David Harrel, the musician behind the blog Digital Audio Insider, brings up a good point in a post he wrote for Shake Your First. On about the many ways a label or artist can get music to listeners, he wrote of the impact of getting so much music:

I'm certainly not complaining about having more music to choose from, but at some point, something has to give--you can't listen to EVERYTHING, even within a fairly narrow genre of music. At this point, I'm starting to think of the whole thing in Darwinian terms, that it's a struggle among an ever-expanding number of artists, all competing for the same resources. No, not the dollars of the music buyer (though that is part of the equation). The ultimate limiting factor is time, the available listening hours of music fans. Maybe that resource is expanding (do iPods and other portable devices mean that people spend more hours each day listening to music?) but probably not as fast as the competition for those hours."

Bingo.

And Coolfer will go one further: Another scarce resource is the time people can put into searching for music. When you hear that digital distribution is going to allow people to discover all sorts of new artists, the challenge isn't finding the correct artist. The challenge is finding the time to discover. There's a small segment of music enthusiasts who will ply the Internet for hours in search of music. The rest won't spend nearly as much time. People have jobs, families, etc.

Continue reading "So Many Songs, So Little Time" »