Is there too much music?

The man who wrote this piece below thinks so and as a lifelong musician myself I couldn't agree with him more. In fact we've overdone the music thing that kids and some adults are willing to listen to Eminem or Snoop Dogg when Beethoven or Bohemian Rhapsody are available means to me there's so much of it around people don't even know or have forgotten what real music really was, and is and that's just too bad as a saturation point is being or has been reached and then what happens?

What could be worse than so called music of today becoming more watered down and bastardized than it already has become in many of it's so called genres? It'll really become noise like our grandparents and parents though the Beatles and Elvis were.

At least they wrote and sang about love and goodness and the Country and blues greats about life's sadness. Now we have the glorification of rape, racial hatred, thug life and murder, how quaint to see music advancing Backwards just like society today....

Is there too much music?

TelegraphHave you ever wondered if there might be too much music? A couple of weeks ago I attended South By South West music festival in Austin, Texas, where more than 2,000 up-and-coming bands, singer-songwriters and other musical performers played in just four days.

Standing on the street at an intersection of venues where at least a dozen bands were playing at the same time, I was immersed in a kind of sonic cloud of formless music, an ambient hum of rock and roll.

And it occurred to me that this was just an amplified version of the soundtrack of modern life, the endless din of music we are subjected to: the boom of car stereos, shop Muzak, advertising jingles, computer games, TV and film soundtracks and the tinny racket bleeding from personal stereo headphones.

Shakespeare famously wrote, "If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it". We seem to be taking him literally. Music is everywhere. It is as if the more it becomes available, the more voracious we become in our consumption of it.

For most of the history of mankind, to hear music you had to either participate in the making of it in a social setting, or perhaps listen to the performance of itinerant musicians. The first major concert halls were built in Europe about 500 years ago.

Little over 100 years ago, the phonograph brought music into the living rooms of ordinary people. With each passing decade, technology appears to be increasing not only our access to music but the capacity for individuals to make and disseminate their own music. More than 10 million pieces of music have been recorded and most of it is available (legally or otherwise) on the internet. continued

---