The Search for Music Snobs

Most music snobs would agree that If you want to hear great music you have to seek it out. Instead of idly sitting by the radio or watching MTV, the music snob of the past would go through old record stores, get recommendations from other music snobs or try to make connections from whatever information is available about the artists in liner notes and the music press. Thanks to the magic of the internet, radio is quickly becoming a dead form, and thanks to poor marketing decisions MTV has stopped playing music.

It has become more and more difficult to mass market music–the top selling albums of today don’t ship nearly the same number of units that were shipped just a few years ago. This phenomena, along with an overall drop in sales, has record companies in a panic. I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but one possible explanation could be that the musical taste of the public is diversifying. As everyone moves into their own little niche with the help of genre specific blogs, music magazines, iTunes and organizations like Wikipedia and the Music Genome Project, we are generating more music snobs than ever.

What does it mean to be a music snob? There are lots of great colloquial definitions, but for the sake of argument, I’m going to define a music snob as someone who actively seeks out new music that isn’t always presented on the radio. They also tend to seek out particular niches and genres. The search for this has become easier and easier thanks to the internet.

For example, if I enjoyed the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and I wanted to hear something like it, I could look it up on Wikipedia and read that it’s Glam Rock, British Rock and Bowie. From there I can explore each of these using similar searches and then find similar artists, movements, and albums. Google and Pandora work in similar ways, making niche exploration relatively simple. Plus, the widespread availability of resources like OiNK, Demonoid, ThePirateBay, and iTunes makes acquiring music a breeze. It is easier than every before to become well versed in music of a particular time, place, genre or artist, and so it should come as no surprise that tastes are diversifying.

While this might be interpreted to mean more music snobs are on their way, it also dilutes the elitist pool of music snobbery. It’s difficult to claim elitism when information and product are so easily accessible and because research has become so simple, the value placed on the music recommendations from snobs of similar tastes becomes valueless.

Of course an egalitarian music community of snobs has some serious downsides. Most people, in whatever situation, usually drift towards their comfort zones. In music this could lead to isolation. For example, as a Bowie fan I’d be more likely to pursue Electric Warrior by T. Rex than The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky or Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. Since radio is virtually dead and I just read niche blogs, I would miss out on Miles and Igor. As niches grow, exposure to music outside of our comfort zones shrinks and we lose the potential to hear the radically different.

It seems idealistic to believe that people ever really strayed from their niches even on the open dial of the American radio, but as we gain specificity we lose the general picture. Instead of a general listener we have specialists, but a new general listener may already be on the way.

The new beast of snobbery will start to emerge in the place of the old snob. In this week’s Rolling Stone there’s an article about Atlantic executive Ahmet Ertegün who found Ray Charles, Led Zepplin, Bette Midler and Frank Zappa. He was described as a modern day renaissance man who could talk the latest Magic Numbers song or the geopolitical situation in China as fluently as experts. Politics aside, this is the new direction of snobbery–an ear that takes in everything it can hear and seeks out differences rather than similarities. As Jason Hartley (a guy who we constantly reference and steal from) pointed out, Bob Dylan said in Chronicles that there are “no bad songs” and kept his ear open to everything from Roy Orbison to Blind Lemon Jefferson to Blur, all of which he plays on his Radio Show. This approach of liking everything will become the next step for left of center listeners seeking new possibilities. Those who seek a broad spectrum will in turn see all the colors out of focus instead of three hundred and sixty seven different shades of dark forrest green. The challenge for new snobs will be filling in the spectrum and focusing their direction.