My friends and I spend a considerable amount of time singing sections of lyrics from trending TikTok audios. Most of the songs we sing are ones that I’ve never even heard the entirety of, much less listened to the albums that they are on. As much as I love singing trending audios with my friends, I think too often in our society we don’t listen to music correctly. The accessibility to music that streaming and social media have gifted us is incredible, but it has also changed the way we listen to music, and not always for the better.
Streaming and the ability to listen to any song at any moment has disincentivized listening to albums in full. Social media has even deterred many listeners from sitting through full songs, with collectively decreased attention spans and a new 30-second burst of music infiltrating the minds of users every week.
I don’t think it’s inherently bad to discover music on social media — I’m all for finding my new favorite song while aimlessly scrolling on my phone. I think it’s the steps after that that are often poorly directed.
When you hear a song you like on TikTok, take the time to listen to the full song instead of just scrolling down a few videos to hear it again placed behind an edit of your favorite celebrity. Then experience the song as a small part of a larger whole, listening to its album from beginning to end. I think you’ll find a deeper appreciation and understanding for the short burst of the song you heard originally.
The current landscape around music seems to forget that music is an art as much as a painting on a canvas or a dance on a stage. When you go to a museum the conditions are controlled. The artist gets to choose the size of their painting, the colors they use and the frame which surrounds the piece — they display a certain product and the viewer perceives it.
Musicians get to control what they release to the world, but they don’t have the same power over framing it. Listeners seem to be increasingly choosing to interact with music in a way that doesn’t line up with how the musician intended it to be heard. Music deserves to be heard holistically and musicians deserve for their art to be appreciated and consumed in the way they created it.
An album is a story, with each song serving as a piece of the plot. You’ll miss out on half the story and rob yourself of a rich listening experience if you only know two verses and the chorus of a song in the middle of the album.
More than just listening holistically to experience the story of an album, listening to a collection of music front to back gives you a window into the artist's creative process, allowing you to gain a deeper understanding of the artist, song, musical intricacies and lyrical meanings.
From a young age, my sisters taught me how to listen to music. Find an artist. Pick an album. Listen front to back. Without this instruction, I would have missed out on a world of value in so many of my favorite songs. For those without the same guidance I had, I hope next time your friends serenade you with a set of lyrics from the song currently permeating their minds or a tune on your For You Page catches your ear, you’ll try putting it in the context of its full story.
