Nobody hums the same song now

An older man in Alexandria can still sing the opening song of an evening drama from his childhood, and so can almost everyone his age, in any town in the country.

That was not only because the song was good. It was because there was very little else. A single channel, a few stations, one evening programme at one hour. When the choices are few, a whole country hears one song in the same hour, and some of it becomes shared memory.

His grandchildren have no equivalent. In the same room, at the same hour, each of them is listening to something different, much of it made by people the others have never heard of. The biggest song of their year reaches a fraction of the people his reached.

Much of this is gain. More voices, stranger ideas, music from places that once had no route to an audience. And making things has become cheap. A camera, a laptop, and now software that can produce a passable song in minutes. Nobody needs a studio or a channel to say yes any more.

What fades is the giant hit, and the business built on it: a handful of writers and singers reaching everyone at once and being paid accordingly. The flood of new work, some of it machine-made, will include a few remarkable things. It will not rebuild the old mass audience.

In a way, this returns us to something older than the hit. Music made for a village, a family, a circle of friends. The difference is that every circle now has the whole world's catalogue to choose from, and nobody has yet worked out how the people making it will be paid.