How many of you have just sat down and listened to music? I’m not talking about turning on Spotify while studying or listening to the radio while driving. When was the last time you consciously sat down, and actually paid attention to music? When was the last time you experienced music? For many of you, the answer is probably vague or unaccusable at best. I am by no means saying that technology is not a good thing for music. It has allowed music to be accessible nearly everywhere in our lives. However, this comes at a cost. I think the actual appreciation of music has seen a swift decline in the last ten years.

Growing up, I was sort of an anomaly in school. I think I was the last person in my middle school to own an mp3 player (I never had an iPod for pseudo-moral reasons). Even after technology crept into my life, I was still one of the people to actually buy CDs. I was never one to pirate an entire discography, although it was cheaper and more convenient. Instead, I would spend months, even years, collecting the discographies of my favorite bands. I almost never had a band’s top radio hits at my fingertips. Albums are a traditionally a handful of radio read singles at best, and a few other songs mixed in. During the space between the purchases of new albums, I got familiar with each song on the album, learning every word, pin-pointing that half a second transition into the chorus or bridge. It was such a visceral experience.

At the end of the day, that’s what art is supposed to be: an experience. No one can dispute the artistic nature of music; therefore, music is meant to be experienced. This is where we’ve lost our way over the last fifteen minutes. Music was initially about the album. There was a ritual to selecting which album to listen to, pulling the record/cassette/CD/beeswax cylinder off the shelf, and pressing play/dropping the needle. Up until the advent of the CD, tracks couldn’t be skipped. You had to listen to the entire album, track by track, and, in doing so, you realized that there was intent behind every song. Each track was meant to be heard, and placed in that particular order.

Since the rise of the digital music player, the sanctity of the album has diminished significantly. If a track is not appealing within the first four seconds, it can be skipped and banished to the depths of a hard drive. We don’t even listen to the same bands at the same time anymore. The radio approached music in a similar way, but was at least somewhat unified by genre. Listening to mp3’s doesn’t have this effect. Instead, we shuffle through hundreds, even thousands, of artists at once, paying no regard to the artistic intent of the musicians.

These may not seem like big issues, until one actually thinks about music as an art form. Imagine splicing together chapters of "Harry Potter," "The Great Gatsby," a biography or two, and a few dozen poems. No one would call this a work of literature if they could read, or even comprehend it, yet this is effectively what music has been reduced to in the digital age. Music has been robbed of its artistic value by the reigning form by which we listen to music. It is no longer meant to be an experience. It has become a commodity, something meant to be hoarded. We are trapped in a cycle of download, store, and repeat. We collect music without really stopping to think why music is valuable in the first place.

My complaints might seem somewhat unwarranted at this point. I am not totally opposed to digital music. The internet has helped me to discover so many great bands over the years. In reality, the means by which one listens to music are irrelevant, so long one occasionally devotes themselves to the presently experiencing the whatever is playing. Music is a means by which someone expresses a feeling that cannot necessarily be expressed through words alone. This is the nature of all art. In all of its forms, art is the only vessel that someone can channel something so beautifully complex. It is a soul communicating with another soul on the most intimate level.

This is why I think it’s important to experience an album. We become more mindful of our fellow man when we take time to feel the words beneath the art. I’ve learned more of love through music than I ever would have through my experiences alone. I’ve felt sympathy in sound while grieving to music, and so I have grieved for another across time and space. This is the power of experiencing music, or any art form for that matter. It teaches us to be more human, to understand one another, and treat each other better because of that knowledge.