AFTER “SLOW FOOD”, “SLOW MUSIC” AND “FREE WILL” IS THE WAY!
WHY I BELIEVE THAT FOR LISTENING TO MUSIC THE PHYSICAL MEDIA IS NOT AT ALL OBSOLETE, COMPARED TO ITS CURRENT DIGITAL ALTERNATIVES, AND WHY ITS RELOCATION IN THE SPACE OF CULTURAL EDUCATION SHOULD STILL BE A COMMITMENT AND A GAME TO BE PLAYED.
1. Cultural and ritual value: The CD is not just a medium, it is a cultural object. Unlike streaming, listening to a CD implies a deliberate choice, a dedicated time, a sequence thought up by the artist. This makes it part of a ritual, not a passive consumption.
2. Tactile and aesthetic experience: A CD has a cover, a booklet, graphics. It offers a visual and tactile experience that is part of the work. It is an object that can be collected, given as a gift, shown. Digital listening, however convenient, is dematerialized and impalpable.
3. Stable sound quality: Contrary to what many believe, the quality of CDs is often superior to that of compressed streaming. Furthermore, a CD on a good audio player provides a fidelity and depth that not all digital services guarantee.
4. Responsibility towards artistic memory: Abandoning physical media also means making music more vulnerable to oblivion or arbitrary removal. CDs remain, even when an algorithm decides that a song is no longer useful.
5. Education in listening: Offering and promoting CDs means educating new generations to listen more attentively, less bulimic. It means sowing a culture of slowness, of in-depth analysis, of quality.
6. Digital ecology: Streaming is not immaterial. Its environmental impact is far from zero, between server farms, data traffic and continuous updates. A CD, once produced, consumes less in the long term.
These answers are based on a simple idea: not everything that is new is necessarily better, and not everything that is old is to be thrown away. True innovation does not lie in the uncritical abandonment of the past, but in its conscious reinterpretation.
Re-educating listening: an act of cultural resistance
In an era where everything is instantaneous, where music is consumed by shuffling, jumping from one song to another like from one shot to another on TikTok, talking about physical media such as CDs may seem anachronistic. But perhaps this is precisely why it has become urgent.
The new generations are not to be blamed: they are immersed in an ecosystem designed to fragment attention and accelerate rhythms. Digital psychopathology is not just an addiction to screens, but a progressive inability to stay in the time of experience, discovery, fertile boredom. Listening to music – the real one – instead requires slowness, patience, waiting.
So how can we reactivate this desire for depth, for “presence”?
1. Giving music a body back: Every song has a story, a cover, written notes, intentions. The CD – or vinyl, or cassette – is a body that bears witness to this story. Showing this to new generations, perhaps at school or in workshops, can be a revealing act: "Look, this is a complete work. It's not just a file."
2. Ritualizing listening: You can teach that listening to a record from start to finish is like reading a story or watching a film. It's a journey. Initiatives like guided "collective listening", evenings in which you turn off your phone and put an entire album on the turntable, help to re-educate the ear and the mind to the long term.
3. Encouraging research as part of pleasure: Finding a CD, looking for it in a market, ordering it, waiting for it to arrive: it's a process that amplifies the value of the object and the experience. Show kids that “owning” something – in the full sense of the term – is different from “having it available”.
4. Questioning the freemium model: Everything immediately and (almost) for free has a hidden price: loss of attention, standardization, algorithmic manipulation. Discussing this openly in schools, in the media, in families, can open their eyes to how much they are really paying, in cognitive and emotional terms, for this apparent freedom.
5. Creating “slow” places for music: Media libraries, cultural spaces, independent shops can become laboratories for slow listening, for comparison between generations, for exploration of sound. There, the CD is not a commodity to be placed in a sandwich, but a living trace of a cultural heritage that is renewed.
Returning to physical media is not an escape into the past. It is a radical gesture of resistance and reappropriation. It is remembering that music is not a background, but an entire world to travel through. And the very act of looking for it, touching it, listening to it carefully... is already music.
Thanks to Stefano Amerio for the above insight, which I totally agree with 🖖