I’m unsure when this unnecessary need for everything to be “new” or “fresh” came about, but I’m exhausted. Over the past couple of years, this trend of consuming media as quickly as possible has rapidly come into existence, putting imaginary use-by dates on things from movies to television to music, and it has to stop.
Before everything became chronically online, there was a time when we could sit and stew on things, whether that was a movie you’d put on repeat, or re-runs of shows you never got tired of. Music was also one of these things. Artists would drop albums years, even decades apart, and you’d have to sit with them before something new came along, if you hated it, you were stuck with it. In some cases, this was beneficial for albums that took a slightly different direction, as we could take time to listen and possibly fall in love.
I hear you though for most of us, that never ended, but with this sped-up-ification of content, there’s a new constant drive to get the freshest thing as soon as possible and the music industry has latched on to that idea. I’d say it’s thanks, in part, to Spotify. Its ecosystem is designed so that new, fresh music is pushed to the top of its editorial playlists and anything older than a week or two is dumped into oblivion. If you didn’t make it onto a coveted editorial playlist, no worries, drop something else and see if it sticks. It’s an endless game of cat and mouse, except the mouse is controlled by shareholders and is only obtainable to the highest bidder.
TikTok is also partially to blame, with algorithms fuelled by quick “short form” content, again, designed to encapsulate the viewer as quickly as possible, but if it doesn’t quite hit the mark, swipe, and here’s some new content. The music industry has also caught onto this too sparking a trend of sped-up sounds that get to the hook at lightning speed. A trend that has even caught major labels’ attention with them pushing “sped-up” versions of their hit records.
Of course sped-up songs aren’t a new thing, it’s a whole genre called Nightcore, but let’s be honest, only music snobs are out here “uhm ackchully”-ing anyone referring to this as sped-up music.
Overall though, this drive to consume everything as quickly as possible and move on is becoming detrimental to entertainment. Artists feel like they have to release new music almost annually, now. If shows don’t gain virality in their first season, they are axed, and the movie industry are becoming so pressured to drop sequels on sequels that quality is dropping by the minute with studios looking at AI to fill in the gaps.
On AI, this is, unfortunately, looking to be one of the ways the creative and entertainment industry is keen to fill the seconds of silence at the detriment of creative folk across the globe. I mean, sure, it’s easier to fart out AI slop than put love and passion into a project. Why put blood, sweat, and tears into something when you could just type what you want into an AI generator and get something “that’ll do”.
I guess my point is that we as a society need to slow down. We need to take more than a second to dive into something before determining whether it’s a flop. We’re becoming so consumed by freshness that it’s harming the content we consume. Soon enough it’ll just be so watered-down that we’ll just be looking at static and thinking its a hit.