of the century, Pandora created a company called, appropriately enough, Savage Beast Technologies to facilitate the Music Genome Project, which uses more than 400 attributes to describe songs at their most fundamental and uninspiring level. In this way, songs are broken into categories that are defined by their “genes,” such as melodic signifiers, rhythmic variations, vocal meters, etc. “These genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song” is how Pandora’s website absurdly describes it—absurd because, to me, they don’t capture it, they steal it. They give us a way to quantify songs, not identify with their uniqueness. In spite of its lofty ambitions, the Music Genome Project inadvertently impedes the direction connection that is meant to occur between music lovers and the music they long to call their own—it imposes a technological distance between listener and song, just as a map distances humans from the land.