Originally Posted By sweetaia

As music becomes less of a thing—a cylinder, a cassette, a disc—and more ephemeral, perhaps we will start to assign an increasing value to live performances again. After years of hoarding LPs and CDs, I have to admit I’m now getting rid of them. I occasionally pop a CD into a player, but I’ve pretty much completely converted to listening to MP3s either on my computer or, gulp, my phone! For me, music is becoming dematerialized, a state that is more truthful to its nature, I suspect. Technology has brought us full circle.

How Do Our Brains Process Music?

David Byrne

I had a conversation with one of my classes about how the consumption of music has changed. It started out as a band recording essentially live music in a studio and releasing a single, then compiling those singles into an album. Then bands like the Beatles started looking at the album as an art form and experimenting with what 45-60 minutes of music at once would sound like. Then came the concept album. For decades, the most popular way to consume music was as an album. However, with the rising popularity of digital music and the availability of singles, it has come full circle. So much so that, after playing the entire The Dark Side of the Moon album for my class, one student commented that it was cool because she had never listened to an entire album before.

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