From the beginning of time, technology has undoubtedly had a great impact on every sphere of human life by changing dynamics and contests in which we operate, act and think. Though it often goes unnoticed, technology brought one of the biggest changes to Art, after the invention of mechanical tools that allow the reproduction of the artworks, techniques such as lithography, printing, photography, television all the way to the internet allowed the artwork to be displaced from the site where it was first thought and produced. But what does this technological disruption carry? How does our experience of the artwork change in relation to the means we use? And how does the production of the artists change in relation to these new means? The phenomenon has been explored vastly by Walter Benjamin in a prophetic essay of 1936 that anticipated topics such as commodification of the work of art and passive fruition. Concepts that would only become explicitly visible only at the end of the century. In particular, Benjamin analyzes the transformation of Art production and reproduction habits when mechanical tools turn it into “disposable”, replicable anytime and consequently the work of art loses its fundamental “Aura”. This comes from the uniqueness and the authenticity of the artwork at the place and at the time where it happens to be. According to Benjamin, the artwork is “hic et nunc”, meaning it has been created and belongs to a specific time and place. Therefore, it cannot be brought anywhere else or in another moment. This concept of, course, has become obsolete for obvious reasons.
To understand this better, let’s go through how music has changed with the introduction of tools, from the gramophone to radio, CDs, downloaded music and online streaming. Before the 20th century, the only way to listen to music was through live instrumentation. Gradually, music became more accessible. Firstly, music became infinitely available through internet or platforms that stream huge quantities of records. Secondly, no constraint in terms of time, space and length of execution is imposed (you can stop, interrupt, start the music everywhere at any time when you have your headphones). And finally, music became global and can now be everywhere and at any time, without geographical and time constraints. I can listen to Syriac liturgical music as easy as I can listen to African Rumba from a random village in Africa. As much as I can listen to Beethoven music, not in a theatre seat but in my car while driving to my ordinary job. There no longer exists a previously defined circumstance, time or space assigned for music listening, music acquired ubiquity and is played more often than ever before. We listen to music on the bus, inside shops that often sound like clubs rather than shopping malls, when we go to the restaurant or sit at the cafe. The change in the habits of listening to music is clear also from the fact that a small % of people (about the 7%) listens to an entire album. Most of us only listen to the few hits that will practically recoup the entire budget of the album. The great variety of music might appear only as a positive turnout of the technological revolution. And it is. However, Benjamin warns us that this results inevitably in a change in the way we listen to music too, which becomes passive, a murmur in the back of our thoughts and lives. The experience of listening is therefore altered and the habit of actively listening to music fades away. As a result, listening becomes uncritical, deprived of artistic evaluation because the absence of silence in our lives makes every single act of listening to go unnoticed to our ears.
This also leads to a change in how songs are made. Production has experienced a boom and expansion in the last decades. Part of the huge quantity of songs and range in production we listen to today is created to be fun, enjoyable and relaxing. It is created as a product that has as target audience; a group of consumers that listen to music in their leisure time, to enjoy and relax after a day of work or to chill with friends. In this view, music is a product that has to bring a certain return to the publishing company and, therefore, needs to reach vast audiences. Some of these productions have as a goal to entertain and become enjoyable for people, which is not “bad music” but it certainly means that many productions arranged today do not aim to a specific artistic project or ideal. Hence, in these cases production follows consumption and it studies and emulates precise sounds, rhythms and music trends that have already hit the top of the charts and are known to be profitable for the industry. This mechanism rises up easily in an industry where liquidity is often scarce and profits in the short term need to be positive to invest in parallel projects. Specific canons are respected in a certain historical moment, profit is assured and the familiarity with this type of music is reinforced. This results in the uncritical listening cited before, listeners will continuously find music that they easily digest. Today’s music business reinforces this cycle through the creation of the Playlists also known in the industry as “Gods”, which are the best tool now to become an affirmed artist through Spotify (and other platforms) or by implementing Music Engineering to create algorithms of sounds that are known to work in the market.
The modern music business reflects what Benjamin had anticipated at the beginning of the century. However, these phenomena, that describe a general trend in the growth of the industry, are not necessarily a negative symptom. These trends do not necessarily indicate a lack of artistic research in the industry. Artistic projects and artistic research are everywhere and technology has allowed each of us to have the tools and the equipment to produce music from our bedrooms and to potentially become artists. In addition, it is not necessary to demonize this type of music that we all - or at least the majority of us - listen to. We listen to it even if alone at home as music nerds exploring the depths of YouTube looking for new music, genres and artistic experimentation. Rather it is important to be aware of how music listening has changed with the help of technological tools that allow reproduction but also to acknowledge how music production in the industry might turn music into a simple product. This does not mean that the entire industry works as such; producing pure products instead of artistic projects but it means that a co-existence of the two is possible. We open up to a new perspective of interpreting art and music, that allows this co-existence to be. This transformation could represent the possibility to open our minds to a new way of orienting ourselves in the world that starts from a new ideal of beauty which might be better adaptable to the constantly changing and contradictory reality we live in today. A reality that is contradictory but also full of possibilities as never before. It contains multitudes, such as the choices music gives today. A reality that allows the chance to choose between infinite number of records and genres covering all the possibilities.
