12/11/2025
Interesting comments......
Headphone listening “is a surprisingly radical invention, and we’re only beginning to contend with its implications,” Jonathan Garrett wrote in October.
https://theatln.tc/iVtACehV
Music used to be a communal experience: Friends would meet up for album-listening parties, and MTV would show the most popular music videos to the masses. But according to a recent report, 78 percent of streaming consumers now listen to music through headphones. “Music hasn’t disappeared from our social lives, but it is more often consumed privately than communally.” Garrett writes. “This revolution is less a rupture than a culmination of a long shift—from music as a unifying force to music as an individual pursuit. Headphones transform music from something you might once have blasted through speakers—in a car, a dorm, a living room—into something almost entirely confined.”
“This shift is further enabled by the platforms where most modern fans do their listening. The core promise of streaming services such as Spotify is that you can access nearly the entire history of recorded music at virtually no cost,” Garrett continues. “That abundance is real, but the platforms are designed to keep us moving, not lingering. Even the word streaming suggests a frictionless drift from one song to the next. Breadth is prioritized over depth; the goal is to strengthen loyalty to the platform, not devotion to an artist or album. Listeners are encouraged to hop around tracks on a playlist, not live with an artist’s work long enough to let it shape them.”
“When that kind of listening behavior scales up across an entire population, and audiences are spread thin, the cultural conversation quiets. Music is everywhere, but it’s less important,” Garrett writes at the link. “The more time we spend in our own musical echo chambers, the less likely we are to share a collective cultural experience.”
🎨: Brian Blomerth
