Why I Do Nothing While I Listen to (new) Music. Also Why TF Did Last.FM Fall Off The Interwebz Radar?
The value of doing nothing while listening to new music is underrated
Many times, I’ve put on the same playlist over and over again just for the sake of background noise. Something to fill the air, much like how my mother has the habit since my childhood to keep the news on or random old films playing while she goes about her day. Too often I’ve depended on familiar music to be something like a friend when no one else was around. These friends have memories attached to them. When I am feeling nostalgic, I throw on some HIM, despite the relative immaturity and superficiality of their lyrics.
I don’t entirely blame people for being bored of music. I find people are not particularly as zealous as they once were over artists. Moreover, who becomes a rockstar anymore? Artists get popular, but often with the help of the usually arbitrary luck of search engine suggestions. Scouting out talent is no longer driven from producer to artist; artists can intelligently leverage the internet and SEO to acquire a fanbase, (which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it just entails I have to sift through so much more content to find quality).
I think the accessibility factor has detracted from music’s value. As we all know, scarcity is a principle of capitalism and adding to value, something that is entirely abstract in its calculation. I can spend ten dollars a month for a Spotify subscription and have access to a nearly limitless and ever-growing library of new music. This vastly differs from my teenage years, when streaming was becoming normalized, though no where nearly as mainstream and ubiquitous as it has become today. To get my thirteen-year-old hands on twenty dollars, (a price that still shocks me as enormously expensive), for a CD that had a maximum of thirteen or fourteen songs (if you were lucky) was something that I had to work for. This means that my everyday playlist today would have been valued at around a hundred and forty dollars back then, just to play from seven or eight albums.
But I have digressed from the purpose of this article. I was inspired by one Medium article, titled, “I’m Going to Listen to 100 New Albums in 2022” by…
