Part of the problem, as you point out, is that modern music (the non-AI kind) is homogenised over-processed junk. But a blind test is the only real one & makes a mockery of claims like (AI art is soulless). I write about similar issues on Medium if you’re interested to extend the conversation.
"Now I find about some records or musicians or genres I’ve never heard, cue up a series of albums, listen to them once, and then mentally check them off as completed."
It took reading this to realize how much I do this myself.
Perhaps what you're detecting in music that makes it so uninteresting has less to do with technical developments per Flusser and more to do with intensified commodification. Capital must turn over with increasing speed, and therefore we must be made to consume as rapidly and unreflectively as possible. I see the same logic dominating Netflix and Youtube, where the next show commences without any human input at all, without there necessarily even being a person watching on "the other side." Has the impulse to turn over capital quickened to such an extent that it outpaces the human consumer? Is modernity the process by which consumption is automated to achieve the speed required to keep pace with capital's needs? If our consumption's subject to automation, isn't this an opportunity to slip the leash and create on a non-commodity basis--make slowly and circulate slowly amid friends? Samizdat's return in a context where selling becomes an increasingly antiquated impulse: the commodity machine coming into being has no need for human words and human eyes, just as it has no need for bird song. Yet the bird, for now anyway, sings still.
Part of the problem, as you point out, is that modern music (the non-AI kind) is homogenised over-processed junk. But a blind test is the only real one & makes a mockery of claims like (AI art is soulless). I write about similar issues on Medium if you’re interested to extend the conversation.
"Now I find about some records or musicians or genres I’ve never heard, cue up a series of albums, listen to them once, and then mentally check them off as completed."
It took reading this to realize how much I do this myself.
Perhaps what you're detecting in music that makes it so uninteresting has less to do with technical developments per Flusser and more to do with intensified commodification. Capital must turn over with increasing speed, and therefore we must be made to consume as rapidly and unreflectively as possible. I see the same logic dominating Netflix and Youtube, where the next show commences without any human input at all, without there necessarily even being a person watching on "the other side." Has the impulse to turn over capital quickened to such an extent that it outpaces the human consumer? Is modernity the process by which consumption is automated to achieve the speed required to keep pace with capital's needs? If our consumption's subject to automation, isn't this an opportunity to slip the leash and create on a non-commodity basis--make slowly and circulate slowly amid friends? Samizdat's return in a context where selling becomes an increasingly antiquated impulse: the commodity machine coming into being has no need for human words and human eyes, just as it has no need for bird song. Yet the bird, for now anyway, sings still.