Has Streaming Amplified the Culture of Instant Gratification?
We don’t just want content; we want it right now.
There’s a dichotomy for almost every professional working in the music industry: the side of us that loves the evolution of streaming as a fan, and the side that knows how difficult streaming has made the music industry. As a fan, I can say with near 100% certainty that my life would be a lot more complicated and expensive without streaming. With services like Spotify, SoundCloud and Pandora at my fingertips, streaming has made music more accessible than ever before — but there’s a catch.
Microsoft released a study in 2015 showing that the average human attention span had been reduced to just 8 seconds — shorter than the attention span of a goldfish. The worst part of it all is that we are on a downward trajectory. The same study proclaimed that the average human attention span was roughly 12 seconds in the year 2000. So, in just 15 years we lost about one-third of our already very short attention span. Who knows how much we’ve lost in the years since the last study?
As a species, we have always aimed to make our lives easier. A common offshoot of this goal is making processes faster and more efficient. When the telephone was first invented, it allowed people to exchange long-distance messages in a matter of minutes, rather than the days or…
