Within 5 years, streaming will be the big winner of the upheavals caused by the dematerialization of music. After conquering geeks, young people, and DINKs, it now appeals to housewives and indie rock ayatollahs alike. Ubiquity, near-exhaustiveness, low cost, instantaneity, sharing, discovery: streaming has it all. But should we really be happy about it?
A little history
In the beginning, there was music. Only music. After a rather rudimentary bone-and-flesh period, history really began with bards, troubadours, and other entertainers who brightened, as best they could, the not always festive daily lives of nobles and commoners alike. Monks also relieved boredom - and spread their evangelical message - by singing.
Then came the time of opera, baroque, and classical music: serious, weighty, people paid by the king to rub shoulders with beauty and make the monarchy shine. At the end of the 19th century, lo and behold, "the harmonic system was pushed to its limits and led to what some call the crisis of the tonal system"! It was on its smoldering ashes that modern and then contemporary music were born, now divided into exactly 431 subgenres on Discogs.
From music to the music industry
The music industry was born the day music became reproducible, and thus marketable:
- Step 1: printing, which allowed sheet music to be reproduced, making it possible to play the same piece in several places simultaneously (or not).
- Step 2: Edison and Berliner. Let's quickly skip over their experiments and the 78 rpm record to get straight to:
- Step 3: the invention of the vinyl record in 1946 by Columbia.
From then on, the machine went into overdrive. With its reduced groove size allowing a good 20 minutes of music per side, its light weight, and its truly industrial manufacturing process, the vinyl record was the format that made the idea of owning music possible, and inaugurated the dance of formats.
The vinyl record: greatness...
Marketed from 1948, the vinyl record would reign supreme for nearly 50 years. Manufactured in hundreds of millions of copies, it was rarely the object of a fetishistic cult during this period. People signed it with ballpoint pens or markers, wore it out, dragged it from party to party, drowned it in beer, tore it, redrew it... It was in every home but no one paid attention to it. Yet, we couldn't live without it.
...And decadence!
But in the shadows, progress had been weaving its web since the late 70s in the form of a small plastic disc with shimmering reflections. Bulk, recording time, sound quality: the CD represented the same leap forward as the vinyl record did over the 78 rpm. I still remember the first time, in 1987, I saw CDs at a friend's house: Talk Talk, Daho, and Tears For Fears. I married her. Launched in 1982, the CD surpassed vinyl in 1988. To say that at the time we found it beautiful says a lot about the industry's ability - hi-fi manufacturers, record companies, distributors - to reduce our critical thinking to the state of boiled vegetables (to be honest, there are some very beautiful CDs, as evidenced by the book "1000 Extraordinary CD Designs" by journalist Estel Vilaceca).
The Gallic Village
We know the rest of the story: the birth of the MP3 in 1994, Apple's iPod in 2001, and Spotify in 2008, all innovations and new ways of consuming music, each in turn signaling the death knell of the preceding format. In 2020, driven by industry giants (Spotify, Deezer, Apple), it is expected that streaming will have stifled all other forms of media.
All, except one: kept on life support by sample hunters in the 90s and 2000s, the vinyl record has experienced an unexpected and joyful revival for the past ten years. Excessive dematerialization (music, literature, cinema, photography) revives in some, in an astonishing pendulum movement, a need to touch, feel, look, truly listen, and at the same time create the large-format soundtrack of their own lives. This, in my opinion, is the real reason behind the return of the vinyl record.
