Introduction

Our music experience is not isolated to the genre or style of music we choose. Research suggests that our experience of listening to music is influenced by other factors, like ritualization of listening or the aesthetics and sensorial appeal of a musical medium. Modern playback mediums, like streaming services, fail to offer these components critical to our enjoyment and reception of a musical experience.

Music Anywhere, Anytime

People listen to music on average 2.6 hours a day, and the time continues to grow. Music at our fingertips has increased our consumption rates and allowed music to permeate our everyday activities. We can stream whatever we want, wherever we go. We can now even control our audio experience in public places by using headphones or earbuds to create our own sound perception bubble. an experience that didn’t exist half a century ago. We carry with us a powerful regulator of emotions that we use to navigate the moods and emotions of our daily lives.

Most people identify as ‘loving’ or being ‘fanatical’ about music and have started including this as part of their identity. Using music as our identity, we can point to an abstract example of our internal voices, narratives, and moods. We feel that our favorite artists reveal much about our internal selves and the inner workings of our brains.

Vinyl Records

Yet the rise of digital music has contributed to the sterilization of musical experiences - there is a limited aesthetic appeal, and the sensorial impact is muted or non-existent. New digital media has an emotional ‘coldness’ that wasn’t present in earlier forms and decouples auditory experience - the connection to the music has diminished. In response, there’s been a rising tide of technostalgia in recent years. Vinyl has made an incredible comeback recently, with vinyl sales in the US up 61% from 2020 to 2021. To put that in perspective, ‘the last time vinyl records exceeded $1 billion was 1986’. CD sales are experiencing similar growth, although less explosive. Music streaming services remain a market leader with $11 billion in revenue within the US and $30 billion worldwide.

Many characteristics of vinyl are considered inferior to modern music formats - vinyl records can not reach the music dynamics or precision the digital record can, and the contact between the needle and groove of a vinyl record creates background noise. Vinyl is larger than CDs and certainly larger than a modern smartphone which can access hundreds of millions of high-definition audio files in a matter of seconds. A vinyl record cannot be set to play on shuffle or on repeat - it plays songs in a specific order only once, and to listen to the whole album, you have to flip it. In this way, vinyl appears to be at a disadvantage from a functional point of view, and yet it’s growing in popularity.

Aesthetic and Sensorial Experiences of Vinyl

Researchers Steffen Lepa and Vlassis Tritakis conducted a social experiment to further understand vinyl records' resurgence. They proposed multiple reasons why people are drawn to vinyl. The first hypotheses were formed from the thinking of musicologist Mark Katz (2015), who noted that the aesthetic mechanisms of vinyl are the likely explanation for the resurgence of vinyl. Lepa and Tritakis added the fourth hypothesis to explain why young consumers drive vinyl sales despite a generational link to this music media.

The social experiment was particularly interesting because they tricked some participants into believing they were listening to the chosen CD medium when they were really listening to a vinyl record. The results showed that listeners who chose vinyl records (even those who thought they were listening to a CD) had greater emotional arousal when listening to vinyl records. In short, participants preferred the sound of vinyl over CDs and reported more pleasure when handling vinyl records.

So even though CDs could be viewed as a superior medium in regards to convenience and musical quality, this superiority does not extend to our emotional and sensorial experiences. It’s easy to imagine that the experience of listening to compressed digital music through a mobile phone is even poorer.

Distinctive Sound

As discussed earlier, from a quality perspective, vinyl is inferior to CDs and digital music. But sometimes, when we listen to music, we are not looking for merely high quality. Contemporary listeners often look for a lively experience that ‘arouses their aesthetic interest.’ The needle scratching in the groove contributes a distinctive sound to any vinyl record, which is perceived as pleasant and contributes to the vinyl experience. Vinyl records have a wavering fidelity because of its distinct analog sound, and the playback changes slightly every time the record is played, gaining imperfections. This adds a certain degree of aesthetic interest not found in modern mediums. The aesthetic interest and variability are grounding forces, making the listening experience more unique and personal.

Sensorial Experience

The sensorial experience of vinyl records is also far and away different from streaming music. Listening to vinyl takes more time than pressing play on Spotify and generates more emotional involvement. A listening session starts by choosing a record from your library, looking at the album art, and selecting the one you like. Then a record is removed from the cover and held within the listener’s hand before being placed on the turntable. The arm is then moved over the record, and the album cover is placed on the table to enjoy during the music playback. Playing a record feels like a memorable experience because it requires special equipment, patience, and space. The experience of getting a record contributes to the overall perception, creating even more emotional involvement. The process or ritual of playing a vinyl record creates an enjoyable and arousing sensorial experience that is not found in digital experiences. In other words, complexity and unfamiliarity are linked to increased emotional arousal in aesthetic situations.

Technostalgia

Technostaligia is a preference for analog or antique sound technologies. Listeners encounter a feeling of nostalgia when using media deemed obsolete by society. This is especially prevalent among older generations, as they developed a close relationship with a medium of their youth. There is an implicit procedural or ritual knowledge of a specific form of media that feels comforting.

Generational Aura Attribution

The final hypothesis attempts to explain the interest of young consumers in vinyl records. Many of these individuals never listened to or played a record during their youth. They may not even own a turntable, yet they are drawn to this medium in increasing numbers.

It seems that much of the aesthetic enjoyment of music can be attributed to the uniqueness and rarity of the medium or piece. Digital music is not unique in any form. The same song that plays on your phone plays on everyone else. And we can access almost any song that’s been created with ease. But buying records is about slowly curating a library that speaks to the listener and moves them on a personal level. Their library is unique and different from everyone else, and their record sounds slightly different from others.

Sound Quality In Modern Mediums

Besides the aesthetic and sensorial components of a musical medium, quality plays an essential and exciting part in how we receive music. Not all modern playback methods are created equally. For example, MP3 compression discards information it deems ‘unnecessary to the human listening experience.’ This compression leads to artifacts in the audio file, like the commonly cited background ‘growl.’ According to the research, MP3s reduce music's pleasant emotional effects, strengthening its negative characteristics and diminishing its positive characteristics.

As we started accepting new forms of audio reproduction for their convenience, we started losing the critical aspects of control, quality, and sensorial experiences that are vital to our overall musical experience.

Control the Personal Music Experience

Humans embrace rituals, often without realizing it. We ritualize dinner time, holidays, hygiene, sleeping, and many other aspects of our lives. By forming an established ritual around things in our daily lives, we gain a specific degree of control over the experience. We believe that if we follow our ritual, we can lead to an expected outcome. For musical experiences, this is usually to reach a specific emotional resolution.

Research into the effects of music has already identified arousal and pleasure as key components of our experiences with music. Researchers Krause and North (2017) used Mehrabian and Russell’s (1974) Pleasure Arousal-Dominance (PAD) model to examine another component, dominance.

The role of dominance is a relatively new consideration concerning our response to music. The model asserts that our degree of dominance contributes to our final experience. Dominance refers to the control we have over our environment - this is a flashback to our ritualization of various activities.

Krause and North found that listeners had a more profound or enjoyable experience when they could control the decision to listen to music and what kind of music they would listen to. This is partly related to our desire to achieve a certain level of arousal. If we are working out, we want to control the music to achieve a highly aroused state, so we choose loud and fast music. If we are relaxing, we want to control the music to achieve a highly relaxed state, so we choose quiet and slow music.

The Future of Music Consumption

Our enjoyment when listening to music does not depend on just the convenience or quality but is also impacted by the ritual of playback, the uniqueness, the tactility, and the control over the experience. Crafting an unforgettable music experience starts before the music even begins.

Yet the popularity of streaming services is expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.7% from now until 2030. By 2030, the music streaming market will likely be valued at around $103 billion. People continue to transition to music streaming services because it’s significantly more convenient than any other medium at low cost. According to David Hesmondhalgh, “streaming encourages ‘functional’ rather than meaningful, aesthetic musical experience[s]” among other vital aspects like musical discovery.

The interest in aesthetic and sensorial music experiences, evidenced by increasing vinyl record sales, suggests that streaming apps must evolve to provide a better music experience. The current status of these apps offers a cold, unfeeling experience when listening, so unlike the mediums of the past.

Services like Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music have turned hard into music data to attract and keep users. Massive data banks now exist, an untapped reservoir of human interactions and preferences for music. They extract emotional data from songs using machine learning to curate playlists to suit specific moods. Streaming services leverage this data to create algorithms and personal recommendations suited to individual listeners. As it exists now, these efforts often fail to connect with our greater emotional needs. There is no visceral experience associated with discovering new music in this format, and the sheer volume of music available creates a ‘paradox of choice’, that paralyzes. It remains to be seen if streaming services will continue to use big data to create more and more sterilized music experiences, devoid of context and meaning, or if they learn the deeper underpinnings of our emotional, sensorial, and aesthetic needs to create worthwhile and enduring musical experiences for the modern age.