Joseph Hwang
* The statistics cited in this article are from the "2023 Music Industry White Paper" published by the Korea Creative Content Agency, part of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Republic of Korea.
1. Personalization
The introduction of the Sony Walkman (TPS-L2) in Japan in 1979 was a revolution that changed how music was consumed. The portable record player made it possible to listen to music on the go. The introduction of earphones, headphones, and cassette (and later CD) players changed the unit of music listening from the family to the individual, and the tools for playing music from furniture to portable devices. This shocked the entire economic structure based on production and consumption.
The personalization of music listening began with music-listening appliances. Before the popularization of the Sony Walkman, music listening was a family or other collective unit of music consumption, because the audio player was a piece of furniture. The Sony Walkman, however, personalized music consumption by providing each individual with a disc and a player that could play music. Even within a family, just one Walkman could not be shared by all family members. Borrowing a Walkman without permission would result in a fight that day.
The playback device has changed from the CD Walkman to the MP3 player and now to the cell phone, and the music recording device has changed from a physical disk to an electromagnetic medium of digital files. Personalization has become even more intense. How much has changed during this process?
2. Recording and Playback Media
To listen to recorded music, it is necessary to have a recording medium to record the music and a playback medium to play it. This fact alone explains why the music industry is a platform industry since it is impossible to listen to recorded music without one of them. In addition, the music industry is an industry with strong tastes, where there is no uniform distribution of music, and people have no choice but to consume different styles of music. This is a shred of clear evidence that the music-listening market itself is a platform industry.
The K-pop music user survey was conducted in 2023 with an expanded sample of 3,500 people, including those in their 60s. The survey found that 86% of the sample listened to music "at least once a week," with 46.7% of these respondents "almost every day." Of these responses, 20-somethings were the most likely to listen at 89.8%.
When the length of time they're listening to music per session, 40.9% of respondents listen for "10 minutes or more to less than 30 minutes," followed by 32.7% who listen for "30 minutes or more to less than an hour. The most common time to listen to music is during the commute. The most common places to listen to music are in the car or on public transportation (34.8%). What this statistic means is that listening to music has become extremely personalized. Live concerts by artists are almost the only way to listen to music in groups, making live concerts more of a commodity than ever before.
What we've talked about so far are statistics related to the playback medium. The next question is where the music comes from. According to the survey, "online video sites" are the highest at 86.4%, followed by "streaming music" at 69% and "TV music shows" at 34.3%. The age demographics show that teens and 20-somethings are the most likely to listen to music from "online video sites", but almost all age groups are equally likely to listen to music from "online video sites". This statistic is overwhelming.
3. Screens, Pixels and Music
Even with the advent of portable and mobile music playback media, music was still a sonic experience until the digital technology revolution with the spread of the Internet. Before that, music was "heard" and not "seen." Of course, after the advent of color television and dedicated music channels like MTV, music videos existed as a necessary "viewing" medium. But for the general public, music videos were just a non-generic medium, just "something you see on TV.
However, the advent of true digital networks and the proliferation of portable digital devices changed everything. Portable digital devices had screens like never before. They required human commands to operate, with a human-machine interface in between. In the past, this interface consisted of physical buttons, sliders, or dials, but in the age of digital networks, screens alternated them. Screens are visual interfaces. Music used to play a supporting role in the visual arts because it was an aural art. However, the advent of the screen interface changed the situation because the medium of music playback was destined to serve both auditory and visual needs.
Who would have thought that an auditory art would be destined to fill pixels on a screen? Music has become a synaesthetic art that requires both sight and sound. This shift is evident in the statistics above. In the past, music producers were only concerned with sound production and had to do so. Music videos were a luxury for specialized media situations, but now music producers have been forced to become multidisciplinary artists who must fill the pixels of a screen with sound.
This change meant an increase in the cost of music production. "Filling the pixels" has gone from an option to a necessity, since every music-playing device has a screen. In the digital language, visual or auditory data is just a similar language and promise made in bits. In the digital world, the boundaries between visual and auditory are easily blurred. The boundaries of art are clear, but in the creation and reproduction of the signals that express that art, the notion of artistic boundaries becomes irrelevant. Human thoughts, no matter how radical, are bound by the environment and technology of the time.
* References and quotations:
https://welcon.kocca.kr/ko/info/trend/1953646
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