If you’re a fan of early-2010s absurdist sketch comedy, you may remember The Birthday Boys, a troupe of writers for IFC brought in as a sketch group to replace the Whitest Kids U Know. One of their more famous sketches that I still hear quoted today is, “There’s too many shows!” At the time this sketch came out, streaming was still on the rise, with only a select few name brand apps before every network/label and their moms had a streaming service for their content. As someone who desperately tries to keep up with pop culture, I’ve only seen this sketch become less absurd and more true to reality, and not just to shows, but music, literature, sports, etc.

I may sound like I’m framing this as a negative thing. The convenience is nice, it really is, but keeping up feels like an existential crisis sometimes. Take music specifically; in October 2022, Variety estimated that an average of 100,000 songs are released daily per stats put out by distribution services and streaming apps. These numbers are also pre-AI, inevitably rocketing this number up since people can now just generate musical slop with a text line.

While this number also includes local, independent, underground, and/or unsigned artists, it still calls the mainstream into question, as it changes trends there. At one point, artists were releasing albums with way too many songs to drive up streaming revenue. Then, Tiktok came along and virality became a primary focus, leading to shorter songs and shorter albums to get listeners to replay them and drive up their revenue that way. Both of those trends seemed to have died down in the last couple years, and as someone who also usually follows trends, I’m personally confused as to where we’re at now (maybe for the best).

But it’s not just the numbers that are confounding to me. The convenience of being able to listen to anything and everything has also led to an uptick in “music addiction” and a neurological response called “musical anhedonia.” Thanks to streaming, music can now be a background for any situation, public or private, and deep listening (the act of focusing solely on the music) has dwindled. I don’t personally think this is the demon that a lot of Boomers and late-era Gen X’ers like Rick Beato make it out to be–having music on that you connect with, or that just makes it easier to concentrate, has been shown to have a lot of beneficial effects. I’m even taken back to the days of the early 2000s where they’d release CD compilations of songs to study to. 

But this also brings me to my own problem.

Like the internet, video games, gambling, and so on, music has the ability to be mentally addictive. If you’ve ever had an addiction to anything physical or mental, you’ll know that repeated use leads to higher tolerance, requiring more consumption of the vice. 

I, myself, hit this wall over a decade ago and still find myself falling victim to overconsumption. In 2012, I began working for a transcription company that allowed us to listen to music all day. You can imagine that listening to artists I already liked for 8 hours a day would get old pretty fast, so I decided to take that opportunity to branch out into artists I hadn’t given a chance to. I would fill a full legal pad of artists, go through each album on their Wikipedia page, and rinse and repeat for approximately 10 years. If I had to estimate, this resulted in listening to about 10,000 unique albums, if not more.

Do I remember them all? No.

Do I at least remember how they all made me feel? Depends–if they’re supremely good, yes; supremely bad, also yes. Anything in the middle…not really.

While it did lead me to finding some of my favorite bands like The Magnetic Fields, The Mountain Goats, Wild Nothing, etc., a lot of it has just been kind of eaten up by more important things that need to live in my brain. Listening to music became a somewhat autopilot portion of my life, so I took to other methods to connect with it.

I was an avid physical media collector (primarily vinyl) for about 10 years, whether my wallet liked it or not. With the price of physical media being what it is, I had to be a lot more discerning about what I bought (dollar bin finds, I salute you).

Then, I started programming with KZUM, and my listening habits changed again. Many radio stations partner with distributors, promoters, labels, and other submission services to get the best independent new music from artists ranging from wholly unknown to Taylor Swift. If I had to guess, we’re sent anywhere from 25-50 albums per week depending on the time of year, and even more singles. This has largely dictated how I find new music anymore, while also keeping up with artists who I’ve already been listening to for years.

My downfall this year is, because of my music addiction, I’ve also been seeking out artists in genres that I enjoy that I have yet to listen to outside the context of KZUM submissions or my listening history. This has propped my listening habits up by about 300 albums this year alone. While it’s fantastic to be able to hear that much new music, it’s also brought me back to my state of musical anhedonia.

This isn’t to say I’m ungrateful for all the music I’m exposed to, and especially not blaming KZUM for my bad habits (sorry, y’all!). It speaks more to me chasing the dopamine release of finding something that hits like it used to. I definitely have–my top 50 of the year so far has maybe two or three artists that are even the smallest of household names–but I also have noticed myself hitting a wall with certain styles of music faster (had to be pickier about my metal releases this summer, as I heard FAR too many).

If there’s anything I want anyone to take away from this, it’s to ignore your FOMO on keeping up with pop culture and stick to what you love. Spending time with art that you feel a connection towards is a better way to strengthen that connection than to just consume something once, and move on to the next. You can let that new album fall through the cracks while you’re still building a connection to another; it’ll still be there to listen to later.

I’d personally like to thank the artists & labels that submit their works to independent stations, and our music director Twyla Twang and her band of volunteers who sift through media both physical & digital to help build KZUM’s library. As I spoke of in my last blog post, we hope to be able to introduce our listeners to something new, as an independent voice is stronger than any algorithm could carry.

Myself? Well, I’ll be power-listening to all the unheard music that’s still in my collection, and in 2027, I hope to regulate my brain to be a bit more discerning about how I listen to music.

Now, this reminds me that I have a copy of Oliver Sack’s Musicophilia sitting on my bookshelf at home. It might be time I picked that up and gave it a read.

-Bloody Holly