The flippant uncertainty of the modern music listening process
For a very brief while, I was sheepishly pleased to hear of SoundCloud limiting the number of daily plays on external applications to 15,000 from 1 July. The platform has in the past proved to be useful for young independent musicians to spread their music in the absence of the reach a large record label provides with its free speech model of allowing anyone to upload their original music on to their database. You can embed the SoundCloud player to share a song anywhere online — from your blog to a Tweet or Facebook post — and anyone can hit play on the link to listen. So eyebrows were raised and much criticism was directed their way for trying to do what anyone else in their place would too — monetise a commercial product for steady revenue generation, while under apparent pressure following the success of Spotify and the entry of Tidal and Apple Music.
They annoyed digital warriors for curbing daily plays not directly streamed through their website with the implication that a listener would now have to go to the SoundCloud website to stream a song after it had run out of external plays. But this was simply a colossal misunderstanding. The update was in fact misreported by the blood-hungry internet press to affect plays on the SoundCloud player itself. In reality, it affects only developers who’ve used the SoundCloud Application Programming Interface (API) to create their own original music players that make use of SoundCloud’s bank of sounds. Now, those original music players on websites or as standalone apps suffer because of the limited number of plays. Social media hounds need not worry about having to take the very drastic step of opening a brand new tab and visiting SoundCloud’s official website or app to hear a song instead of listening to it directly off of Facebook or Twitter. Which is a shame.
Without fetishising too much a period of limited technology, I still look back fondly at a time (over a decade ago) when I would visit Planet M in South Extension or Music World in Ansal Plaza, somehow locate the sole shelf housing English rock music cassettes — lonely, unarranged — in a distant, dimly lit, neglected corner alley. I would buy a handful of tapes — depending on my parents’ mood — rush home, lock myself up, sit with the album sleeve and artwork, and start listening. I’d allow myself weeks, months often, to fully internalise that innocent process of discovery. There was also a shop in Delhi’s underground market Palika Bazaar that sold bootlegged and pirated copies of albums that weren’t available in India — let’s just call the shop “Clyde’s” — that I used to frequent at the time (Piracy? Me? Never.). The effort put in the acquiring of an album (whether through legitimate purchase or intellectual theft) almost informed the listening of it. It’s not that the joyfulness of discovering music has disappeared today with changing formats or models — quite the opposite — but it’s different.
Each time I’m browsing through my timeline now on Facebook or Twitter or Google Plus or Ello, I come across a bunch of embedded links to new songs. YouTube, Bandcamp, SoundCloud links. I click on them and listen to this potentially life-changing new music with a sort of casual, postmodern apathy bordering on distrust, listening absent-mindedly while also checking out what my virtual friends are eating or what skyline they’re admiring. This attitude, one that I have very much embraced along with the rest of my generation, seems flippant and dismissive, and really not conducive to appreciating any new form of art. The act of hunting down new music religiously, and then respecting the work enough to try to understand its ups and downs over a sustained period of time — instead of instant, outright rejection — has, in previous years, played a key role in the maturing of listening habits of many young, naïve listeners. Accumulating massive, unfiltered collections of music has become far easier, of course — thanks to debit/ credit cards, fast download speeds, streaming and, well, peer-to-peer software — but the initiation into appreciating the craft of sound, or the cultivation of reasonable attention spans, seems skewered toward the laughable now. For a ludicrous Rs 120 a month, you will soon be able to access the entire iTunes music library with the new Apple Music streaming service, but does that allow for a fruitful, satisfactory immersion in the music? It’s hard to tell one way or another yet.
I click on the embedded links and listen to this potentially life-changing new music with a sort of casual, postmodern apathy bordering on distrust, listening absent-mindedly while also checking out what my virtual friends are eating or what skyline they’re admiring. This attitude seems flippant and dismissive, and really not conducive to appreciating any new form of art.