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The Student News Site of Laguna Blanca School

The Fourth Estate

The Lost Art of Listening: Has our generation forgotten the physical connection to music?

The+Lost+Art+of+Listening%3A+Has+our+generation+forgotten+the+physical+connection+to+music%3F

1973:
It’s here – the record you’ve been waiting months for. It’s finally in your hands; you’re holding the album of the zeitgeist, completely fixated on the cover art and dying to know what’s inside.
You peel off the plastic shrink wrap and pull out a pristine LP that contains what millions of fans have been anticipating. You place the disc on the turntable, carefully resting the needle on the vinyl . . . and lose yourself as sound fills the room.
Cut to 2014:
You turn on your iPhone, plug in your earbud and open an app like Spotify or Soundcloud.
Scrolling through your list of albums and artists, you find a tune that fits your current mood and press play. You listen for a few seconds, then skip to the next song.
Tonight, you might make a playlist or download a few songs from iTunes or Google from that band your friend was talking about.
It’s fast, it’s easy, but is it better? Has our generation lost something by not experiencing the physical connection one had when music was really tangible?
After records, cassettes and CDs turned obsolete, the creation of MP3s changed the world forever.
With the rising popularity of programs like iTunes, music no longer possesses a physical aspect – files are saved on playlists and playlists are saved on apps. Truthfully speaking, music has become fully digital.
Today, Pandora (175 million users), Soundcloud (4o million users) and Spotify (10 million users) dominate ourmusicarticlepic music experience.
Our generation is listening to a virtual cloud, streaming intangible songs and downloading albums from the aether.
We still have access to great music; in fact, we can have any music we want within seconds. Yet is that instant gratification as meaningful as the experience of buying and listening to a record?
“I think we’ve lost the physical connection to music. My mom still has all the records she bought when she was a kid – she could never part with them. They represent her adolescence; every LP has its own sentimental value,” senior Mia Chavez said.
Today’s teens have forgotten the old magic of putting a needle on vinyl – the sensation of listening to a record from the beginning of side one to the end of side two has been replaced by pressing “play” on MP3s.
There are, however, the precious few who still buy vinyl. Either as hardcore audiophiles or pretentious “hipsters,” a small percentage of people do appreciate the physical experience of records.
“Hipsters” are buying records, but they aren’t necessarily listening to them. It’s become a keen fad, a trendy snubbing of modern technology. Yet interestingly, while vinyl sales have increased about 30 percent over the last six years, turntable sales have remained fairly flat over that time, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. So record sales are increasing, but record player sales are not.
Back in decades when you bought a record, you listened to that record. You really listened.
The wait was highly anticipated; the line of fans at record stores stretched around the block.
Today, songs are produced at a faster rate than ever before; whether it be a hit by Nicki Minaj or an anonymous Soundcloud uploader, the music sphere just keeps on growing.
“I think we are more connected to music now because we can hear everything. An artist creates a song and a day later the whole world listens to it,” junior Theo Berriet, avid Soundcloud user, said.
This overwhelming surplus of songs allows our generation to be a bit ADHD when listening to music.
“I never listen to a song the whole way through,” junior Bea Tolan said.
“I’ll listen to the beginning for five seconds and then I might skip to the middle.”
Most teenagers share Bea’s habit: our generation doesn’t have the patience or attention span to hear a song for the entire three minutes let alone a full album. Yet we’re eager to buy a Led Zeppelin’s record from Urban Outfitters because, after all, it’s the cool thing to do.
Oh, the irony: we have instant access to every song ever produced, but we’d rather pose as vinyl aficionados.

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The Lost Art of Listening: Has our generation forgotten the physical connection to music?