Chasing the Perfect Listen: From Ancient Hymns to Infinite Streams

You wake up, turn on the radio, and catch the latest hits streaming. On your commute, you then listen to your favorite Spotify playlist. In the library, you put on some classical music to keep you focused. At home, you dust off a vinyl you haggled over at a flea market, an original record. Later, you might head out to a live indie concert you spotted on Instagram.

Each moment of the day goes accompanied by its soundtrack, available anywhere, anytime. Music has become available effortlessly. But this instantaneous accessibility of music wasn’t always possible. Throughout history of man and music, each shift in how we consume music has been transformative. These changes affect not only how we listen, but also when, with whom, and why. As such, it brings forward a tension between the drive for technological convenience and ubiquity, and the human craving for tangible, meaningful musical experiences.

Listening and capturing live music: a neanderthal practice

The Divje Babe flute, ©Petar Milošević

Before modern devices, music was inseparable from the performance itself. Music was tied to a specific moment in time and place, live and social. First traces of live music date back to 60,000 years ago, with the creation of the first musical instrument, a simple flute carved from bone.

As societies grew, so did the desire to preserve music in time. First traces of written music followed, with the creation of musical notation. Created in 1400 BC, the Hurrian hymn to Nikkal is considered the oldest form of written melody. Carved in clay tablets, it contains arrangements of lyres that could be transcribed and reproduced. This key object acts as direct proof that ancient societies sought to capture musical ideas and performances so they could be reproduced and remembered. Later systems of notation allowed for melodies to be remembered, taught, and reproduced.

Capturing and replaying music: the objectification of sound

The real rupture came with the advent of sound-recording technologies. The first trials to pre-record music started in 1857 with Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph. It used a vibrating membrane attached to a stylus that traced sound vibrations on glass paper. Using this device, the first recording of a singing voice was created in 1860, featuring Martinville singing the famous children’s song “Au Clair de la Lune”.

1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune

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However, although the phonautograph could capture sound, it couldn’t play it back.

Building on earlier experiments, Thomas Edison made the unthinkable possible with his phonograph in 1877. He captured a musical performance that could be replayed indefinitely. Music, once dependent on its performer, was freed from its interpreter, gaining a different meaning in the listener’s home.

As such, the first musical was made during the Crystal Palace 1888 recordings: an extract of Handel’s “Israel in Egypt”. With the phonograph, music was transformed from a commodity into an object. Rather than owning music scores and learning to perform them, listeners could own sound. They could possess a recording, replay it, share it, trade it. The walls between composer, performer, and listeners began to blur. Music didn’t belong to a specific moment in time; it could outlive it. Listeners gained more control over music itself as well as its temporality. This made possible the very idea of “listening at home” and set the technological baseline for later media.

Inside, outside, wherever you want it: music in our everyday lives

In the mid-20^th century, the long-playing vinyl (LP) became the dominant medium for pre-recorded music. Introduced in 1948, it dramatically increased the capacity of recorded media, allowing 20-25 minutes per side, long enough for full albums.

CBS Laboratories chief engineer Dr Peter Carl Goldmark (r), and sound engineer Rene Snepvangers, who helped develop LP microgroove record production, 1 June 1948. Photograph: CBS/Getty Images

Mid-20^th-century musical culture was defined by a duality between public ubiquity and private intimacy. With the birth and rapid rise of the LP, radios had already begun saturating urban spaces, creating mass-shared moments. It started with “the family listening” experience expanding the reach of music, and establishing programming and advertising as central to musical circulation. Then, with the radio came hits. Songs that had the most engagement were amplified and repeated, and created new industry logics (playlists, charts, and sponsorships).

Radio and LPs coexisted. While radios increased the exposure of some musical pieces, records were a sign of fanship and ownership, representing physical proof of musical affiliation, and offering repeated listening. This created a hybrid consumption of music, with the at-home musical ritual of sitting with a record, and the out-of-home radio show playing in the background of a café.

Portability and mixtape culture

By the 1960s, music consumption changed again with the compact cassette. Introduced in 1963 and coupled with the arrival of Sony’s Walkman in 1979, it enabled genuine portable and affordable music listening. Now, music could follow individual listeners wherever they went: on the bus, in the streets, in bed. Not only did it democratize musical consumption, it also pushed for musical creation. Listeners could curate “on-the-go” collections, mixtapes, which they could listen to privately, with headphones. While music had mostly been a collective experience, this new-found portability changed social norms around listening and led to the fragmentation of shared listening.

Then came the compact disc (CD), which dominated physical music consumption in the 1980s and 1990s. CDs promised sound, durability, and portability. Retail models and record industries boomed. In the 1990s and 2000s, tens of billions of CDs were sold, each retailing for $15 to $20.

But the height of the CD was short-lived, as it was soon enough replaced by the MP3 codec and audio compression. MP3 turned individual tracks into easily shareable units and shifted consumption from an album-based one to a track-by-track mode of consumption. MP3s came about at the same time as platforms like Napster, which allowed listeners to access a wide variety of music and to download it through peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing. They popularized free file sharing, disturbing CD sales and forcing the industry to rethink distribution.

Globally, revenues from CDs, vinyl, cassettes and digital downloads fell from $36.9 billion in the 2000s to $15.9 billion in 2010.

Streaming services and on-demand music

With the arrival of streaming platforms in the mid-2000s, music became instantly available to anyone, anywhere, at any time. The first music streaming platform, “Pandora”, was created in 2005, categorizing music into genres and creating a musical database. Other companies hopped on the trend to release their own streaming services: Spotify in 2006, Soundcloud in 2008, and Apple Music in 2015. Music could be “streamed” directly, without needing to download it beforehand through a cloud system. It re-emphasized the idea of discovery, convenience, and ubiquity, restoring a logic of “music-everywhere” created by the radio, with personalization, and choice.

Streaming encouraged passivity. Music quickly became a service rather than an artifact: playlists replaced albums, and algorithms have started to shape musical tastes. As noted by Marta Ewa Lech, Sune Lehmann, Jonas L. Juul in Is it getting harder to make a hit? Evidence from 65 years of US music chart history, streaming has also shortened the life of songs, each rising and falling faster than the other, and compressing the tenure of “hits”.

And yet, paradoxically, physical music formats are making a comeback. Since the early 2000s, vinyl sales have been steadily rising, and by 2020, LP sales in the US overtook CD sales for the first time since the 1980s. But the return of the vinyl doesn’t mean the disappearance of streaming. While streaming provides high-quality audio, the return to analog is driven by culture, and a desire for ritual and materiality.  Vinyl’s artworks and tactile aspect give listeners a sense of ownership over their favorite songs. As Theo Cateforis puts it:

“For those who still have a craving for a personal connection with a musical object, the vinyl LP has re-emerged as the ideal format due to its size, jacket designs, posters, inserts, etc., which have given it an aura of ‘authenticity’ for many consumers. Ironically, plenty of people buy the vinyl just for the materials and listen to the music primarily through streaming sites.”

artsandsciences.syracuse.edu

Looking back, we see more than just technological evolution; we see shifting attitudes toward music. Music was first communal, punctual, and ephemeral. It then became reproducible, and then collectible. Later, it became private and mobile. Now, it is digital, physical, algorithm-driven, and instantly accessible. But the return of physical mediums of music reveals that many listeners crave a deeper connection with this art, an artifact to hold on to, to examine, and to cherish.