Courtesy of Intelligence Aerospace.

What better way to bring music to the masses than the Internet? There‰’s never been a time when you could hear more music from the comfort of, well, anywhere. On top of that, what better way to serve the purposes of populism and democracy than to give the people exactly what they want? With infinite tracking, data processing, and targeted markets, the producers know exactly what you want and can deliver it instantaneously.

Spotify, Pandora, Facebook, Twitter, Shazam, your click on this article ‰ÛÒ it‰’s all a wonderful system of exceedingly comprehensive documentation of your taste in just about everything. However, this system operates with a specific logic that is geared directly toward its own goals: give the people something to consume. All of these measures mean absolutely nothing in regards to what music, or any art for that matter, does for you. Pandora has no check on the extra-linguistic communication between art and audience. What it wants to know is consuming habits and what it wants to produce is a product more suited for consumption.

What happens when you turn that data on itself, break its production into numbers and frequencies and strip it of any machine-blind qualities? Well, you get the tried-and-true lament of aging dads and born-in-the-wrong-generation YouTube commenters: music is all loud, boring, and homogenous. Below are graphs, representing the work of the Spanish National Research Council, breaking timbre (top) and decibels (bottom) into numbers, and measuring their diversity:

A real shocker here: timbre is consistently less diverse than ever before, songs are getting louder, and everything looks the same. Surprise, surprise: music is increasingly made purely for consumption. Its sole purpose, according to this model, is to be easily digested and enjoyed over and over and over. It‰’s the music equivalent to packing food with saturated fats, replacing news with tabloid gossip, and recycling the same fucking comic book story for every movie you‰’ll see this year. Nothing in the public consciousness is outside this model, from rock to rap to pop to country to indie (what a joke that word is) to electronic, from Foo Fighters to Carrie Underwood to Sam Smith to Charli XCX to Pharrell Williams to Nicki Minaj (hopefully I covered enough demographics here).

What‰’s to be done? Nothing. This is the most perfect expression of democracy and late capitalism possible, where every waking action bleeds consumption, and every spoken word I hear from my classmates is some dilapidated form of advertising. You‰’re no more than a number and a moving mass, bred for predictability and homogeneity. Is any of this a new thought? Not in the slightest: Tocqueville had it pinned down since 1835, noting citizens behaving like selfish, perpetual children with no independence of thought in an endless pursuit of petty pleasures. At this point, it‰’s become blatantly obvious. But what do I know? I‰’m just a pretentious angry white boy who‰’s no further outside any of this than anyone else.