Why some young people are ‘quitting’ music

There is an overload of music. 60,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. Over 20% of those don’t get streamed even once. The ubiquitous access to almost every piece of recorded music in history has led to a paradox of choice, promoting passive and playlist-driven music consumption and creating winner-take-all effects for the biggest artists.

Yet, instead of just avoiding the 24-hour traumatic news cycle, some people are affixing this nihilism to their world view entirely; there is a sense of not caring about our futures, careers, or anything in general. This mindset is becoming increasingly prevalent among younger generations.

So now, there’s the growing phenomena of people aggressively beginning to revoke other people’s access to their attention online. They’re taking digital sabbaticals, setting strict communication windows for checking and replying to messages, ignoring or archiving messages unless they’re from known people, turning off all app notifications. They are... See more