how do people listen to music?

and does it change over time or with different generations?

Steve pointed out an interesting article by William Berlind on attention spans and music.

Is the next logical progression a 10 or 15 second ringtone?

There are clearly some interesting issues here. Kids are already multitasking at concerts -- it isn't uncommon to see them sharing the concert with friends via cellphone (with terrible fidelity, but the sense of presence is worth a huge amount) and text messaging through concerts is very common.

This sort of behavior is something that I saw a few years ago when I had a god's eye view of music consumption on a few campus networks. We were able to not only monitor what was downloaded, but how many times it was played over a period of time. The interesting thing is that most of the downloaded mp3s were never listened to from beginning to end. (note that there are multiple explanations for this behavior, but it is interesting in light of the views of the listening public and the music industry)

There were some interesting things that came out of the research ...

One thing the RIAA and music industry really need to worry about is the perceived value of music relative to other outlets for disposable income. It may be that they are targeting entirely the wrong generation. It may turn out that giving people mechanisms to audition new music (this goes well beyond what we see in something like the iTunes store or the Amazon recommendation list) will let them find the music that they will want to play enough to warrant purchasing it. If music is too expensive to explore and enjoy (and there are many ways to measure expense), many will give up on it.

Comments

[Erik Ostrom]

By itself, that graph doesn't say anything to me about attention spans. I imagine my graph would look like that, but it's because I spend a fair amount of time looking for a song I want to hear next, not because I get bored.

For example, my iPod is almost always on shuffle play. In the car, I'll often listen to one song I really like... and then two songs that I'm not really into at the time, but they're okay and besides I'm busy concentrating on driving... and then something will come on that I'm really not in the mood for, and I'll "audition" eight songs hitting the "next" button until shuffle play turns up something perfect. See graph.

(Note that I'm not auditioning songs in the Amazon-clip sense; I'm just taking a few seconds to recognize a song I already know.)

What surprises *me* is that what I take to be the "play to completion" length is over four minutes--if these college kids have such short attention spans, why aren't they listening to 3-minute pop singles?

WRT mechanisms to audition new music--this is why I almost never buy music based on online CD store shopping. Sometimes I'll buy from Miles of Music because they have minute-long clips and because I trust their judgement. But more often I base my decisions on (sometimes illegal) full-song downloads, or on going to my local used CD store and listening to enough of the beginnings and middles of songs to get a feel for what the songs are really like.

[steve]

Good point .. I should have been more clear. I don't think the graph describes short attention spans as much as it does a browsing behavior .. much of what people hear isn't interesting and they drop it before listening.

[Jason Boggess]

really i think that you all are wrong about how music affects a teenagers mind. I should know i am one but if you want to prove me wrong i gave you my email.