Once a relic of the past, mp3 players are making a surprising comeback in a world dominated by streaming services. Music sociologist Julian Schaap of Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC) talks in the Volkskrant about the increasing desire for physical ways of listening to music, partly due to impending smartphone addiction and an aversion to Big Tech.
Pop editor Els de Grefte writes in Volkskrant that she discovered a video on TikTok of a man listening to music on an old iPod. After some searching, she found out that there is a sizeable group of mp3 enthusiasts these days, who are done with streaming services and also want to use their smartphones a little less frequently. On Marktplaats, for instance, iPods and mp3 players were searched 460 thousand times this year, which says something about the popularity of ‘physical’ music carriers.
Taking back control
According to Julian Schaap, you can think of MP3 players as a physical form of music listening, just like vinyl, CDs and cassettes. The physical aspect makes the music become your possession. And therein lies the big difference with music on streaming services. According to Schaap, taking back control of your music is therefore a major reason for the return to mp3 players. ‘With a streaming service, you give away your ownership,’ he says. ‘That means the streaming service owns it and can therefore take away your music.’
And that lack of control is also in the excessive amount of choice experienced by users of streaming services. You often get no further than standard playlists or the albums listed on one service's homepage. You leave your choice to an algorithm because there is simply too much to choose from. And this choice fatigue is not unfounded, says Schaap. 'People are poor at dealing with infinite supply. What you choose becomes more meaningful by limiting yourself.'
Making choices defines your identity
Reappropriating music and using an mp3 player requires deliberate choices: which albums do you want, buy or download them, transfer the files from your computer to your mp3 player and choose them later on your device. ‘People, especially young people, use music to create an identity,’ says Schaap. By making it more difficult for yourself to choose certain music to listen to, the choices you make take on more weight and are therefore more defining of your identity.
Besides ownership, the physical aspect also matters. ‘People like objects,’ says Schaap. 'Especially if they are fans of something. Clicking a song on a streaming service doesn't feel like an expression of your fandom, anyone can do that.' Making an effort to collect music shows you are a fan.
Ritual
But why consciously put in more effort when you have virtually the entire world of music at your disposal via a streaming service and can turn on a song with two clicks on your screen? ‘Because of that friction and the extra actions, you put on an album with more attention,’ says Schaap. Listening to music thus becomes a ritual: an essential way for people to give their lives meaning. ‘Rituals provide peace and control in addition to meaning, instead of being lived by technology and the acceleration that comes with it.’
This news item is a summary based on the article by Els de Grefte of the Volkskrant. You can read the whole article here (paid content).
- Researcher
