On Saturday, November 8, 2014, at the TEDx Conference in Ostrava, Czech, AudioQuest founder William E. Low gave a talk titled, "Music: The World's Most Popular Recreational Drug."
Although Bill had prepared an 18-minute speech, he hadn't memorized it, the Czech translators didn't have an opportunity to read the speech ahead of time, and the event's speech coach enjoyed his one-on-one conversations with Bill so much that he strongly advised Bill to simply share his story. And so he did.
The fully prepared speech is preserved here, followed by a video of the event and a Qobuz playlist comprising tracks inherent to Bill's quest for deeper sonic immersion.
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The subject of drugs is very complicated. Almost every day there’s a news story about a medical drug that might cure the worst disease, and another news story about a drug that turns out to do more harm than good.
The category of “recreational drugs,” the chemicals and herbs that people take for fun, is also full of such contradictions. A glass of wine a day is supposed to make us healthier, but too much alcohol is obviously very dangerous.
Most recreational drugs are illegal in most countries, which makes them dangerous no matter how harmless they might be chemically — even if they are less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco.
However, there’s one very popular drug — I believe it is the world’s most popular recreational drug — and it’s legal and it’s safe. What could this possibly be?
The World's Most Popular Recreational Drug
I’m taking the liberty of calling music a “recreational drug.” Music is very powerful: It alters our brain chemistry. It changes our mood. It affects our interaction with the world around us. We expect such effects from chemical drugs, but music isn’t itself a chemical.
I’m making this slightly outrageous claim that music is a drug because I find this to be a very useful perspective towards understanding why people listen to music, and towards understanding how, and where, and when, people listen to music. To carry the analogy a bit further, music is the world’s most popular form of self-medication.
Almost all humans respond to music. Ninety percent of us more-or-less have no choice. We are moved by at least some music, some of the time. Music certainly grabbed me early on.
As a pre-teen back in the early 1960s, I loved my little transistor radio! It connected me to a world outside myself, it made me feel like part of a community, something bigger than myself. Every week, the new Top-10 countdown was what I would now call a destination activity. It certainly was a destination for me.
The early 1960s were already a few years into a period of unprecedented expansion in the language of Western music. The evolution and increasing diversity of music had been going on forever, but something new happened in the 1950s.
Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll
Among other things, the previous 50 years of American Black Blues became a goldmine of material for white and black performers to adapt, and to bring to a larger worldwide audience. Start with the Blues, mix in a little Appalachian folk music, some Country & Western, add numerous other innovations and influences, then pare the mix down to something seductively simple… and create Rock & Roll.
There is no definitive start or stop date to this generation-long episode of rapid expansion in the language of popular music. But we might pick 1954 — when Elvis Presley first went into the recording studio — up through about 1980 as the period that those of us old enough to have grown up inside that time bubble remember fondly: the almost daily joy of being stimulated in some new way as the new music took us to new places.
Back in the ‘60s, the question, “Have you heard the new…” (whatever the song or the artist, maybe the latest tune from the Beatles or Bob Dylan), really meant “Have you tried this amazing new drug?”
If you had never heard the infectious beat of “Let’s Dance,” or “Loco-motion,” if you hadn’t heard the Beatles tell you “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” or heard the Rolling Stones tell you that they wanted to “Paint It Black,” you had simply never felt that way before.
As the period evolved, the late ‘60s gave us music that simply couldn’t have existed without the new musical language from the early ‘60s as building blocks. When we first heard the Doors, or Janis Joplin, we were truly taking a drug we had never taken before! To answer Jimi Hendrix’s question, “Are You Experienced,” yes, music gave us many new experiences.
It’s no small coincidence that the hedonistic rebel-shout of the late 1960s was Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll — a pretty powerful combination!
The Zeitgeist of the Time
Wonderful music is of course still being composed and performed today, and by some of the greatest talent ever. The language of music is being applied with greater and greater finesse and is yielding outstanding results. But, arguably, the building blocks, the language of music, isn’t expanding nearly so quickly.
Young people will always go through an intense period of “discovering” music, a period during which particular music becomes “my music.” This happens maybe most strongly between the ages of about 12 and 14. For a moment in history, this discovery process lasted for two decades, not just for two years. Maybe that’s why the term “prolonged adolescence” was first applied to my generation.
I care about all this, not only because I love and consume music, but because I have been involved in the world of music reproduction all my life. I’ve been buying and selling and enjoying hi-fi equipment since I was 12 years old. Music has been my muse, and she’s taken very good care of me.
I never had a personal plan or a business plan; I never did figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up. I just never stopped playing with hi-fi equipment, and along the way, offering advice to friends turned into selling hi-fi equipment to strangers. I simply did what came naturally to me, in my time, in my context.
Younger people often have a tremendous advantage at grabbing in-the-present opportunities. The zeitgeist of the time isn’t something that a young person has to figure out — it’s in the air they breathe. It’s only years later that self-awareness and intellectual sophistication are required to see the new opportunities, to be able to see what is simply normal and taken for granted by the next generation.
The Tail Wagged by the Dog
Having grown up inside not only a remarkable period of fast-changing music, but also during the incredible hi-fi wave of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, I’ve had good reason to do a lot of thinking about change. Today, over 30 years after owning a good hi-fi stopped being so universally desirable, I’m still trying to explain to my peers, and to the following generation of hi-fi professionals, that hoping to bring back those mythical glory days, is not something we have any control over.
Us audio-geeks didn’t create all those customers. The musicians of the time, the audience of the time, the music of the time… they were what created us. We were a symptom; we were the tail being wagged by the big dog of contemporary culture.
In addition to music itself as a kind of drug, marijuana was the drug that turbo-charged the hi-fi business. No other drug, whether consumed personally, or as a contact-high in a social setting, was as likely to make people treat a hi-fi system like a place-of-worship.
Unfortunately for the hi-fi business, the cocaine-influenced world of disco didn’t cause anyone to go out and buy a hi-fi. More recently, the ecstasy-sympathetic club scene of trance, techno, and house music, also didn’t lead people towards the pleasures of enjoying a great hi-fi at home.
Maybe, with marijuana having been voted legal in two more US states just this week, the criminalization of marijuana, a process which started in the US as a way to oppress Mexican immigrants, will eventually be repealed around the world, and the hi-fi business will get back its turbocharger.
The Business of Making, Selling, and Playing Music
Hi-fi and video, the world of home-entertainment, is often referred to as a technology business, because, well, there’s a lot of technology in those shiny new TVs and other toys. However, music is a recreational activity, and music and recreation are things people have been doing since long before there was such a thing as electronics.
The business of making, selling, and playing music, is the entertainment business. Though of course, technology has greatly affected the performing, the recording, and the playback of music.
Early technology made it possible to record and reproduce music, which enabled a new audience to hear professional musicians for the first time. Recordings also gave musicians the ability — or is that the curse — of hearing themselves for the first time. Imagine what a difference that made!
A bit later, technology gave us radio and enabled an ever-growing number of radio stations to eagerly reach out to engage a growing audience. All these inventions and the waves of change sweeping through Western society after World War II, set the stage for an unprecedented new, larger, and more active audience. The stage was set for an accelerated period of innovation in Western music.
And did it ever accelerate!
During that musical flowering, there was very little change in the technology used to enjoy all that new music. Tube amplifiers gave way to transistor amplifiers, but that didn’t change the way music was created or consumed, at least not yet.
The most important technologically enabled change of the period was the growth of FM radio. FM gave us much better sound quality, but more importantly, the new FM stations had no choice but to develop new audiences, to cater to the new and underserved market of those who loved living closer to the edge of the musical frontier. What made FM so influential in some countries, was its role as part of a new music distribution system, parallel to AM and Middle Wave, but also significantly different.
Some years later, in 1979, along came the innovation that dramatically changed the music business forever, the Sony Walkman. This new device combined a small Compact Cassette player, the portability of battery-powered transistorized electronics, and a pair of headphones. The Walkman created the phenomenon that today we call “personal audio.”
A smartphone and a pair of headphones is really just a Walkman in a different package. It was the Walkman that made it nearly free for a kid, still living at home, to experience total music immersion on demand. It was the Walkman that allowed that amazing drug called music to be injected directly into their brains — and without the old folks telling them to “turn down that noise!”
Music as Destination or Accompaniment
A fork in the road that affects both the music business and the music reproduction business is whether listening to music is a destination activity, or an accompaniment. When the music is the what-I’m-doing — when it’s a destination — that’s when people choose music that’s “worth their time” and they are more likely to want a great hi-fi system.
When the music is an accompaniment, when it’s a soundtrack to another activity, the choice of music might be different, and that’s when a “good-enough” hi-fi is likely to be, well, good enough.
There are more people than ever who care about their music as intensely as ever. But they are listening to more of it by themselves, while cooking or cleaning, while exercising or jogging, while biking or skiing, while commuting to and from work.
People also hear music by going to concerts and to clubs as much as ever. Music is still a social event and a very common destination activity, but when the music isn’t live, and there’s no DJ, music is more often an accompaniment, a soundtrack to our lives.
If the hi-fi business isn’t what it once was, what about the music business itself? What about the musicians, the recording labels, and the music distribution system? What changes have they experienced or are they facing? Those are huge questions for everyone involved with music. A lot of people are very, very interested in how you are going to acquire your music in the future, and how much you’ll pay for it.
The End of Physical Media?
At the TEDCity conference in Toronto, back in 2000, Canadian author Douglas Coupland spoke about how musicians were going to have to earn their money the old-fashioned way — as they did before there was a recording business. He proposed that musicians would need to return to patronage and live performances to make a living.
Of course, things are much more complicated than that, and music distribution is very much in a state of flux. Arguably, concerts and live performances are already the foundation of the music business. CD sales have been going down for many years, and the CD’s replacement — sales of digital files acquired over the internet — are also down by double-digits this year.
What is up? Streaming! Music, video, and movies are all shifting to being accessed through the internet. The established names like Pandora and Spotify are trying to consolidate their lead, and Netflix has become one of the international powerhouses of the internet age.
A few months ago, Apple bought Beats, and while the Beats headphone business is huge, that only explains about half of the 3 billion dollars that Apple paid for Beats. So, everyone assumes that it was actually the very young Beats Music streaming service that attracted Apple.
What seems obvious, is that we are headed towards a future in which not only is there no reason for physical media, as CDs and DVDs are called, but there will also be no reason to personally own a limited set of digital music files. In the future, we will all have a library card to all the world’s music, streamed to us from the Cloud.
A Notable Exception
A note of caution for those hoping to gain from this seemingly inevitable transition: Never mistake a clear view for a short distance. Getting from here to there is going to be turbulent. The big guys like Amazon and Apple are going to be fighting tooth and nail. However, it appears that the music labels are keeping the doors open for many more players to enter the streaming business — easy access, but also easy exit, as the French streaming service Qobuz is currently trying to avoid.
I suspect, that as with Starbucks Coffee in the US, the tremendous success of a dominant player not only eats up a big part of the available market, but such success also creates opportunity for many smaller players.
But is streaming a true economic replacement for the business of paying to own one’s music? Recently, the US recording artist Taylor Swift set a record by selling 1.3 million albums in a single week. Ms. Swift is a notable exception, and an instructive example.
A few days ago, she withdrew all her music from Spotify.
As an example of the economics involved, a deluxe edition of Ms. Swift’s new album was reported to have already sold 247,000 copies for a total of over 3.4 million dollars.
However, if all 13 songs on that album had been streamed on Spotify to all those same customers, and if she was paid at Spotify’s highest payout rate, she would have earned just under $27,000.
Of course, Spotify’s customers might listen again and again, and I’m sure there are other reasons this math is too simplistic. But the scale of the difference is obvious, and is a very real concern as streaming not only replaces radio, but replaces buying music.
Maybe Douglas Coupland was right. If streaming music is the future, the artists are going to need to play a lot of concerts.
WEL's Prescription
My prescription: Listen to lots of music! Go to concerts, go to clubs. Use music as the soundtrack to your life. But also share music with friends and loved ones. Set up a hi-fi system, cuddle-up on the sofa with your “other,” and let music — the world’s most popular recreational drug — work its magic on you.
