I am old enough to remember putting a vinyl on a turntable in my bedroom and listening to the entire thing before flipping it to listen to the B side! I know there is a resurgence of the whole vinyl experience, as hipsters have basically resurrected the good old turntable, but this is not how the majority of people listen to music these days. They obviously listen to mp3 on iTunes, and more and more stream songs on Spotify, Pandora, YouTube and other platforms….the digital era has completely changed the way we listen to music but since its existence, Spotify has collected an impressive amount of data! Now that everything is done online, nothing is private anymore, we seem to forget about this, but when we sign up with Spotify (or any other system), we say good bye to the wonderful experience of listening to our favorite album alone in the dark…. We are watched at so many levels.
Music Machinery, a blog about online music written by Paul, the Director of Developer Platform for The Echo Nest, did the work for us and analyzed ‘several billions of plays from many million unique listeners from all around the world’ using Spotify data, and the result do not surprise me a bit.
First of all, the study shows that people skip songs, and you would expect it when using a smartphone or a computer, but the numbers are really impressive! 24.14 % of the songs are skipped during the first 5 seconds, and 5 seconds is not a lot to get an opinion! 35.05% are skipped after 30 seconds, and finally 48.6% of the songs are skipped before they end… meaning that close to half of the songs are not listened in their entirety. Observing kids all day long, I am not surprised by these results, strangely, this is how the next generation is looking at the world around them, they skip a lot… I am talking about kids because they are the main users of Spotify, the most important group consuming music this way, but Spotify data actually confirm this. When the study looks at the age of the listeners, young teenagers have the highest skipping rate, well above 50 % (close to 60%), whereas the skipping rate drops dramatically as the listener ages (35% for the 30-year-old), with a bizarre little bump around 50! Mid-life crisis? I am not sure, but teenagers being naturally unfocused and having more and more tools which facilitates their non focusness is sure a disaster, I experience it every day. If they are not rewarded after 5 seconds, they are looking for something else. I guess this generation will never experience the song slowly growing in you, the uneasy first listening but the repetitive listenings that make you like it a little bit more each time. Some artists are hard to get, and certainly do not reveal themselves in 30 seconds, but how rewarding the experience is when you suddenly like a song you didn’t get at all first! A quick fix can be good but often ephemeral, and songs which slowly grew in me, are often the songs that stayed with me the longest.
What does it say about the way we listen to music in general? Everything in art demands attention, and I would even say all your attention… we now listen music while doing something else on the web, we are multi-taskers (or think we are), and I can’t see this as a good thing. It echoes what I see at shows where people, who have paid good money to have a good seat at a show that have chosen to attend, nevertheless check their messages on Facebook half of the time.
I know that streaming music is very practical, and makes it very accessible everywhere, but Poppy Crum, senior scientist at Dolby Laboratories and consulting professor at Stanford’s CCRMA school (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics), spoke with Mic about the ‘bad’ consequences that this new way to listen to music may trigger: ‘True love or appreciation for a piece of music … comes with depth of knowledge of that music’, she said. For Crum, there are important factors into play when creating a good experience with a piece of music: ‘repeated exposure, iterations and intent’… ‘Those sorts of heightened emotional responses of pleasure and enjoyment and satisfaction come in a way that is counter to rapid, quick streaming and constant exposure to a lot of different things’… ‘It [a connection with music] wouldn’t be experienced initially, and would bypassed very quickly in a sort of ‘taste and go’ streaming environment.’
‘Taste and go’? This is exactly what we are living right now, everything is moving too fast, we are bombarded by too much information at the same time, and there’s simply too much music to listen to, too many choices, no wonder we don’t pay enough attention to music or don’t give enough time to a single song… we may never experience music as we did in the 70s-80s before the digital revolution, we may never connect emotionally with a song as we used to, but it may not be a good-enough reason to buy a turntable.
