Wednesday, 17 May 2017

Is Facebook Killing Music?

It sounds counterintuitive doesn't it - I mean any cursory glance of Facebook will reveal a rich harvest  of links, postings and interesting stories about music.

And cats, and kids falling from trampolines, and what we did on our holidays, and a photo of our kid's latest school project, and pictures of people who have nothing better to do than take selfies, and articles about elections, and 'hit likes' for special interest groups, and pictures of vegetables that look slightly erotic (ok, I made the last one up) but you get my drift.

Because the clue was in the term 'cursory glance'.

My points that we may feel that Facebook is a great way to 'reach people' but that is all it does. In the same way a fallen mountaineer might 'reach' people as they continue to make their clime to this summit, or get the heck off the mountain because there's a storm coming. No one stops, puts out a hand and spends a moment with the said fallen dude. Everyday life is too precise for that.

So what Facebook conditions us to do rather, is to scan rapidly, share the odd link that we feel 'says something' about us, make the odd crack and then get on towards the peak or towards basecamp.

In the olden days. (i.e. the eighties) I heard a statistic.  It indicated that in general an album was listened to on average one and half times before it was returned to the sleeve, never to be heard again. And that was in the days when listening to a record was a physical act; you had to commit to putting a record not the turntable.

Nowadays (as has been remarked to me) you can 'discover' an artist who is now retired, download the twelve albums he made over his career in less than a minute, listen to about fifteen seconds of his or her output and never give it a second thought.

So, if you are working in a medium which requires anyone with the greater attention-span of a goldfish to 'appreciate' it, maybe Facebook isn't the way to do it...

Just saying' ....

No comments:

Post a Comment