There was a time (likely just before my college years) when I distinctly remember thinking “you know, the music I’m into now, I could just listen to nothing but this for the rest of my life, I mean, it’s that good.” (it was high school) No doubt I wasn’t the first to pledge such lifelong musical satisfaction. And not unlike myself, the musically-satisfied lives of my predecessors probably lasted like… what? A couple months?
Or maybe not. Maybe everyone is still listening to the same crap (excuse me, I mean music) they listened to in high school or college or whatever (I’m sure it’s still very good and not dated at all). And maybe I was the very first to anull my I-never-need-to-listen-to-new-music-again vows, because, like, the next day the Internet started getting really good at dumping piles of the stuff on my head. And then computers started getting really good at helping people make even more music and, hell, now there’s an awful lot of it.
So wait… what was I talking about?
I guess the point to all this is that I’ve listened to A LOT of music over the last 10 or so years. And I like to think I have, you know, REFINED MUSICAL TASTE; which under some sort arithmetic property means there’s A LOT of music out there that’s actually pretty good. Which probably means there’s A WHOLE LOT of music that’s actually really bad. And so, yeah the point to all this is that there’s a MASSIVE amount of recorded music out there, you know? No, hold on, that wasn’t my point.
There’s this pop-urbanism factoid people like to throw around in discussions about cities, architecture and the such: as of 2008, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas. (Many mistakenly substitute “urban area” with “city”, not the same thing.) Well I’m thinking we’re about to, or will shortly, pass the mp3 equivalent of that urban event-horizon. Something like: By the end of 2009, there will be more recorded music than any human can listen to in a lifetime of uninterrupted listening.
Apple’s iTunes Music Store is estimated to have over 10 million songs in it’s (incomplete) catalog. Assuming the average song length is somewhere around 3.5 minutes, that’s 35 million minutes of music. On the other side of the scale, an 80 year life weighs in at a little over 45 million minutes.
Soundtrack for your life, indeed…
It sorta blows my mind how much “old music” college students will be sifting through 25 years from now on their broadband dormitory Internet connections. In 25 years, there will probably be well over twice the amount of recorded music there is today. And 75 years from now, forget it… we’ll be thinking of The Beatles and Britney Spears as contemporaries. And, hey, 75 years is not that far off. That’s still feasibly in my lifetime. So if you wanna get right down to it, this whole recorded music thing is just in it’s infancy. I mean, 75 years, just think how much recorded music there’s gonna be. An f’ing lot, you know?
Which bring a few things to mind: First, how on earth will anyone intelligibly navigate through all that music? Second, will the newness of new music draw much attention when there’s 100 million minutes of old music to listen to? And finally, what’s the role of the record label in this future?
Anyhow. Maybe I’ll dive into some of these questions later.
The photos are from a film about the world’s largest record collection:
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