With the advent of the information age and the sheer amount of media consumption that our generation experiences on a daily basis, has our ability to appreciate the products we consume deteriorated? Well, if you consider the theory of declining attention spans, it shouldn’t be difficult to infer that there’s an aspect of appreciation missing in younger generations, including ours.
iTunes, peer-to-peer file sharing and Pandora — all of these services were designed to make music affordable, accessible and modernized for our fast-paced technology-centered popular culture. Of course there are exceptions, but for the most part, people don’t typically purchase entire albums anymore. The days of lengthy albums that are more of a journey rather than a collection of hit singles is over. Icons like Pink Floyd wouldn’t prosper in our times — and that’s astonishing.
The music industry and popular culture in general has become so focused on the bottom line that it has become financially inefficient to produce albums. If the average iTunes customer is only paying for one or two of the most popular tracks of an artist’s new album, what purpose do those other tracks serve? Well, they become a waste of money. The artist may argue against this on artistic grounds, but the record labels only have one thing in mind: profit.
While the Internet has given otherwise unseen artists a shot at the big time, it has also allowed music fans to become complacent. Granted, artists like Pretty Lights, who give out their music completely free on the Internet, thrive in this digital culture. But what happens to the art and ingenuity in crafting a legendary LP that can only truly be appreciated from start to finish?
Well, it has simply become a thing of the past. It might be something that is easily overlooked, or maybe it’s simply not relevant to our generation’s culture, but it does raise an important question: What will be the next form of musical expression to dwindle out of the spotlight of popular culture?