After Music: Listening in the Age of Saturation

I’m taking a break this weekend to visit some networking events, so let me hand you over to our very own Sam Reck for this week’s email. His wise words resonate strongly with myself and James, and I hope they do for you too! Links to Sam’s own excellent music at the bottom - please check it out!



I can’t remember the last time I was truly excited about new music. I don’t mean interested or impressed - I mean stopped in my tracks, eyes-widened, can’t-believe-what-I’m-hearing excited. Every now and then I’ll hear something well made, sometimes even brilliant, but it feels like a facsimile - a ghost of something that once mattered. Even the artists I admire most sound as though they’re circling the same drain, re-arranging what’s already been done, dressing it differently.

Music today feels like a hall of mirrors. The reflections are beautiful, intricate, and infinite - but they all lead back to the same image. I listen to these dazzling displays of harmonic complexity and technical mastery, the kind of music that can twist through a thousand modulations in a single breath - and yet I don’t feel it. It’s clever, astonishing even, but somehow hollow. It sounds like someone trying to push a boundary that may no longer exist.

Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe the problem isn’t the artists; maybe it’s me - or all of us. We’ve become numb to sound. The miracle of recorded music, once a rare privilege, has become as ambient as air-conditioning. I can summon a symphony, a jazz quartet, or an Icelandic drone choir in three seconds on my phone. The infinite library that once felt like freedom now feels like noise.

There’s a term media theorists use: saturation. It’s what happens when abundance collapses into indifference. When the very availability of everything erodes the value of anything. That’s where I think music is now. It’s not that musicians have lost imagination - it’s that listeners, myself included, have lost hunger. The sense of discovery that once defined the act of listening has been replaced by an algorithmic feed that knows what we “like” better than we do.

I think often about how new this is. Recorded sound - sound you could play back - is just over a century old. Universal access, even less so. It’s a tired anecdote, but it’s true: saving your money, going to a record shop, browsing, listening in the booth at the back if you were lucky. It’s gone. For most of human history, music was an event, not a file. It happened once, in a place, among people. Its meaning was inseparable from its moment. You couldn’t own it; you had to be there. Then came the gramophone, the tape, the CD, the MP3, and now the stream - each step separating sound from space, performance from presence.

We’ve gone from scarcity to infinity in a few generations. My grandparents might have owned a dozen records; I have access to millions. And yet, in that abundance, I feel something missing. I used to measure time in albums - the new release from an artist you’d waited years for, the liner notes, the ritual of pressing play and staying. Now everything is available, so nothing feels necessary.

When I try to understand what I’m craving, the word that comes to mind is authenticity - though even that word has been cheapened by marketing. What I really mean is presence: music that feels like someone in the room, telling the truth, unguarded. I listened recently to the binaural Atmos mix of Ain’t Nobody by Rufus and Chaka Khan, and it was the first song in a long time that made me want to re-listen. It didn’t give me chills - it enhanced what I already knew, it re-invited me into the song. A track I’d heard a hundred times suddenly opened up, spatially and emotionally, in ways I hadn’t conceived. The Atmos mix made it feel newly present, alive again. It wasn’t that the song had changed; it was that my experience of it had. I could appreciate it afresh, even if it was still, at its core, a reissue of the past - a sophisticated act of regurgitation.

Maybe that’s where the next frontier lies - not in new chords or genres, but in re-learning how to listen. The production arms race has already been won; now intimacy might be the rebellion. I think we’ll start seeing more music that sounds deliberately small: unfiltered vocals, breaths left in, room noise as texture. The studio trickery that once symbolised sophistication now feels defensive, like a mask.

Another possibility is spatial and sensory listening - music that’s experienced like architecture. Atmos, binaural, and spatial computing are early hints of this. We might move through songs  instead of streaming them, experiencing them as shifting rooms rather than linear timelines. Moving towards the drummer, or closer to the singer. And beyond that, generative systems - music that changes with you, that evolves rather than loops. A song you never hear the same way twice.

Then again, maybe the most radical future is silence. After a century of constant playback, quiet might be the only thing left that still sounds new. You can already feel that pull: musicians and listeners turning to podcasts, to conversation, to the sound of thought instead of composition. It’s not that we’re rejecting music - we’re searching for something it used to give us: connection, meaning, the sense of someone there.

The late ’60s through the late ’70s were a singular moment: the boundaries between composition, performance, and recording blurred for the first time, but the process still demanded human constraint. Tape, early synths, analogue desks - they were technological, but they pushed back. Every sound still had to be performed, or at least committed to.

From the ’80s onward, the frontier shifted from what music is to how it’s made. Digital tools democratised production - which was both a revolution and a slow erasure of friction. Sampling, MIDI, DAWs, pitch correction, editing down to the millisecond - every new layer of control also removed some of the accidents and limitations that used to shape musical identity.

By the early 2000s, that transformation was complete: there were no longer technological obstacles between imagination and realisation. Ironically, that’s when creativity began to plateau. When anything is possible, nothing feels miraculous. The excitement that once came from discovering a new sound has been replaced by a kind of aesthetic optimisation - songs built to perform well on platforms rather than to express something only the artist could.

In other words: once the studio became infinite, music lost its gravity.

I don’t think music is dying. It’s just dissolving into everything else - into film, games, ambient spaces, and algorithmic feeds. The borders between “song” and “sound” are eroding. What used to be a discrete art form is becoming a medium of atmosphere. That might sound bleak, but maybe it’s just evolution. Maybe what’s next isn’t music as we’ve known it, but listening as an expanded art - active, embodied, intentional.

When I step back from the frustration, I realise I’m not bored of music itself. I’m bored of its current framing - the endless stream, the metrics, the flattening of wonder. What I miss is the feeling of presence, the sense that hearing something is also witnessing it. And that’s before we even think about the impact of AI-generated musical content. I don’t see that as a threat so much as another shift - one that will, in time, find its own balance. But I do think some listeners will start to crave what can’t be synthesised: the live, the embodied, the tangible. Until we create machines that can truly capture the beautiful imperfections of human playing, there’ll still be something essentially ours about it. Perhaps that’s where we’re heading again: toward experiences that can’t be replicated, that ask us to be there.

Until then, I’ll keep listening - not to everything, but to something. Carefully. Quietly. As if the act itself might bring music back to life.

Practical Coda:

I sometimes wonder if working on music for a living has changed how I feel about its consumption. By early 2024, I was ready to start releasing music under my own name, but something held me back. At first, I thought it was logistics - the lack of a label, a plan, a meaningful way to be heard. But as I solved those things, the hesitation remained.

What I eventually realised is that I didn’t just want my music to exist; I wanted it to breathe. I leaned instinctively toward connection - toward being in a room with other musicians. I began forming a band, not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity. Collaboration meant friction again: personalities, timing, compromise, laughter. The unpredictable chemistry of people in sound.

It worked. And it reminded me why I started at all. The act of making - the physical feeling of vibration, the air moving in a space - reconnects me to something deeper than output or reception. It isn’t about chasing innovation or nostalgia; it’s about remembering that music is a contact sport, a thing that happens between people.

Maybe that’s the real answer to my earlier question - the antidote to saturation. To step away from the infinite archive, back into a room, and let sound live and die in real time. To make something that exists only because we were there to play it.

That’s where I found my excitement again. Not in the feed, not in the file - but in the shared act of making noise.

https://www.submithub.com/link/eight-track-mind