Is Music Just White Noise Now?

There was a time, not long ago, when music was an ‘experience’. Sharing our favorite tracks over Bluetooth, tuning in to the handful of music channels on TV playing random songs, even browsing those old websites which had lyrics to all the songs. Music meant joy. Music meant fun. Music, again, meant an experience.
And music still remains, even bigger and accessible than ever. The experience? Not sure.

A report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry states that we spend 20.7 hours on an average listening to music. Close to a whole effing day ??!! It’s clear that these 20 odd hours are not solely spent on music. And that is the reason why I say that the experience has somewhat ruined. We listen to music in commute, while working, while exercising and some people, even while sleeping. Maybe, we are at the stage, where ironically so, music itself becomes the background noise. This thought is somewhat frightening.

How it started

The advent of streaming services – Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube etc – has democratised the access to music. A great example would be our very own country. Once fixated on the upbeat dance numbers and charming melodies of Bollywood, Indian listeners have widened their playlists for all sorts of genres. From Hip hop to K-pop, we have a market for everyone.
Apart from streaming, netizens are also exposed to music in their pursuit of consuming content across social media. Every week a new song goes viral, a new trend kicks in and boom, the favourites library just expanded. Reels & Tiktoks eat up a lot of time (a topic for another blog) and are almost always accompanied by music.

Visible effects

A major chunk of youth population (including myself) uses earbuds when travelling. Listening to music has sort of become a ritual when taking a bus or train. An article suggested that headphones have enabled us to curate personal auditory environments, to live a life so unbothered, your surroundings shouldn’t affect you.

From an evolutionary POV, we have always been on a fight or flight mode, constantly absorbing stimuli from the surroundings and charting our course of action. A certain Gon the stone-age boy wouldn’t have survived, if he hummed to his favourite ‘rock’ music ignorant of the real rocks around him… One may rightly debate that the contemporary world doesn’t possess the same threats, but critical reactions to unforeseen events, the problem persists if one is in her own musical Lala land.

Diminishing marginal utility

The law of DMU holds true for almost every activity in our lives. As per this law, the more of a commodity we consume, in our case – Music, the lesser utility or pleasure we derive from that increase in consumption. Your Spotify ‘Wrapped’ is the biggest evidence of this. When the number of hours spent on that app are converted to days and when we are shocked at how we spent multiple days in the year doing nothing but just listening to songs, it does make you wonder, ‘Why didn’t I stop?’
Well, that is probably because you were chasing a certain level of pleasure and a constant duration of exposure to music doesn’t satiate that craving.

Impact on Talent

It would be unfair to ignore the plethora of new talents that this endless access to music has introduced to a sizeable audience. A great example would be the Indian rapper Hanumankind making a mark overseas for his banger ‘Big Dawgs’. Thanks to the wide reach, artists have gotten this newfound ability to reach out to audiences which were previously untapped due to lack of distribution.

The Loud & Clear Report published by Spotify states that more than 1500 artists made more than $1 million in royalties through the platform alone. 80% of them didn’t have a single song in the top charts. Spotify describes this phenomenon as – ‘Success in the streaming era doesn’t require a chart-topping hit or a decade-spanning catalog – it’s about building a loyal fanbase that keeps coming back.’

Having said that, it is important to note, most of these newfound voices enabled by platforms might lose out because of the reduced attention span & music becoming the background sound for all daily activities. Their fate would lie upon an algorithm, on what the computer thinks the person would like to listen to.

Psychological and Cognitive effects

More times than we’d like, we find ourselves humming the lyrics of songs viral on reels. These songs generally have nothing to do with what we were doing, but just come out randomly. It’s no secret that our brain is overflooded with information. Songs that become viral appear in so many forms of media – and with such repetition – it gets hammered in our memory like a nail.

Multi-tasking while grooving to your favourite beats doesn’t quite bring a rhythm to your work. For instance, music with lyrics can mess with reading comprehension or deep work, as your brain tries (and often fails) to juggle language processing on two fronts.

Also, we have started to use music to get into certain moods. Want to get motivated? Let me open my motivation playlist. Feeling sad? Let me sulk with the sad songs playlist on. Well, music might help lighten your mood and stay calm, becoming dependent on it in a way such that we lose control over our own feelings – that’s a recipe for disaster.

Conclusion

In the end, while music is more accessible than ever, it’s lost some of its magic. It’s everywhere—background noise, mood enhancer, productivity tool—but sometimes that means it becomes just another thing filling up our minds. The trick is finding a balance. Maybe it’s time we start thinking about how we use music, and whether we’re truly experiencing it, or just letting it run in the background.

– Naman Shah

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