I may be going out on a limb here, but I reckon the vast majority of right-thinking people would question Humperdinck’s claim to such an honour; and the university’s claim that he is “a man of distinction”, rather than, say, “a decent showman, and quite funny in that ad he did”, may cause us to take any comment it makes on music with a pinch of salt.
North’s study suggests that music is just too accessible, and therefore not prized, but taken for granted; that people think of it as a commodity or a resource, rather than the “near-mystical experience” that it might have been back when the only way to hear music was in a concert hall.
What is intriguing is the desire to blame the new format and the new technology for the lack of “deep emotional investment” in music. Would that not have something to do with the formulaic nature of much pop, the callous, two-good-tracks-and-a-bunch-of-filler attitude to creating albums, the fact that you can hear music in every store, cafe, restaurant and bar, on every TV documentary and radio continuity announcement, behind the electronic listings guide? So why bring downloading into it? Why blame the format? Well, you could argue that the inferior sound quality of MP3s adds to the problem of people not caring about music. Those who love vinyl and high-end audio gear are understandably dismissive of the compression involved in creating an MP3 file — removing the very sonic detail that their equipment is designed to preserve. But this is only a minor issue.
Leicester University’s study singles out the new format for blame because new formats are always the object of controversy. Because, oddly, formats matter. The way we listen to music is, for many of us, as important as the music we listen to. As the comic duo Flanders & Swann sang in the 1950s, when Hi-Fi was all the rage: “I never did care for music much — it’s the High Fidelity.”
Why should we care so much about the format? Well, we all know that the music we grow up with will shape our attitude towards music for the rest of our life. But might it not be just as true that the format we grow up with has an equal effect on our view of what music actually is? Those who grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, obsessed with the astonishing reproductive powers of Hi-Fi and the wonders of stereo, have continued to admire sonic quality and technical perfection above all else. In contrast, those who grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s — the heyday of the vinyl album — are more likely to see music as part of what we would now term a multimedia package. The listening experience, for them, was intimately bound up with album artwork, lyric sheets, sleeve notes, perhaps stickers or posters, maybe even coloured vinyl.
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If you lived your teens plugged into a Walkman, then music for you is a soundtrack to your life — convenient, portable, ubiquitous. The effect that the CD format had on impressionable youths is a little harder to pin down. Given the nature of the medium, it ought to have raised another generation obsessed with sonic excellence, but, if anything, what has defined the CD format is the relentless quest for extra tracks, lost tapes, remixes and alternative versions to fill up all those extra minutes. As a result, CD listeners are open to music’s constant variety, and both aware of and quite concerned with authenticity and history.
As for the download generation: a bunch of shallow, numbed, apathetic listeners? Probably not, eh? The fact that the Arctic Monkeys — who epitomise the influence of downloads in building a band’s success — also managed to have the fastest-selling debut album of all time suggests that the download generation is open to a variety of formats. And the fact the band can sell out their gigs confirms that the supposedly apathetic downloaders have not lost sight of an essential point: that music is something that happens when human beings play their instruments live in a room somewhere.
I bet some downloading Arctic Monkeys fans have “near-mystical experiences” at those gigs. Maybe even mystical ones.