The state of listening doesn't make headlines

Among the most useful things I’ve done this year was reading Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. The 41-year-old title is having a moment right now as a touch point for writers unpacking the state of literacy, or the much-discussed “end of reading.” Postman’s book is about television. He traces the pre-TV “typographic” era, as he calls it, when context-rich print media like books and newspapers defined the public discourse. And he shows how the shift to image-based communication was a tectonic shift to a news media defined by entertainment value.

Postman writes about typography—printed text—as having “the strongest possible bias towards exposition” and encouraging a “sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively, and sequentially”; print media inherently contains “a tolerance for delayed response.” What good is moving information quickly if we are not afforded the time and space to analyze it or understand it, he wonders. The telegraph and then the television brought about a culture of incoherency and discontinuity, he argues, which of course resonates into the present. This is so much of culture today: distracted, fragmented, placeless.

I saw the book on an endcap at McNally Jackson last weekend. “Consider it against our age of social media, for extra fun,” read the staff note. 

The framework of amusements has given me a lot to think about when it comes to generative-AI music products, too. Suno CEO Mikey Shulman has said many strange things in podcast interviews, but one comment that has really stuck with me had to do with Netflix. Late last year, in conversation with a venture capitalist, Shulman wondered about the millions of Americans who routinely end their days half-watching the streaming giant, and whether they could be convinced to spend their wind-down time playing around with Suno instead. Suno, of course, being his $5.4 billion-dollar A.I. music platform that sells prompt-based music generation using models trained on tens of millions of unlicensed works. What prevented Netflix-scrollers from turning into Suno-prompters, he said, was a “lack of imagination.” 

That Netflix users would be among his target consumers makes sense. Suno is well understood in this lineage of amusements. Shulman knows this. When he outlines his vision for the future of music—which he does often—he varyingly describes his core product offering as an “entertainment activity” or “meaningful consumption experience.” Music is obviously so much more than this. It is personal expression, historical record, communication, collective knowledge, the list goes on…

I don’t know if there’s any modern music development that reflects the fraught state of listening today as well as the generative A.I. music apps. I hesitate to call it a listening crisis, even though the unfolding media frenzy about the reading crisis encourages me in that direction. Listening, too, is increasingly atomized and fractured, in-part thanks to how recorded sound is distributed and delivered today. If streaming services helped shape context-less, self-oriented, vibe-based listening modes—“make the music revolve around me” is how I’ve described it in the past—then the A.I. apps take the same orientation and bring it to audio-generation, for the playlist-trained user who does not understand music as a form of communication and a site of curiosity but rather a backdrop to be controlled. Something they don’t have to listen to at all.

Major magazines report this crisis of reading, but the crisis of listening barely registers. This is a world where listening has already long been endangered. People have been especially drawn to the work of Pauline Oliveros in recent years because of how the simple truths underpinning her best-known work—that hearing and listening are different; that hearing is incidental, while listening requires sustained attention—are rarely acknowledged, let alone taught. We teach children to read, but we don’t teach them to listen. Why not? “One hears repeatedly that we live in a 'visually oriented society',” Oliveros once wrote, “even though the ear tells the eye where to look.”

Last year, in the Financial Times, I wrote about the similarities between Spotify and Netflix: “These companies are in the business of distraction.” If there is a crisis of listening, and there is a crisis of reading, then they are both surely crises of distraction. The consumer-facing gen-AI music apps—ones like Suno’s and the “AI remix tools” coming soon to Spotify—reflect that familiar logic, but in search of new ways to make platforms more addictive and all-consuming. Not with music, per se, but an approximation—something that feels like music.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books,” Postman wrote in 1985. “What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.” Who will fear what happens when something resembling the music-making process is a distraction from listening itself?

News, events, etc. 

On the occasion of Spotify turning 20 this year, the German academic journal Musik & Ästhetik convened a forum of writers and scholars to reflect on the theme of “what is left to say about streaming?” I have a short essay reflecting on that central question, alongside contributions by longtime streaming researchers like Maria Eriksson and Robert Prey. It’s available open-access.

I have a few appearances coming up this fall. Next week I will return to Unsound festival in Poland, where I’ll take part in a panel on AI and music, and we’ll also record a live taping of Critical Listening, the music and technology podcast I’ve co-hosted since last April. 

Critical Listening

In case you missed it, over 25 episodes and counting we’ve interviewed musicians, writers and organizers on topics like streaming, AI, labor and beyond. Lately we’ve been focused on a series called Listening Habits where we speak with musicians about how they actually listen to music in everyday life. We also do monthly bonus episodes for members unpacking headlines from across the music business trade press. Become a member.  

What I’ve been listening to 

The song “Autosmile” by @ at least once every day. A 2022 record by Kate Ferencz, You Will Love Again, recently recommended to me by a friend. A copy of SYR5 I picked up last month at Record Grouch. The new albums by Frances Chang, The Tubs, and Eraser. The new Julia Holter record almost every morning lately.