“You may not be interested in audio streaming, but audio streaming is interested in you,” writes Hugh Linehan in Saturday’s (10/26) Irish Times (Dublin). “Right now we are smack bang in the middle of a radical reordering of how we listen to music and to words…. Music and podcast apps are inexorably eating into the services you grew up with and will ultimately replace all but a tiny remnant of them…. This transformation is usually seen through the lens of business or technology coverage…. There’s been less attention paid to how actual listening … is also changing. One immediately observable effect is atomization, with listeners gravitating towards the niche and away from the mainstream.… All around us, traditional media are being replaced by individually tailored niches…. This atomization is accompanied by a surge in the popularity of headphones…. The history of recorded music is of technological innovations driving creative change: would the extraordinary flowering of jazz and other forms in the 1950s have been possible without the invention of the 33rpm LP? … Is it … really such a good idea in our day-to-day lives to be so inwardly focused, so cut off from others and the world at large?”
Posted October 30, 2019
