In late 2007 Alec Duffy, artistic director of the New York theater company Hoi Polloi, won a songwriting contest held by Sufjan Stevens and was awarded exclusive rights to a Sufjan tune, “The Lonely Man of Winter,” that had never been released or publicly performed. Duffy was entitled to do whatever he wanted with the song—press it as a single, upload it to the Internet, even license it to the highest bidder.
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Technological innovations that affect the average person’s daily life—cell phones, CDs, social networking sites—often meet with reactionary, even defiantly Luddite opposition, and the rise of the sound file as a music format finally seems to be triggering that sort of resistance. Nobody’s complaining about the fact that most musically inclined computer users can easily and affordably compile a collection thousands of albums deep, studded with material that’s hard or impossible to find in a physical format. What is drawing fire, aside from no-brainers like illicit file sharing and the poor audio quality of the ubiquitous MP3 and AAC formats, is a cluster of habits often called “digital listening.” Those afflicted tend to accumulate music faster than they can listen to it and skip restlessly from track to track, often without getting through more than a fraction of any one song.
“You don’t have to be a music critic,” says Seattle music critic and former Reader contributor Michaelangelo Matos, “to be breathing in more music than you can breathe out.” Matos, whose other credits include writing for Idolator, eMusic, the Stranger, and Seattle Weekly (where he was music editor for a time), loves that so much music is so easily available, but he admits that it’s harder now for him to have a dear and fuzzy connection to any of it. So he announced via a blog post in late December that he was going on a musical diet, which he calls Slow Listening in a nod to the Slow Food movement. For the first 11 months of 2009 he’s holding himself to strict rules: “I’m only allowing myself to download one MP3 at a time,” he writes at slowlisteningmovement.blogspot.com. The next MP3 can only be downloaded once he’s listened to the current one. If he buys a CD, he must listen to it all the way through before he buys another. His one-terabyte hard drive—that’s 1,000 GB—still has about 250GB of music on it, but his laptop library is already slimmed way down to 19 GB.
That’s not to say I expect Slow Listening to triumph. Slow Food’s incremental progress in popularizing local, organic, and small-scale food production notwithstanding, McDonald’s is still everywhere. Apple is hardly going to ditch the iPod Classic (which it bills as the “take-everything-everywhere” player) for its own version of the NVDRS Tape; even the smallest Shuffle holds about 12 hours of music. And hard-core music hoarders aren’t going to wake up one morning to find that the Pirate Bay has closed up shop out of a newfound sense of self-restraint (though of course it might get shut down for other reasons).
