Do you remember the first album that you listened to? Like the first full album, with each track feeling like something new. The lyrics feel like they’re speaking to you. You get confused about what song you wanna listen not stop. For me, the album Damn by Kendrick Lamar. Each track felt like an exposure of emotion, listening to my own life or the lives of friends. And the funny part is, I didn’t speak any English, I wasn’t even in the U.S. at that time, but I could feel his artistic side in a song like FAER, describing how black mothers are and how tough they are on their kids. When I was a kid, my mom used to tell me she was only like that because she didn’t want me to end up like my brother.

But it was Kendrick’s artistic voice that brought me there and made me listen to the full album. I believe people are losing the feeling of connecting with an artist and listening to a full album that speaks to them. With shorter attention spans and music becoming too easy to produce, we are losing the artistic side of artists and the ability to connect with music for life.

Attention Span

The way music is consumed has changed in the past few years, with 120,000 new songs being uploaded to streaming music platforms every day. For only $10.99 per month, people are able to stream music and much more at their fingertips. The assumption that people will listen to all this music is unreliable, as Jeremy D.Larson put it, “Those who have settled into the groove of life after 30 simply don’t listen to new music because it’s easy to forgo the act of discovery when work, rent, children, and broadly speaking ‘life’ comes into play.” According to INSINA, 24% of tracks are skipped within the first 5 seconds, 29% within the first 10 seconds, 35% within 30 seconds, and 49% are never finished. With an overload of music and with less and less attention brought to those songs, people tend not to listen to full albums anymore. 

Music Has Become Too Easy to Make 

In the past, it was typical for bands to spend millions to produce music. In 1972, The Rolling Stones spent $2 million to produce their album Exile on Main Street. In today’s day, software like DAW can produce an album for only $200. Producing and creating music has become increasingly easy. Widely accessible for free or an upgraded premium price of less than 10 dollars, companies like Suno, an AI company, can be used to generate any kind of music style, combining various kinds of music genres.

With an increase in streaming music and more people self-producing their own music, listening to and discovering new songs and artists will become more difficult. People tend to only listen to the same type of music and their favorite songs over and over. Younger individuals, who tend to explore new titles, with find this age of streaming and music production an obstacle. It will be interesting to see what will become of music and its artists in the future. Will we make better music, or will the music industry regress with the further use of AI?