With respect to your experience cited in your other comment, a lot of my music experience time is a continuous stream of random tracks on Apple's "Made for You" feature.
I'm not particularly partial to what comes up. There's obviously a degree of quality that I'm expecting in order to keep the experience smooth and a set of genre and musical conventions I'm expecting.
I wouldn't say that's exactly commodified, no, but I definitely feel like my engagement with the difference between Taylor Swift and some other well-produced halfway reasonable pop artist is pretty minimal. At least in that act of listening.
I used to care a lot more about this. I used to keep up with my favorite artists and look forward to their releases excitedly. Now, I feel everything is such a continuous stream of mild-novelty that I'm less attuned to these differences.
So in that sense, I think I agree with the grandparent in that something feels interchangeable and indifferent about music. I don't want to pay a ton for it, even as someone who used to love buying albums. Or, at least, the times when I engage with music in that way seem fewer and further apart.
Music seems to serve two purposes. The majority of my listening is unintentional, background listening. Much more rarely am I more engaged in the experience. Only in those latter times do I feel all that attuned to a difference in quality.
Now, instead of using an algorithm of music selected by a mass market service that is playing you an endless stream of songs that are proven to have a large audience, try listening to the raw feed of uploaded music to major services.
Like the literal feed coming in that is just a firehose of every major label, all the indie releases uploaded via Distrokid or similar, and so on.
You'd find it instantly unlistenable. Nobody wants that because it sucks. Most music, even music people have taken very seriously, has almost no appeal to anyone at all.
I'm not particularly partial to what comes up. There's obviously a degree of quality that I'm expecting in order to keep the experience smooth and a set of genre and musical conventions I'm expecting.
I wouldn't say that's exactly commodified, no, but I definitely feel like my engagement with the difference between Taylor Swift and some other well-produced halfway reasonable pop artist is pretty minimal. At least in that act of listening.
I used to care a lot more about this. I used to keep up with my favorite artists and look forward to their releases excitedly. Now, I feel everything is such a continuous stream of mild-novelty that I'm less attuned to these differences.
So in that sense, I think I agree with the grandparent in that something feels interchangeable and indifferent about music. I don't want to pay a ton for it, even as someone who used to love buying albums. Or, at least, the times when I engage with music in that way seem fewer and further apart.
Music seems to serve two purposes. The majority of my listening is unintentional, background listening. Much more rarely am I more engaged in the experience. Only in those latter times do I feel all that attuned to a difference in quality.