I really enjoyed Clive Thompson’s history of How the Phonograph Changed Music Forever. I found a couple of observations particularly interesting. First, on the “new” phenomenon of listening to music alone:

A curious new behavior emerged: listening to music alone. Previously, music was most often highly social, with a family gathering together around a piano, or a group of people hearing a band in a bar. But now you could immerse yourself in isolation. In 1923, the writer Orlo Williams described how strange it would be to enter a room and find someone alone with a phonograph. “You would think it odd, would you not?” he noted. “You would endeavor to dissemble your surprise: you would look twice to see whether some other person were not hidden in some corner of the room.”

This is particularly interesting when you consider it in the context of the latest trend: headphones as the new walls for people in open-plan offices. We went from listening to music together, to listening to music alone, to using music to indicate we don’t want to be bothered. Also see How Headphones Changed the World as a great companion article to the phonograph one.

Second, this is something I hadn’t considered before¹:

“In the age of the iPod, and the age of Pandora, and the age of Spotify, we’ve seen the average college student go from being a hard-core ‘rock fan’ or a hard-core ‘hip-hop fan’ to being a connoisseur of a lot of different genres, and a casual fan of dozens more,” he says. “It’s very rare to come across someone of college age or younger who’s only invested in one or two styles of music,” and they’re less likely to judge people on their musical taste.

I’ve written before on the tyranny of endless musical choice, and how much we lose in the age of streaming, but this is most certainly a positive thing. We used to be narrowly defined by the genres we liked, and now we’re able to dip in and out of interesting musical experiences we wouldn’t have been exposed to in the age of the phonograph and CDs.