The songs that never get listened to
Every song that you’ve ever listened to, regardless of whether you like it or not, was once the biggest thing in the world for somebody. The energy, time, and effort were put into that piece because they love music and wanted to try to reach out to people like the songs they love have reached out to them. But not every song is a hit, and not every career is a success story. For the few tracks on streaming services with billions of listens, thousands sit at the bottom of the pile without any engagement. So, what happens to these forgotten songs?
You might think that the songs being referred to are those that don’t have many listeners. Timid tracks were made by someone who didn’t know how to promote them or didn’t have the qualities necessary to make a song stick. Well, no. Those songs still linger occasionally; they might pop up on the odd playlist or creep into your searches when studying a specific sound. However, some songs fall into the deepest sea of nothingness, where light from the surface doesn’t reflect, and nobody dares to go. These are the ones that have fallen through the cracks of the algorithm and have a total of zero listeners.
Across streaming platforms, roughly 39.2million songs have zero listeners. That’s approximately one for every person in Canada. This is because it is straightforward to make and release music now, to the point that there is simply too much content for listeners to consume.
Finding music that belongs to a particular genre isn’t as simple as looking through different sections of a record store anymore; it means scrolling down and down and down whilst also taking the time to listen to the independent songs you’re looking at. As such, it is hardly surprising that so much music falls off the radar. It begs the question, is the ease of making and releasing music starting to ruin the art form? Realistically, it depends on how you look at it.
On the one hand, it’s sad that music isn’t as connective as it used to be, as a hit album now is very different to what a hit album used to be a few decades ago. Equally, it is harder for smaller artists to get their music listened to because there is simply too much music out there for people to stumble across.
That being said, increased accessibility to art will never be a bad thing. Music is supposed to be a way to express oneself and connect with others, and the fact it is easier for people to do that is a positive, even if a lot of it might fall through the cracks. A lot of the music on streaming sites is the equivalent of authors who have a blog where they post extracts of their books. We have access to drafts and spelling errors, which might mean a lot of music doesn’t get heard and lingers on the bottom floor of the internet, but it also means people can practice how they make music, record it and distribute it, which contributes to the overall progression of the art form.
It shouldn’t be a case of focusing on what goes unheard, but rather, what is made because of that music that goes unheard. We live in an exciting time for music, where the lines between genres are blurred, and anyone who knows how to make it can do so. The unheard doesn’t lead to the death of the art form; it is a step forward in its evolution.
