Living With Music in the Digital Age

Source: David Hesmondhalgh and Raquel Campos Valverde, “Living With Music in the Digital Age: Entanglements of the Functional and the Aesthetic” (2025). Full article

Claim

Functional listening can coexist with aesthetic, emotional and attentive relations to music. A listener may seek focus, rest or company while choosing artists with care, judging sound, recalling memories or moving between background and close attention.

Evidence and method

The authors test claims that streaming makes listening mainly functional, distracted and culturally thin against a 21-day diary study and follow-up interviews with 22 light and heavy music listeners in England (pp. 1–4, 6–8).

Participants use music to energise work, focus, rest, sleep and manage thought during daily tasks. These aims determine neither one style nor one level of attention, and the same listening event can carry personal knowledge, memory, pleasure and active judgement (pp. 10–13).

Functional and aesthetic relations often occur together. A listener may seek a practical effect while selecting a known artist, responding to form or attaching personal meaning to the sound, and attention may change during one session (pp. 13–15).

They criticise streaming platforms without reducing listeners to passive products of interface design. “Coping” describes how people work within ordinary pressure and technical systems without granting platforms total control or users complete freedom (pp. 13–15).

Concepts

• Functional listening: Using music toward an aim such as focus, sleep, exercise or mood regulation.
• Aesthetic listening: Attending to musical qualities, expression, form, association and judgement.
• Entangled modes: Background, functional, distracted, attentive, emotional and aesthetic relations can coexist or change over time.
• Coping: Listeners use music to handle ordinary demands without fitting a simple model of domination or resistance.
• Everyday musical life: Meaning appears across repeated situations and routines rather than only in ideal attentive listening.

Limits

The small qualitative sample cannot establish how common each mode of listening is, and it does not study generative apps or Endel users. Diary reports describe experience rather than testing focus, sleep or physiological effects. Its evidence cannot show that functional systems in general preserve artist attachment or aesthetic attention.

Presentation use

Use this evidence against the claim that background music stops being music. Ask how a function-first app changes which musical relations its interface makes easy to see and which it hides, while listeners may retain memory, taste, emotion and aesthetic judgement.

Set the study’s mixed listening lives against Endel’s coarse function buttons and weak artist foregrounding. The app may narrow how a session begins without determining what the listener experiences. A critical platform argument need not treat each user as passive or each functional session as empty.