Today, with the plethora of devices available for media consumption, people use their devices interchangeably. Most people would argue that they are getting the same experience from watching a TV show on an Ipad versus watching on their living room TV screen. In general, people focus on the TV show itself and not the experience of how they watched that show.

Famous media scholar, Marshall McLuhan famously declared that “the medium is the message”. He argues about the importance of studying the medium in which you interact with rather than the content on that medium. He says that the form of the message determines the ways in which that message is perceived. If he were around today, he would say that watching TV on an Ipad is a fundamentally different experience than watching the same show on a traditional television.

The internet has fundamentally changed the experience of listening to music as well. People can listen to music at just about any time by using streaming services on their phones. I’ve found that people play music at anytime just because they can. To a lot of people, a quick shuffle of their library is vastly prefered over silence. When people do this, there is no intention behind their music listening, the album or genre isn’t even an afterthought. Their only intention when streaming music is to fill the void of silence. The popularity of this mindless habit has made listening to music on a streaming service an extremely passive experience.

The growing passivity of music listening on streaming services has lead to popular music sounding more passive as well. The world’s most popular genre, Hip Hop, has two increasingly popular subgenres called“mumble rap” and “trap”. With both genres, the listener can fully understand and enjoy the song even while it is passively playing in the background. Additionally, the most popular artist on Spotify in 2016 was Drake, who is known for his spacious and breezy style of hip hop. The way that people listen to music led to a change in sound of the music that became popular. Just like Marshall Mcluhan said, the form of the message determined how that message was perceived. A passive experience led people to perceive music as a passive medium, and then the market successfully fulfilled the demand.

Personally, passivity is not what I enjoy in my music; I enjoy music that actively engages me both sonically and lyrically. Precisely for this reason, the musical medium that I prefer is my record player. Vinyl makes passively listening to music very difficult, because, unlike music streaming, listening to music on vinyl is an active process. I have to search through my collection for a specific album that I want to hear, enjoy the large album art, pull the record out of it’s sleeves, and then finally place it on the turntable. Even after the record’s begun, the experience is still active, because halfway through the album I have to flip the record over to it’s b-side.

Sometimes, I can’t figure out if I bought the record because I love the music, or if the experience of listening to it on vinyl is why I’v come to love it. Vinyl records brought intention to my music listening experience, which is something that I never imagined that I’d enjoy. Having a record setup makes the listening experience, just that, an experience. In a world where everything is immediately accessible we tend to forget to have intention behind our media consumption. Don’t turn something on just to fill the room with sound, only play music when you want to hear music. If the medium is the message, then us consumers need to take a step back and actually think about how we are consuming.

Written By Taylor Kalsey, after many rewrites, in Isla Vista CA

OUTLINE

1- medium is the message 2-spotify as the medium, extremely passive experience leads to passive music 3- why i love vinyl, in an internet age where everything is passive, vinyl needs intention behind it, organizing, buying, to putting the wax on the table. It helps make my music matter more to me.

INSPIRATION

Featured Image is a boombox by fantastic man Tom Sachs