Beato’s objections boil down to three points:
- “creative dependency on technology [that] limits the ability of people to innovate,”
- “the homogenization of music,” and
- “quality versus quantity” (which he calls “a big, big thing, okay?”).
Music being too easy to make means too much of the same music is made, “making it harder to find really exceptional things.” Because of the creative dependency there’s likely not much exceptional to listen to, anyway.
“Act Two” is a matter of too much ease as well. With 100,000 songs added to streaming platforms last year—“more than one song per second for the entire year,” Beato notes—so much is at users’ fingertips that the value of an individual song drops to nearly nothing. “Think about this,” he implores. “All of the music that exists—or at least that’s been uploaded to Spotify or Apple Music—is available for $10.99 a month…. For the price of what we used to pay for one album.” And then he injects what might be a bit of Old Man nostalgia: “There is no sweat equity put into obtaining it, having it be part of your collection, having it be part of your identity of who you are. ‘These are the bands I believe in. These are the artists that I love, and I’m going to share it with my friends…’.”
Rick Beato’s nostalgia actually isn’t solely about music. It extends to—and maybe heavily relies upon—cultural and social meanings of music.
A band musician chimed in against earlier “mechanical menaces”
Over a century ago, a different technology applied to music elicited a similar response. The technology was the phonograph and other music recording devices, and the man voicing a bitter lament was John Philip Sousa. Yes, that Sousa—a musician for bands very different from the ones that Rick Beato plays in and produces.
In the September 1906 issue of Appleton’s Magazine Sousa’s florid and sarcastic prose laid out “the menace of mechanical music,” claiming, as Rick Beato does over a century later on YouTube, that new music technologies degrade musical talent and, even more galling, leave composers out when it comes to profit. “I am quite willing to be reckoned an alarmist, admittedly swayed in part by personal interest, as well as by the impending harm to American musical art,” Sousa admitted. “I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.”