The video is often secondary (here, a still photo displays throughout the song). YouTube's just the easiest place to hear what you want for free.
Remember when I wondered where kids were hearing current music enough to get to like it? Actually, to explain: I initially wrote a post that rated recent music at the low end of a zero-to-five scale, but after listening to the same music over and over for awhile, came back and upgraded some of the tracks. Then I realized that I loved the older music because I heard it everywhere I went back in the day. And I was wondering where kids were hearing music so much today that it was becoming an acquired taste, because it was generally out of my hearing.
Yes, I know, they’re listening on earbuds, but from what sources? MP3 players? Stuff passed to them by friends via social media? Where?
Part of an answer comes from this piece the other day in the WSJ:
Among the issues dividing teenagers and their parents, add whether to listen to music on YouTube or on CD.
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. teenagers under the age of 18 say they use Google Inc.’sGOOG +0.65% video-sharing site to listen to music, more than any other medium, according to a new consumer survey from Nielsen Co., one of many challenges facing record companies as they transition into the digital world.
In addition to treating YouTube as a de facto free music service, young people said they are less inclined than those 18 years old and up to listen to CDs or the radio.
Neither age group reported making much use of Spotify AB, Rhapsody International Inc. or other on-demand streaming music services, though Pandora Media Inc.’s P -3.60%custom online radio service was among the five most-popular methods for both groups.
My first reaction was, who’s listening to CDs at all — aside from those burned to listen to in the car? And I see it’s clueless old people. In fact, older generations — from whom I’m disassociating myself as much as possible in my wording here — are more out of it than that:
In fact, among adults, cassette tapes remain more popular than many online music services, or even vinyl records, despite the latter medium’s purported comeback in recent years.
Just to make an excuse for adults here: I think that might be because so many of us these days are driving older cars. For instance, my wife drives a Volvo that she inherited from her father, and it has a cassette player but no CD player or MP3 jack. If our cars had turntables for vinyl, I suppose we’d sound cooler, but it would be rough on our record collections.
But back to the kids: Turns out they’re pretty smart. I discovered sometime back that YouTube is the quickest, easiest way to listen to almost any song, from any genre, for free. It’s not as easy as turning on one of your Pandora stations and letting it run, but at least you get to listen to exactly what you want to hear.
... but the video can add something.
Good thinking, kids.
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When I was college-age and then on into my 20’s, music fans were also usually audio geeks to some extent. We obsessed over direct-drive turntables, various aspects of speakers, receivers, debated the merits of various brands of audio equipment. The ease with which young people today (and middle-aged people like myself, too, I confess) ACCESS (and “access” is the key word here, not “listen”) music comes at the price of a tradeoff of audio quality, of which digital compression is just the tip of the iceberg. I appreciate that whereas it took me months of sleuthing to find someone to tape a copy for me of an obscure piece on an out-of-print LP, now I can likely find it on YouTube or other internet sources relatively easily. Still, I miss the days of hanging out at some friend’s place with floor-to-ceiling speakers and a massive array of pre-receivers & receivers to tweak the audio content into a larger-than-life spectacle, not to mention the communal aspect of listening to music with friends in that way versus today’s more atomized experience.
The problem with the music business is that they have let the computer geeks create endless new ways to take the sound out of music.
Music used to be an experience, now it’s mostly a packaged product.
Y’all have better ears than I do. If it’s a good song, it will grow on me even if I only hear it on a 50-year-old mono transistor radio…
LP’s are dead? Oh, okay; I still load film in 35mm camera.
Just wait until the kids start “Working for the Weekend”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL8G5pBZ5CI
Frankly, I love classic rock, music from the late sixties through the 70’s. Deep Purple, Led Zepellin, Derek and the Dominos, …
Those are the good old days!
It’s wonderful that in my 50s I can listen to and own any music ever recorded, and can listen to it in multiple ways. Everything we own that didn’t buy digitally, whether CD or vinyl, has been digitized to the computer, if for no other reason than it can be transferred to any other device, or burned to a CD. 5 family members share an iTunes account, and that lets all 5 of us share our libraries with each other seamlessly.
But when it’s all said and done, the best listening for my now 55 year old ears is playing a factory pressed CD on our large stereo system/speakers. Even better would be a great analog turntable playing vinyl through it, but currently that’s not in our rig.
And why don’t young and old people listen to radio? Because the choices stink! Even if you like the new music (or classic rock on those stations), it’s still someone else making your listening decisions for you.