Ever since music was a popular thing, forced listening was a staple. i.e. You can’t listen to what you want when you want. To a certain extent you’re stuck with what ya got. We’ve decided what will be played next and you don’t really have a choice.
Payola and musical politics ensued, then came Napster, then Spotify…and it turns out people seem pretty satisfied with picking whatever music they want whenever they want it.
Perhaps forced listening will find a way to reinvent itself…because the beauty of forced listening was that when you heard a song you didn’t really like, it was very likely you were going to hear it again. And again. And maybe by the fourth listen you started liking it a little bit and by the seventh you were hooked. Your relationship to a song and artist where it took a bunch of listens rather than just one is a really different, interesting dynamic.
These days we don’t take time to listen to music we don’t really like. Why would we when we can just tell Siri to play a different song? Even the thought of it seems strange. But songs we don’t really like can turn into songs we love when we’re ‘forced’ into hearing them a few more times.
Leaving room for things to grow on us is becoming a lost practice. No need to return to the way things were but hopefully there’s a way to carry with us the best things from the old days of forced listening.
