Feeds

Downloads, iPods make music more 'disposable'

'There are simply too many notes, Herr Mozart'

Managing SSL certificates with ease

A University of Leicester psychologist has concluded that modern listeners don't value music as much as their 19th-century counterparts did - and he blames the iPod and music downloading.

A team of researchers from Leicester, Surrey and York universities, led by Leicester School of Psychology's Dr Adrian North, questioned 346 mobile-phone users by text message. Over a 14-day period, they were daily asked to report back on music they had heard in the previous 24 hours.

The goal of the study was to determine "people's experiences of music in naturalistic, everyday circumstances", said Dr North.

The results: participants are highly exposed to music; they listen to more pop than classical, jazz or other forms; they tend to listen when they're on their own; they tend to hear more music at home than in public; music was usually experienced during the course of some activity other than deliberate music listening, and - guess what - "liking for the music varied depending on who the participant was with, where they were, and whether they had chosen to be able to hear music".

All of which, we're sure, anyone could have told the researchers. Still, it's good to have it down in black and white, all statistically verified and everything. And it keeps academics off the streets.

In conclusion, Dr North notes: "In the 19th century, music was seen as a highly valued treasure with fundamental and near-mystical powers of human communication... Because so much music of different styles and genres is now so widely available via portable MP3 players and the internet, it is arguable that people now actively use music in everyday listening contexts to a much greater extent than hitherto.

"However, the degree of accessibility and choice has arguably led to a rather passive attitude towards music heard in everyday life: the present results indicate that music was rarely the focus of participants' concerns and was, instead, something that seemed to be taken rather for granted, a product that was to be consumed during the achievement of other goals."

All this is true, but has arguably been the case for the past 40 years, if not longer. Pop music is more accessible and more widely broadcast than other genres, so it's no wonder it's more widely heard and even, occasionally, listened to.

"Our relationship to music in everyday life may well be complex and sophisticated, but it is not necessarily characterised by deep emotional investment," says Dr North. But then, for good or ill, almost all modern music, even the good stuff, doesn't require emotional investment. Is that the listeners' fault, or the musicians?

Music is such a subjective experience that it's not a particularly social activity, even when done in the company of others. That's why personal audio products, stretching right back to the Walkman and beyond to transistor radios, have proved so popular. These are merely trends the iPod and other MP3 players tap into, rather than engender.

One trend has emerged in the download era: a greater degree of hoarding musical works, often beyond the capacity of the downloader to find the time to listen to them all. P2P file-sharing has made it possible for consumers to collect music to an extent never possible before, to the point where the collecting even seems to become more important than what's collected. ®

Choosing a cloud hosting partner with confidence

More from The Register

next story
This 125mph train is fitted with LASERS. Sadly no sharks, though
Network Rail's New Measurement Train - not new, but still pretty nifty
Samsung slams door on OLED TVs, makes QUANTUM dot LEAP
LG says will stick with it, but be ready to watch it cave in...
Apple strap-on wristjob: You WON'T be able to spend more than $5,000!
Golden arm-slab Watch is positively cheap next to real wristcandy, allegedly
Be Your Own Big Brother: Going to pot
Cloud computing for gardeners
DROIDS - everywhere! Is Apple really even in the game any more?
I ain't drinking the Kool Aid, but I can't avoid swimming in it
Farewell Nokia: First ever 'Microsoft Lumia' set for Tuesday reveal
Teaser image suggests Fin for Finn smartphone brand
prev story

Whitepapers

Why cloud backup?
Combining the latest advancements in disk-based backup with secure, integrated, cloud technologies offer organizations fast and assured recovery of their critical enterprise data.
Security management 2.0
It’s time to slay the sacred cow of your substantial SIEM investment, and figure out objectively what offers you the best fit moving forward.
High Performance for All
While HPC is not new, it has traditionally been seen as a specialist area – is it now geared up to meet more mainstream requirements?
Simplify SSL certificate management across the enterprise
Simple steps to take control of SSL across the enterprise, and recommendations for a management platform for full visibility and single-point of control for these Certificates.
Assembling a next gen enterprise web infrastructure
Delivering the solution that both simplifies management of multiple sites and lowers their total cost of ownership.