Stop Listening To Music

31 Jul 2026 ≈

Andy Cush, at Hearing Things:

I’m not a psychologist or an economist, but I have a hunch that my reaction in that moment went deeper than my conscious awareness of the basic mechanics of supply and demand. There’s something about that sort of abundance that just strikes me as wrong, and I fear that the endless surplus of music presented to us by the streaming platforms and their social-media adjuncts (soundtracks to Instagram photos, TikTok lip-sync videos) tarnishes my appreciation of music similarly […] The abundance effect, exacerbated by the tens of thousands of prompt-based AI songs uploaded to streaming every day, worries me on what I’ll go ahead and call a spiritual level—a fear of estrangement from music’s depth and beauty like the one that plagues Reger in Old Masters—as well as an economic one. I’m not saying it’s the only reason musicians are so repeatedly debased in the capitalist open market. But even a non-economist can tell you that one way to decrease a product’s agreed-upon value is to flood the market with supply.

It has become so easy to mindlessly consume that we’re usually not even aware that we’re neck-deep in Content.