On any given day, on any given road, on any given Madison city bus, headphones cover the ears of nearly every public-transit patron. Walking down the street, the picture doesn’t change much — heads-down, thumbs up, poking and prodding an LED-screen to select the new song of the moment while walking down East Johnson Street.
Music is everywhere. Conversation about it is not.
Despite the growing epidemic of these so-called “headphone zombies,” I find there are surprisingly few genuine sentences spoken aloud about music.
Lurking through others’ profiles on music streaming platforms is often the closest one comes to talking about music taste. We hold out our own cryptic playlists at an arm’s length, trigger finger hovering over the “private-listening-session” button, and wait for applause.
Sometimes we will react to an unfamiliar song with a heart-eyed-emoji, something tasteful, all while the eternal jealousy perfected by the digital age, and practiced from behind the phone, sits like a lump in the back of our throats. Maybe this is our modern day version of, “you’ve never heard of The Cure?” and being scoffed across the music store counter by a woman with a cool haircut and a shirt you can’t quite read, poking out from beneath a worn-out denim jacket.
Music streaming tracking, while perhaps as unassuming as a record-store employee, has begun to stain the background of every song with the panoptical buzz of an ever-watching ear. When one dares to ask about the music someone is listening to, the answers are distant and removed. Picture Mr. Music-Listener, wearing Bluetooth headphones, a Geese t-shirt and jeans that look tired of being cinched repeatedly by vintage leather belts. He would look at me and say something along the lines of, “do you use Spotify or Apple Music?”
I answer first with a headshake, sending Mr. Music-Listener into a state of peril as he pulls his Airpods from his ears. With one quick word I am feared. I am unconventional. I am pretentious and misunderstood. I am John Cusack in High Fidelity. I put my lips together and whisper, “neither.”
From interactions like this, I have begun to wonder: what has become of the music-listening world?
Radio stations and curated mixtapes have been largely replaced by widespread, capital-A Algorithms. An answer to “where did you find this?” no longer opens the floodgates for an anecdote, but instead yields one of few simple phrases that are destined to smother any spark of conversation: “I found it on Tiktok.”
The ignition of passion when finding new artists has been taken out of the hands of Mr. Music-Listener and the mustache he’s trying-out, and placed into the automated mouths of big corporations spitting out recommended mixes, creating millions of versions of the same monotonous music taste.
In the awkward cracks of a broken social contract, I asked Mr. Music-Listener who his favorite bands are. I was quickly met with the top of his head, as he leaned over to shuffle through his Spotify playlists, uttering, “Uh…let me check,” as if the answer will soon be revealed to him by the tiny DJ behind the digital curtain (don’t get me started on AI DJs).
Data-tracking has become so popular on music streaming platforms, thanks to Spotify Wrapped, that Mr. Music-Listener and the millions of others like him have grown relatively unconscious to their own music taste, while simultaneously boasting the amount of minutes listened to in a year. We have begun to prioritize our quantity of music consumption, as it will cement us in social circles as the guy who “knows music.”
Twenty years ago, the guy who “knows music” knew music. He was the guy in the back of the record store looking through the ‘2-Dollars-and-Under’ bin (what could possibly be in there?), because he knows gold when he sees it. For every song you offered up to him, he would have three in return, a new band you have to listen to and a biographical description of each of its members. He knew the year, the label, the country of origin, the definition and the spelling, not just the word. He is not Mr. Music-Listener. He is Mr. Music-Lover, a distinction which has been lost in the social consciousness due to the intense automation of music streaming.
Headphone zombies are like moths to the flame of the cultural moment. They switch between favorites as soon as their feed refreshes to the next blank-faced, big-eyed, jaw-locked, messy-haired artist who has most recently conquered the algorithm. Mr. Music-Listener will soon ditch his Geese t-shirt for another band he found on Instagram. Artists are beginning to post content on social media more than ever in hopes of getting swept up into their five seconds of fame. This puts music listeners, once again, in the same hands of a different algorithm.
When will we acknowledge the power of the man behind the screen, the one pushing the songs that play after our playlist ends or the next video on our feed, determining the next artist we, collectively, obsess over? When will we begin to seek things out after taking a breath, instead of having them handed to us the moment our attention shifts?
If we do not take our music listening habits out of the cold, dead hands of an automated algorithm — not to mention whose pockets the dirty hands of major music streaming platforms CEOs are sliding millions of dollars into — Mr. Music-Lover will be an archaic caricature of a passionate past lost to a passionless present.
The aching, guitar-string imprinted fingertips of Mr. Music-Lover are stretching out from the back of an unlabeled bin in the record store you’ve never spent more than 10 minutes in (you didn’t even know there was a backroom). He’s begging you to buy a CD, to make a mixtape on your friend's machine, to download an mp3 file off Bandcamp, to make a Rateyourmusic profile and go to a crappy indie-rock band’s show in an off-campus basement. He urges you to take your thumbs out of your ears and take back, into your own sturdy hands, your taste in music.
Rachel Gerhardt is a Junior studying Astronomy-Physics, Physics, & Philosophy. Do you agree that the algorithm is ruining music listening experiences? Send all comments to opinion@dailycardinal.com
