How Has Technology Influenced People's Music Tastes?

Mercury News

The economic principle that I am researching is that people generally respond to incentives in predictable ways, and how technology has changed our methods of listening to music.

My research question to help me study the economic principle is how technology has changed our methods of listening to music.

First and most obviously, with the world becoming more and more digital, our methods of listening to  music have evolved as well.  Now that everyone has a cell phone, it is very easy to download and app on them and listen to just about any song that you want.  If you can't find it on any of the various streaming platforms, you can turn to Youtube or other websites and find any song you could imagine.  The ability to listen to any song you would like with just a few clicks of your finger has been imperative in keeping music from the past very relevant.  I know that many people, myself included, take advantage of these music streaming apps by listening to a lot of music from the 1960s-1980s and even some from before then.  Before this was the case, people could only listen to the CD's or records that they had.  Of course this didn't stop them from creating an extensive collection of CD's so they could listen to all of their favorite songs.

Next, as I stated in my last post, music producers have the ability to make a song with almost any instrument they can imagine with just a laptop and a pair of headphones.  This has been imperative in evolution of the genres that people listen to.  As technology has improved over the years, producers have clearly been able to make electronic songs and beats for artists to sing or rap over much more advanced and intricate.  On top of that, with producers being able to post their music to multiple streaming sources immediately after they finish, we as listeners have new music much more readily available to us.

In my next post I will be discussing how technology has influenced the style of music that can be produced.