Music exposure observation

Hello everyone,

Each month Stereophile seems to have a column that highlights the generational Gap between Boomer/ Gen X audiophiles and Millennial / gen Z listeners, usually emphasizing the ideas of both value/economics and streaming/ on demand services as a way of demarcating why younger generation isn’t as beholden to the Hobby as those of us who have been in it for 20 or more years.

As a proud Gen x-er, I thought about something the other day insofar as what role music plays in a daily life of a typical household. Whereas up to about 20 years ago or so music was a dedicated entertainment investment - that is, one would put on a CD or vinyl, and that would be it. And whether that CD was a complete album or a mixtape of sorts didn’t really matter. More important was the lack of any on demand paradigm: no audio or visual streaming services. In short, music was much more of a dedicated facet of life in most households. Yes, there were cable and DVDs, but the idea of listening to music as more than simply a Whitman’s Chocolate sampler, to use a somewhat weak analogy, wasn’t an option.

Going back even further to my young childhood days of the mid ’70s and ’80s - and for many of you here you’re adult days of the 70s and 80s, music was a viable form of In-House dedication. Putting your record on meant listening to the record in some semblance of continuity, even if background. In short, music was much more of a temporal investment, no matter the quality of the production or the artistry.

And of course, times have changed. And I was thinking about how much my own two children experience music as that similar investment. Yes, I have my dedicated audio room upstairs, and a Sonos set up in the kitchen, as well as the obligatory multi-channel receiver set-up in the family room, but there are so many other things to distract my children from music as a be all end all. Now there does exist streaming video games and streaming video services and On Demand entertainment of all wavelengths, and unless I have them in my car, or I’m playing music in the background as we do something else on a family game night or in the kitchen, it’s simply not the same visceral experience.

I’m not bemoaning this change; everything shifts and if the center does not hold, it simply achieves a new equilibrium somewhere. But it does make me think about this idea of a dedicated focus on something, like, in this case, music, a much more rarified experience. There are simply way too many other stimuli out there more cheaply and efficiently had that take away from the pure audiophile experience. In essence, be growing up experience was in the music is much much different nowadays than it was 20 or 30 or more years ago.