Today, as I riffled through the songs on my mp3 player, and watched others pass by me with their own gadgets, I found myself considering how wonderful our time is. Think of it: we live in a time of humanity's development where it is possible - and, in fact, common - to have possession of music. And this feels natural. We accept without question that everyone is entitled to "their music".
In truth, this was never the case before. Before our time, music was something that was only rarely available. Unless you knew how to sing or how to play an instrument, before of the mass marketing of music, you would not have access to music on a daily basis.
I think of my grandparents, and of how they only had access to music, sung by singers and played by musicians, on very special occasions. Today, not only we have the means to listen to music whenever we want to, we have the means to choose which songs we want, and we get to carry them around with us, as if they were our amulets.
We also have the opportunity to listen to that music selfishly: through the invention of headphones, we can listen whichever songs we want, without sharing them with anyone. Those headphones also serve the purpose of cutting us off from any external sources of sound that might pollute the experience of "our music".
It has gotten to a point where people are convinced they could not live without music. And this poses an interesting question: have we become addicted to music? Have we stopped enjoying silence? And if we take possession of the songs we like, and give them preference, how do we come in contact with new music?
