Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen to Music Now

There is a possibility that hearing so much music without specifically asking for it develops in the listener a fresh kind of aural perception, an ability to size up a song and contextualize it in a new or personal way, rather than

In the nineteenth century, the initial development of the railroad and photography led to the proliferation of a cliché cribbed from Alexander Pope—the phrase “the annihilation of time and space.” You didn’t have to run to get somewhere fast, and you didn’t have to travel somewhere to behold its image.

immediately rejecting it based on an external idea of genre or style. It’s what happens in the moment of contextualization that matters: what you can connect it to, how you make it relate to what you know.