Active vs Passive Listening

A tip for enhancing your listening experience

I’ve been thinking about how most of my music consumption has been passive for the past couple of months — except for those few weeks when I was comparing Apple Music and Spotify and was extremely involved in picking the music I wanted to hear. Outside that short stint, the music had been playing in the background while I was doing other work on my computer, cooking, or cleaning. Deezer’s algorithm had been picking the music for me.

When it comes to streaming, I doubt that most people’s experience would be any different. Almost all streaming services have excellent recommendation algorithms built in, capable of feeding you with exactly what you want to hear. There is great value in the convenience they offer. It seems almost counterintuitive not to take advantage.

Without even realising it, playing music this way had made me change a key behaviour: I used to listen to full albums for the most part, instead of individual tracks from here and there. This had turned on its head thanks to autoplay.

The music industry has changed, and it is not surprising that a lot of artists focus on getting hit singles out, not albums. When albums do come out, they are following the release of one or two tracks that had come out months in advance (in the hope that they would carry the album sales.) I don’t necessarily have an opinion on whether this is good or bad. I just know that a lot of music I listen to is quite old, and they’re best enjoyed when complemented with the tracks the artist intended them to be accompanied with (case in point: any Bowie album.)

I wanted to go back to my old ways, and I have. To make sure I don’t end up listening to the same music every time, and to add an element of discovery to my listening, I’ve started to go into the playlists suggested to me by Deezer, pick tracks at random, and play the full album it is from. I also rely on a few friends whom I know have similar tastes to mine for album recommendations.

Here’s something for you to try: The next time you fire up your music streaming app of choice, instead of letting it do the work for you, try and find something you think you might just like, and play it. Play an album in its entirety, instead of letting the algorithm pick different tracks.

The point is to search and play actively, not passively. I’m certain your listening experience will be more enjoyable when you do this more often.

The great thing about this is that your gear won’t matter at all. Audiophiles, especially the snobbish ones, would tell you that you need to keep investing in better gear to improve your listening experience. There are certainly some technical factors that support this argument — listening to a good source over a wired headphone will always give you better quality over Bluetooth, for example — but most often than not, it’s your habits that do the trick.