You’ve probably heard it a thousand times already, attention is becoming the most valuable resource of our time. It’s not information that valuable anymore, Google and the gang solved this. Knowledge is. And attention. There is so much going on daily that 5 minutes of my time are suddenly outrageously expensive.
Taking a look at what you’ve produced, in the form of a post, tweet, Facebook update, the project you’ve moonlighted on for the past 4 months, email and so on, requires that I spend some of my precious attention and time on you, instead of looking at some cat playing a piano, reading the latest news or actually doing some work.
All of this makes one simple click extremely valuable. Pressing like on the post somebody has just written sends the message that you took the time to actually read it and appreciate it. One click, one like, +1, share, Digg, has become important and valuable.
What ever happened to hand writing a post-card and sending it via email? Just thinking of how much time, effort and attention this required makes me shiver. Now it takes just a tweet + a picture. I’m sure it won’t be long before we hear, hey, send us a tweet from your vacation. Actually, I think I’ve already heard it…
It’s amazing how much a simple click is beginning to be worth and how invaluable is becoming taking the time to write a personal message or having a genuine face to face human interaction.
It might be the process of getting father and father away from being a teenager (know as getting older), it might be change in interests, it might be wisdom or it might be being clueless, but I really do think that hit songs, the kind of which become the soundtrack of generations, are going away slowly and for good.
I’m not saying there are no more good songs. In fact I believe quite the opposite is true. I’m saying that it is much harder for a song today, and definitively in the future, to be played over and over and over again until it gets so well embedded into the social contentiousness that it will be something of a soundtrack for a generation. Think of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ by Bob Dylan. How many hundreds of times have you heard it? Or Yesterday, by the Beatles, or Mr. Robinson, by Simon and Garfunkel and so on.
My argument has to do with 2 things:
The devices and technology with which the songs are consumed;
The consumption habits.
In the not so distant past there were two main ways of listening to music: radio and records. Both were limited in the number of songs they could play. If you had a Metallica cassette or CD or whatever, you would listen the hell out of it, because there was nothing else to listen to, you had few other things to listen to and especially if you were a penniless youngster, with very few means of getting your hands on new music. Radio stations had to pay royalties and to maintain a big physical records collection, so they had limits to.
In conclusion, the DJ’s of the past and your own limited collection were the things that defined what you listened to over and over again, embedding into your mind a certain song. And yes, there was MTV and VH1 which played the same limited amount of songs, if not even more limited, because they needed to have video for them.
Today we have radio, but arguably, it’s not so influential anymore. I consider myself connected to the new ways of consuming data and digital content. Except for listening to the radio in the morning, while having breakfast, and while in the car, the influence radio has on me has diminished. At work I use Grooveshark and 8tacks and all kind of streaming services where you can find a ton of new music. There are tens of services dedicated only to finding new stuff. So the songs I’m listening to are more often then not stuff I’ve never heard before.
Consumption of digital content is shifting from a scheduled form (TV, radio, newspapers) to an on demand form (I would like to watch Rambo again – click and watch).
And finally, arguably, the members of the younger generations have the attention span of puppies, which is probably a defense mechanism to the avalanche of data they have to plow through.
Putting everything together I believe that because it is much easier to discover new stuff and to jump from one thing to the other, there is no way a whole generation will listen 500 times, during a summer, to the same Lady Gaga (or pick an famous artist) song. There might be one crazy fan who will put that song on repeat on his mp3 player and listen the hell out of it, but things get old fast(er) for most. And while there might be meaningful songs for certain individuals, there will not be a songs that you and all your friends, new and old, have listened to.
Don’t believe me, but I want to challenge you. Go to your old record collection, take a cassette / cd / record of any kind that you listened to hell out of, or if you don’t have what to play it on anymore just get it from somewhere on the web and listen to it, on repeat, a couple of times. Now, tell me, how did that make you feel? And why did that make you feel so? Was it because 10, 15, 20 years ago you were listening to that song all the time on the radio or recorded? And while listening to it you were doing some things that are now dear memories to you?
