The Paradox of Choice and Learning to Savor Your Music
I’ve had a nagging feeling that the thousands of songs spread among my multiple iThings and iTunes libraries are beginning to taunt me. Since I’m old enough to have actually worked in a record store, I can remember the excitement when new releases arrived each week, the joy of unwrapping and listening to new music, the thrill of discovering a new song or artist and sharing with customers and friends. It took some effort, but back then it was pretty much possible to keep up.
No more. Those days are gone forever. Over a long time ago. Oh…
Yeah. The overabundance of music choices wrought by the digital age has had some surprising repercussions on my listening habits: I’ve actually found myself listening to music less, and not always enjoying it as much. Kyle Bylin wrote an excellent series of essays on this topic for Hypebot and Music Think Tank, starting out by quoting from a lecture Barry Schwartz gave at TED in 2005:
“All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people. One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis, rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all.” In effect, the more albums that a fan attempts to choose from, the more likely they are to either kind of freeze up and go with the path of the least resistance, like the lastest pop album, or to simply leave with no albums at all.
“The second effect,” Schwartz says, “is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from.” Why is that?
Well, there are several reasons to make note of: First, when a fan goes into a record store that has thousands of albums to choose from, if they buy one, and it’s not what they thought it would be—after all, what new album is? Schwartz explains, “It’s easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better. And what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision.”
A recording of Schwartz’s talk appears after the jump, and he explores these thoughts in depth in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
Paradox or Paradise: Music Choice in the Digital Age
While Bylin’s first essay is rooted in the material world, he delves into the digital domain for his second outing. At the Technonomy Conferennce earlier today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted that we now create as much information in two days as we did from the dawn of man through 2003. That’s a lot — about 5 exabytes.
We increasingly rely on filters to keep us from drowning in this torrent of data. From a musical perspective, Pandora is the filter of choice for many listeners. Bylin argues that what Pandora promotes is the opposite of diversity: its aim is to provide music that sounds like the stuff you already like. Again quoting Schwartz: “Our cultural experiences will only be as diverse as the filters we use to help us select them. With all that is available to us, unmediated browsing is impossible”.
Bylin concludes his third essay with a call to action:
Sometimes, more music is less. Other times, that may not be the case. More important than any of these inferences may be the simple, yet powerful notion that we need to savor our music. This means, much like it does at the dinner table, that we need to set down our forks and actually taste the food that’s in our mouth. Same goes with the iPod. Set it down, forget all the choices, and just listen.
~ Kyle Bylin: Savor Your Music: The Effect of Abundance in Culture
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If you think the fear of listening to something new is paralysing in the States, try listening to radio stations in Romania. They all play the same mind-numbingly retarded club music, no matter where you are. Turn on the radio, and it’s as if you’ve stepped into a cheap night club — the same beats, the same garbage lyrics, the same sexual innuendo, and even the same songs. I think there are maybe 2-3 radio stations (out of over 100) in the whole country that play different music.
What Schwartz and Bylin don’t mention is that it’s entirely possible people behaved the same way in the age of record stores. They might have been just as fearful of choosing something new, except there were less choices then, so the problem wasn’t as apparent. There’s are some very good reasons the studio system and network television model were as effective for so many years. They knew how to package and differentiate the choices they offered to the marketplace. People weren’t overwhelmed. Now, with little to no gatekeepers in every entertainment industry, there’s too much to choose from.
Hey Raoul –
Paradox of Choice – I think the Digital Age has taken a problem that was increasing in a linear fashion, amplified it by orders of magnitude, then fostered exponential growth.
Filter Effect – Bylin applies Schwartz’s thesis to music, but it has broad implications. For example, the proliferation of news outlets can actually stifle diversity and critical thinking through filtering. Hate Obama? There’s a channel for that. Networks and blogs no longer function as information sources, but instead become ideological echo chambers.
Romanian Radio – I’ll have to check it out. Before reading your comments I was ready to put the suckiness of American terrestrial radio up against that of any nation!
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