This is experience I paid for! Hahaha! Don’t rush to yell at me—I wrote a clickbait headline. Of course I don’t mean literally being poor. By “poor,” I mean that you have some money you can spend on listening to music, but it isn’t a very large share of your budget.
The second condition is that you really love listening to music and like exploring on your own. If you meet both conditions and want to get the most out of the money you spend on music, then get into vinyl—or, more broadly, physical records.
Why have I come to this counterintuitive conclusion? Doesn’t vinyl cost more money?
Think about how we buy vinyl records. For some odd reason or another, we get a turntable, then buy our first record. It might be a record by a musician we’ve loved for ages, and it isn’t cheap. But now you have a turntable, and you think: I have to put something on this thing, right? So you keep buying records. And that’s when something happens. What happens?
First, the music market—or even the content market—is structured in a way that fits the iceberg model perfectly. The popular 20% of content sits above the surface and is consumed by 80% of people. The other 80% of content is below the surface and is consumed by 20% of people. What’s above is called popular content; what’s below is called niche content (Figure 3).
With content supplied in this way, what problem does that create?
I gradually realize that if I keep buying that popular 20% of music above the surface, I can afford less and less of it. Then I look at my turntable and think: I can’t just leave it sitting there. But I’m broke!
So my attention turns below the surface, and a whole new world opens up. Down there, huge numbers of records are inexpensive. These records were hits in their own eras, but time has left them gathering dust beneath the iceberg.
If being broke hadn’t left me buying only secondhand records, I might never in my life have heard Barry Harris, Billy Vera, or Billy Joel through a recommendation system. I might never have heard Prism, Masaru Imada, Yoshiaki Masuo, Terumasa Hino, Native Son, or Larry Carlton. Because I’m broke, I’m forced to widen my choices instead of staying at that 20% tip of the iceberg. And being broke also makes me more open!! Because I’ve paid for it, I have to try listening to kinds of music I wasn’t especially keen on before. After all, some of what I hear in that music is the sound of my money. And that leads me to discover even more good music.
When it comes to listening to music, I’m broke! So I’m OPEN!
I’m not trying to set analog and digital against each other. Digital music is an incredibly convenient invention that lets people listen easily anytime, anywhere. The point isn’t the form music takes. Music is music; the medium isn’t the music. A record can be secondhand, but the music isn’t secondhand. What matters is how we choose music.
The arrival of recommendation systems and algorithms has replaced people’s act of choosing. When those systems and algorithms make choices for us, we naturally lose the pleasure of exploring. Recommendation systems push everyone’s tastes toward a single direction. In our listening, we gradually lose diversity, and that convergence further weakens our ability to choose.
I care deeply about diversity, because I believe the purpose of listening to music is to bring new experiences into your life. So choosing music is something you have to do yourself.