Kids these days … why aren’t they into music?

My daughter isn’t interested in music. That’s what I thought for a couple of years.

How was this possible? I’m a musician and I always tried to expose her to music. When she was born in 2019, I assumed living with me would make her absorb it by osmosis and make her musically-inclined at the very least. I had seen this happen with friends I grew up with that lived in musical households.

I was wrong. Beyond singing on repeat whatever kids song was trending on the internet at any given moment, she didn’t show further engagement. She had no interest in listening to other things, nor in the musical toys I got her.

I thought maybe exposure wasn’t enough. Maybe she needed a little extra push. I signed her up for kids music classes at three, violin at four, and piano lessons at six. She happily attended the classes, as it was a little father-daughter ritual, but she never showed real involvement beyond the class itself. For her, the best music lessons were the ones that were cancelled.

This was the opposite to my upbringing. I was raised in an environment were music was certainly appreciated, but where practicing it was considered a waste of time because 1. it was a distraction from school and most importantly 2. it didn’t lead to the most imporant thing in life: Making money. In spite of this environment, I became obsessed with music.

Considering my opposite experience, I started to believe that the environment wasn’t really that important. Some people are just not musical and that’s that. No matter what I tried, she wasn’t going to be.

As I started to accept that I wouldn’t be able to deeply bond with her over my life time love for music I also thought deeper about my early experience, digging up memories and trying to find the pivotal moment for me. Beyond music exposure and lessons, did my environment gave me something my daughter’s doesn’t have access to?

My opposite experience

My interest in music started at around eight years old in front of a huge Fischer stereo, with a very limited amount of cassettes and CDs that I would play over and over again. It would be a couple of years after this that I picked up an instrument, but that Fischer stereo was the starting point of my deeper relation to music.

Recalling those days, I realized that device gave me a type of experience that, in its limitations, was more capable of fascinating than the hyper connected musical ecosystem of today.

I decided to do an experiment, and replicate that experience at home.

Bringing back pure music

Comparing my childhood listening experience with my daughter’s, the first thing I figured out is the different role music itself, as a sound phenomena, plays in our listening experience.

My daughter interacted with music in a fundamentally different way than I did as a kid. She’d ask me to play a song she liked from a movie or tv show, but the music was never the primary focus. It was more of a complement to the more important component: The video. Every time I played a song, she would immediately look for the screen it was coming form.

When I would tell her just to listen, she would give me a look of perplexity. She couldn’t conceive music as an entity on its own, without a video to go with it. It made me realize that in our image-saturated world, we’ve relegated music to a secondary role. Not only music has taken a mostly complementary role to film, social media clips, and video games, but sound itself has been pushed to the background as well. We watch movies with subtitles and low volume, we text instead of calling, and we listen to music through underwhelming phone speakers. Sound has been diminished.

Realizing this, my first intervention was simple: I hid the screens. In that way, I switched the focus of the experience to sound itself.

Whenever she asked to play a song, I'd play it on a device and put it face down, telling her, "Just listen". After a few weeks of this pattern, she stopped looking for the screen. Instead, she’d listen while drawing or doing crafts. The music became a background element, but it was just sound, detached from a video.

Reintroducing artificial scarcity

We live in the era of infinite content. Streaming services and youtube offer every song ever recorded, available on demand all the time. But like anything that's abundant, music has been diminished and taken for granted.

Highly available digital music breaks the constraints of the traditional medium (concert, album, cassette), allowing for a fragmented and shallow listening experience. We listen to out of context individual tracks, skipping constantly between them, and alienating them from their creators.

The introduction on algorithmic playlist only makes listening even more fragmented and deprived of context, incentivizing a short and non-nutritious musical snacking.

I think that this mode of listening makes the possibility of deeply engaging with music and its creators impossible. Musicians create unique universes, and we need to enter them to appreciate them.

To disrupt this cycle of musical snacking, I made a radical choice: I unsubscribed from streaming services.

I thought about going back to CDs, Vinyl, and cassettes, but fuck that, I’m no hipster. I also think digital media and streaming are great technologies, and are not the issue in themselves. I didn’t want to get rid of the convenience of streaming to any device without having to carry physical media.

As a tech guy, I set up a home server with my music library. With a Mesh VPN and Jellyfin, I turned my phone into a streaming iPod, giving me access to my music library anywhere.

This solution gave us the best of both worlds: the convenience of streaming without the anti-musical inducing habits of algorithmic playlists and infinite choice. It also has the perk of not giving my money to the artist blood-sucking vampires at Spotify.

By setting up my music server, I broke the paralysis of infinite choice by reintroducing scarcity. Though, not real scarcity. My music library (and my daughter’s) is still pretty massive and it would take me several months to listen through it just once. It’s scarce in the sense that is a big, but limited universe of possibilities. Big enough to provide plenty of variety, but small enough to not get drowned in it.

Introducing this scarcity had an effect in my daughter I was expecting in theory, but that was still surprising and wonderful to see. Instead of being bummed out by the limited selection, she started to go deeper into the music she had available. She was in front of a limited selection and, in doing so, she began to listen with more attention whatever she would pick. Incredibly, she now listens to entire albums instead of jumping around, and knows the names and lyrics of the tracks.

The reason I was expecting this effect of a limited selection is that I’m old enough to have experienced the transition between physicial media to digital files, and then to streaming, the final boss of musical passive convenience. It was clear to me, especially when transitioning to streaming, that I was listening to music in a fundamentally different way than I was used to, and it felt alienating...off.

In addition, I also knew that a limited selection would work better for appreciating music because we are economical beings. Most human activities occur in a context of scarcity and we are kind of wired to manage limited resources. Abundance is something quite alien to our daily life, and its effect is that instead of opening possibilities, it paralyzes and numbs us.

By reintroducing artificial scarcity, I gave my daughter the chance to have a deeper relation to music.

Bringing back the Bass

Our culture has become entirely visual. While our TVs are Ultra HD and our phones have 30 cameras with a gazillion pixels, the quality of sound reproduction has only gone downhill since smartphones appeared and turned us all into zombies. The sound from most portable devices is poor at best, as it mutilates the sound spectrum, flattens dynamics (even more than music producers), degrading the experience of music.

In this context, how can anyone be expected to enjoy something they’ve never truly experienced? The bass that punches your chest, the dynamic range of an orchestra, and the physicality of drums are bodily experiences that a smartphone micro speaker can't reproduce. Steve Jobs might have changed the tech world, but the iPhone ultimately killed the experience of music. iFuck that guy.

Considering this smartphone-induced suboptimal listening experience, my final intervention was to buy a simple stereo system with a CD player, Bluetooth connection, EQ, and a big gain knob. Nothing fancy in the eyes of an audiophile, and not even close to the Fischer stereo I had when I was a kid. But let me be clear, the difference between my $200 basic stereo and a phone speaker is orders of magnitude larger than the difference between my basic stereo and the highest fidelity equipment in the world.

The effect of this change on my daughter was immediate. The first time I played Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer while cranking up the bass, she was hooked-in immediately. The sound wasn't just in her ears, it was in her body, and that was a qualitative jump in her experience of music.

The effects of my experiment

The effects of my interventions are noticeable. Now, my daughter listens to music very often, while dancing, singing, and drawing. She requests music by album, and not by song. She even asks me to show her new music that she might like.

For kids these days, music is dead because they’ve never truly experienced it. We made it irrelevant through videos and overabundance, and diminished the experience with terrible speakers.