What Song Should I Listen To?

Google has been promoting what it calls “activity-based” music. Huh? Open the Google Play Music app and it will ask you to select your current activity (options include Cooking, Being Romantic, Relaxing, Studying etc). The app will then pull up a list of songs best suited for that activity! If done right, Google’s claim may not be just an instance of bragging:

“Google Play Music has whatever you need music for — from working, to working out, to working it on the dance floor.”

Nick Carr points out what this approach implies:

“Music becomes an input, a factor of production. Listening to music is not itself an “activity” — music isn’t an end in itself — but rather an enhancer of other activities, each of which must be clearly demarcated.”

And if you accept that listening to music is not an end in itself but the backdrop to whatever else you are doing, then it is logical to outsource the effort to find that backdrop and focus on the main activity! And so:

“You should, as Google suggests, look to a “team of music experts” to “craft” your musical inputs, “song by song,” so “you don’t have to.””

No wonder then that Carr ends his blog in disgust:

“Art is an industrial lubricant that, by reducing the friction from activities, makes for more productive lives.”

Less than a decade back, the iPod Shuffle picked the next song at random (in fact, you could not pick the song to play) Believe it or not, the device sold like hot cakes! Simon Reynolds describes what that led to:

“Soon (I) was always wanting to know what was coming up next, It was irresistible to click onto the next random selection. … Soon I was listening to just the first fifteen seconds of every track; then, not listening at all. … Really, the logical culmination would have been for me to remove the headphones and just look at the track display.”

Why does tech have such a big impact on our music habits? Nick Carr believes the root cause is:

“When there’s no end of choices, each choice feels disappointing…And so, bored by the content, bored by the art, bored by the experience, we become obsessed with the interface.”

With so much choice, Reynolds may not have been exaggerating when he said that the interface “relieves you of the burden of desire itself”! And so we look forward to whatever “solutions” Silicon Valley comes up with: from shuffling to recommending the song for us. Anything except making a decision ourselves…