Millions of songs have been written since the dawn of time. Some of these songs have been committed to vinyl and CD, even the digital MP3 format. There is such a vast collection that I'll never hear them all. Not even a 10,000th of it. Let me fill you in:
- I can't get hold of them all
Sure we can all download songs from the internet, thinking we're cool and syncing them to our shiny iPods or whatever, but that is a crime. Apart from the fact that no one seems to care that it's illegal, you'd have to have a pretty serious unlimited data contract with your ISP to get hold of every song ever written, if they have even all been converted to mp3s. If I were to go the legal route then I would need a rather large amount of money. Thinking about all the vinyls, cassette tapes and whatnot, even if I bought them all second hand, I'd run up a pretty large bill.
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| I'll probably never hear a song by The Sex Machineguns |
Taking the average length of a song to be 3 and a half minutes, that means I can listen to about 410 songs in a day. If we take the average length for a human male living in England to be about 80 years, that means I have 42,048,000 minutes to listen to songs in my entire life, that's if I listened every night, every day constantly for my whole life.
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| That's time drifting away into oblivion |
After a few sums, this works out at 12,013,714 songs with the aforementioned length. As we all know not every song is the same length and I can't listen to songs in my sleep. So, overall, that's a pretty pathetic percentage of all the songs ever composed.
So yeah, I've listened to a few songs in my time. But obviously if I like a song, I'm going to listen to it again. I currently have 624 songs on my mobile phone, each of which I have probably listened to about 5 times at least. So that's taken a massive chunk of possible listening time away already. But what would be the point in listening to a song if I never got to listen to it again? If I could only ever hear it once then I could never build up an appreciation for a song and sing a long with friends. Kind of seems like a pointless endeavour. I can't imagine going to a club and hearing 100% new songs each and every time so that excludes me from one of my favourite pastimes.
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| No Britney! I don't have time for your inane mumblings! |
- Songs are released faster than I can listen to them
If we take into account even just one sub genre of music, a quick look on Amazon shows how many CDs are released each month. "Pop RnB" (possibly one of the worst genres) has 101 releases in the last 30 days. Take that on average 15 tracks per CD. That's 161 tracks of 3 and a half minutes. That's almost 10 hours of solid music just in one category of music. What about Rock? Drum and Bass? Hip Hop? What about all the underground artists yet to be discovered who are recording tunes left right and centre?
So it comes to be obvious, if it wasn't from the very start, that I am doomed to listen to a tiny corner of the musical world. Luckily I really enjoy the music I have so that's OK. I just wish maybe one day I could listen to some North Korean rock or something.
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