What is the Value of Music?
What a question!
This must be obvious to everyone!
Or – is it?
For many people it is obvious. And probably, as it looks like recently, for even more people it is not. Or, should I say, too many people don’t see any value in music and consider it an annoying distraction?
For those, who consider music as valuable, I think they would support their reasoning by saying, that music is an important part of human culture, it is an important social activity, an entertainment, a personal development activity, and we could mention few other ways how music is valuable in our lives.
The other side of the argument would insist, that music is just a waste of time, a noise pollution generating activity, an endless repetition of the same stuff, or something similarly nasty.
I am not going to argue for either side, although my hope is, that to readers of this blog my position would be absolutely clear.
The reason of this post are few articles and news, that appeared recently in the media I follow, and which, to a certain point, illustrate how complicated things are.
One such article is from my favourite author Ted Gioia, where in his Substack posting he goes all the way to the ancient times in an effort to understand today’s crisis in music. The other is from the Canadian newspaper the National Post, which published this week an article about a hard to understand (at least from the cultural point) an effort of Toronto politicians to rename a street after Taylor Swift fans. Yet another is Rick Beato, who in his vlog talks about seemingly falling interest in music. So let’s dive deeper into this situation.