Do we actually listen?

Is the rise of playlist culture preventing us from connecting with the music we listen to?

In recent years, the rise of digital streaming platforms and playlist culture has meant that our attitudes to music have massively altered. We now turn to music for creating atmosphere or mood, rather than being a direct stimulus to actively engage with. Gig and concert attendance has continued to thrive, but our relationship with recorded music seems to be shifting more and more with every click. It seems as though people are turning to podcasts and other forms of digital media to be stimulated, while music seeps slowly into the background.

In 2017, critically-acclaimed photographer Wolfgang Tillmans presented his debut exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. In it, he played the music of an 80s band called Colourbox in a room designed and optimised purely for listening. Colourbox’s production values in their music was so high that they never played live, meaning their music has only ever been listened to on recordings.

When we listened to band’s tunes through a seriously expensive loudspeaker set-up, we had a moment of realisation: how often do we sit down and give music our full, undivided attention? The answer, in short, is not often. If at all.

It doesn’t help that our capacity for concentration is generally is getting drastically shorter. A fairly alarming study was released in 2015 by Microsoft Corp., which showed that people’s attention spans had dropped to eight seconds, even less than the infamously easily-distracted goldfish. Technology companies and music producers have adapted their content based on our apparently teeny-tiny capacity to pay attention, and as a result, content is as fleeting as a Snapchat story.

With a wealth of content out there, the constant flitting between different tabs, apps and devices means we are always looking for something for something better to be consuming. This has myriad consequences on the music industry. Classical music is being performed at faster tempos than ever before and, as Gavin Haynes astutely and humorously pointed out in an article in the Guardian last year, introductions in pop songs are now almost non-existent. We use music for the drops, the riffs, the catchy chorus, or merely as gradual chord progressions to fill a world we consider to be too quiet.

Freya spoke to the pianist Stephen Hough this week for BBC Music Magazine, who declared his sole ambition for the new year is to become a more ‘active’ listener. ‘We are surrounded by music everywhere we go,’ he said. ‘There’s background music in lifts, in restaurants — everywhere. But no-one is properly engaged with it. I want to become more active in my listening, even when listening to silence.’ The concept of facing music straight on with no distractions seems to have become something of a novelty.

Playlist culture means we rarely listen to albums in full, instead choosing an amalgamation of pre-programmed tracks to accompany our lives. Artists spend weeks curating the order and flow of their new carefully-crafted albums, only to have the tracks individually drip-fed to the public and then mixed in with other artists of similar genres and soundworlds in playlists.

These playlists aren’t even a listenable length anymore, so even if you wanted to attempt to engage actively with them, there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day. This puts them immediately into the category of background music. With nearly 3.5 million followers of the six-hour ‘Relax and Unwind’ playlist and 5 million followers of the eight-hour ‘Peaceful Piano’, we know we’re not making this up. It’s what people are listening to. Creators of Muzak — the original brand behind ‘elevator music’ — have gone from being the laughing stock of the music world to some of the most lucrative in the business, with Muzak now being brought into people’s homes under the guise of ‘mood music’.

In our research for this piece, we came across a group called Pipedown, which campaigns for ‘freedom from unwanted pipe music in public places’. Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry, pianist Alfred Brendal and conductor Simon Rattle are among the group’s supporters. In recent years the group has helped persuade the likes of Gatwick Airport, Sainsbury and Tesco to stop using background music in their stores. We are Pipedown’s latest recruits and we’re well on our way to joining the anti-background-music cult. We’ll be selling branded t-shirts and key rings on your way out.

Here at The Noiseletter, we believe you can take away something positive from every genre of music — be it death metal or bubblegum pop. So our aim is to bring you recommendations of music genuinely worth listening to, and we aren’t afraid to take you out of your comfort zone. See the Hear section of the first instalment of The Noiseletter for a perfect example of this: the K-Pop phenomenon Mid-Air Thief’s 2018 album Crumbling.

It’s not surprising that we’re finding it difficult to focus on one thing. With devices in our pockets by day and our beds by night, is there any wonder? The issue with music is it is one of those slightly problematic art forms that can be enjoyed while also enjoying several other things: flicking through Instagram, reading a weighty piece in the Financial Times, eating lunch, having a heated discussion with a friend at a gig while simultaneously spilling beer over the person in front of you (we strongly recommend not doing this last one). You’ll struggle to read a book and listen to a podcast simultaneously. You’ll definitely lose the storyline if you try and catch up on your emails while watching Shutter Island. Perhaps the ability to multi-task is what has hindered the magical quality of real listening.

So what is it exactly that are people engaging with if they’re no longer connecting with music in the way they once did? Is active listening now reserved exclusively for podcasts and digitised spoken word? Stay tuned for next week’s Think section of The Noiseletter, where we’ll be dissecting the craze of podcasts and what it could mean for the way we consume culture.

For now, take a small chunk out of your evening to pop your headphones on, sit back and chow down on a really meaty album. We’d recommend Queen’s A Night at the Opera, host of the infamous work Bohemian Rhapsody, which is the perfect individual track for a baby active listener. It is 5 glorious minutes and 55 superb seconds of pure genius, and you’ll struggle to find your mind wandering elsewhere. Instagram scrolling ain’t got nothing on Freddie.