Music is Best Enjoyed Together
While temporarily in St. Peter, Minnesota, I was fortunate enough to have time to stop into a record store. Aesthetic Religion is your traditional small-town record store. They had a large collection of jazz, hip-hop, and a few other generes.
While there, I came to the conclusion that although listening to music alone can be fun, or pass the time, it's listening together that creates memories. Think about it for a moment - do you remember listening to music alone, or were some of your best music memories created when you were hanging out with friends? Or attending a concert?
Enjoying music is often a group activity, and as such, works best when you have something tangible to touch, look at, or read while listening. This is the reason that records were so popular, along with tapes and CDs as things evolved. Streaming music just doesn't have that same feeling. There are no album liners to read, or cassette tape papers to unfold.
Where words fail, music speaks.
- Hans Christian Anderson
An additional concern with music streaming is that you never really "own" the music. You cannot loan it to a friend, or sell it when you are tired of listening to it. At best, you have a license to listen to it as long as you pay the monthly membership fee. This means that you cannot check out the tastes of a potential date by what type of music they have in their room. And discovering new music through friends is almost impossible, unless they are savvy enough to send you links to songs playable online.
Handing a CD to someone and asking them to play track five drives human connection and empathy. If a friend I know likes a song and recommends I listen to it while handing me the CD, you can guarantee I'll listen to it. The same is not true with a link I receive in a text message. And if I do listen to it, there is a high probability that I'll listen to it through my phone, which has awful sound. The chance of it resonating with me is almost non-existent.
Fortunately, we can still get our hands on physical music, which you can own outright. Enter the local records store. Spend some time and pick through the music, buying something new or used. Take it home, show others, and examine the liner. Take time to play it, enjoy it, and share it with others. Music is best enjoyed as a communal activity.
Music is a higher relevation than all of wisdom and philosophy.
- Ludwig van Beethoven
