Do we need more music? Probably not, but why do we keep making it?
There are currently over 50 million songs on Spotify. Not all are unique, of course, as some are variants of the same song (live versions, covers, remasters, special editions, etc.). Stats are wonky even on something as centralised as Spotify, but I’m willing to halve that number. 25 million unique songs. Heck, I’m even willing to quarter that number. That’s still 12.5 million songs. That’s a lot of songs.
OK, math time.
Averaging everything to 3 minutes a pop (and that’s ignoring songs like Dream Theater’s 24-minute ‘Octavarium’ extravaganza), that’s 20 songs per hour. There are 8,760 hours in a year, which means that you can listen to 175,200 songs in a year if you never sleep or do anything else. Even at this rate, you’d need 71 years of non-stop listening to finish all of the songs in Spotify’s current library. Realistically, if all you do during your waking day is listen to music, for about 16 hours a day (so 5,840 hours a year), then you will probably not be around to hear the end of the playlist, as it would take 107 years to listen to everything once. (God forbid, you like a song and want to listen to it again!) If that wasn’t depressing enough, the number of songs being released grows by 40,000 every single day.
So if we stand no chance of listening to everything already released, why are we still making music? Surely what’s been released out there is enough to satisfy our aural lust. While the cynic in me agrees with this view, the music producer and musical artist in me wants to create for himself and for other people. But why would we?
The way I reconcile this apparent conflict is by realizing that artists: 1. express themselves, and 2. create and express the sound of their time. Palestrina was a great composer, but as amazing as his work is, it hasn’t topped the charts in a while. And that’s ok. It worked for his time. Dua Lipa’s music wouldn’t have worked back in the Italian Renaissance, but she’s doing pretty OK nowadays.
We get used to a specific set of musical cues that seem to sediment very early in our lives and we tend to stick to them throughout the rest of our lives. Moreover, music is also linked with specific memories. For instance, while I think Carl Sagan missed an incredible opportunity to add The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ to the Voyager Golden Records, I also suspect that part of my appreciation for the song stems from the fact that I first listened to and became fascinated with it at a time in my childhood where my biggest fear was going outside and none of my friends having a ball to play with. We age and our tastes become less flexible — the next new thing isn’t as appealing as it once was. Slowly, we become those old dudes who still can’t stop talking about The Beatles.
The romanticization of the notion that the music of the past was better, be it from 300, 30, or 3 years ago, isn’t a healthy way to view the history of music. The world changes and so does its music. Expecting music to remain the same from 1981 to 2021 is counterintuitive, given how much the world and its people have changed in the interim. All of these changes completely shift both musicians’ songwriting topics and production methods, and audience’s expectations, especially those just discovering music.
Music’s function is most likely what everyone wants it to be. But one thing is certain: music is the soundtrack of a particular slice of Earth-time. So, unless time suddenly stops, we have no choice but to make new music and tell our (contemporary) stories to current audiences and (hopefully) to future generations of music lovers.
Here’s to the next 50 million!