In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training.’ And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. ‘… if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. The format’s immediacy echoes that of soma: But like any frontier space there is room for misbehaviour. This is, of course, largely an enormous privilege, another endless resource of the Information Age. Practically any song we want is seconds away, ready to transport us wherever we please. It is the most popular method of listening to music. Music streaming, fronted by Spotify, has grown astronomically in recent years. That’s hundreds of millions of listeners with bottomless supplies of emotional supplements in their back pockets. There are over 370 million mood playlist listeners, and that number increases by the day. Today streaming accounts for over 75% of music industry revenue. He was wary of lonely listening: ‘Private listening could be viewed as the height of narcissism - these devices usually exclude everyone else from the experience of enjoying music.’ At the time Byrne was more concerned about MP3 players. This was in 2012, when services like Spotify were in their infancy. Has technology turned music into a soma-like drug? Is it a pill you take that is guaranteed to generate a desired emotion - bliss, anger, tranquility?’ It was like taking a holiday, and you could regulate the length of the holiday by the dosage. ‘In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagined a drug called soma that blissed everyone out. Citizens can pop pills and drift away for an hour, a lifetime, however long is needed to forget the strains of everyday life.Įighty years after Brave New World was published, David Byrne - of Talking Heads and big suit fame - compared Huxley’s drug to music listening habits in the digital age. ‘Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.’ Taken in moderation it sounds like the perfect drug: ‘Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant.’ Indeed, that’s the idea. It calms the angry and appeases potential upstarts. It is the lubricant of Brave New World’s docile society, offering concentrated, controllable doses of instant gratification. In Huxley’s novel soma is a government-issued drug. If we are not careful, we risk becoming dependent. Now more than ever music is treated like a drug. Exploring the new terrain through the lens of Brave New World can help us guard against missteps. Technology has revolutionised music consumption. Now they dominate the music industry, and Byrne’s concerns are more relevant than ever. Streaming services like Spotify were in their infancy at the time. Faced with the rise of digital distribution and personal audio players, Byrne saw a similar fate awaiting music. He was referring to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian 1932 novel Brave New World, in which soma subdues society’s passions and keeps people apart. In 2012 David Byrne asked whether music had become a ‘soma-like drug,’ a kind of emotional medication. In 2012, David Byrne wrote that music risked becoming a soma-like drug. Anyone, anywhere, can listen to just about anything. Last modified 0 Soma, Spotify, and the brave new world of music consumption Streaming services like Spotify have revolutionised listening habits.
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