Help! Free Music Has Taken Over My Hard Drive
[Music's] transaction cost can be as low as free ... so there's no inherent pressure to listen to it all. Repeat this a bunch of items and all of a sudden my hard drive is full of music that I've never heard, and the "digital photo effect" starts to kick in. So what do I do? I listen to the same old albums over and over, because I know I like them."
(Posted on www.rootburn.com, Rajat Paharia, former co-director of software experiences, IDEO)
Has this knock-on effect of music's accessibility on the Internet been acknowledged, or is everyone too cool to admit the same happens to them? It's what I call the "pinball effect", from when I used to drink and play pinball in American bars regularly.
I'll put my hands up. I'm sure this is analogous to living in a city within 5 miles of millions of people: millions of potential friends, but I still hang out with the same couple of dozen people. Being connected to everything all the time might not even be particularly healthy - Stuart Kauffman (At Home In The Universe) talks about the way densely intra-connected networks clunk from state to state in a tedious, non-creative way, and I wonder if there's an analogy to be made with a world where everyone has 10% of all recordings ever made 10 seconds from their play button...
ReplyDelete"Digital technology has made music easier to make and copy, with the result that recorded music is about as readily available as water, and not a whole lot more exciting." Brian Eno
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http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10784
I've definitely found this to be true. But at the same time, thanks to free music and the internet, I've discovered some absolute gems and learnt alot more about the music I already loved.
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