I stumbled across a quote recently from Jacque Attali, who was an advisor for Mitterand amongst other things, from something he wrote called Noise: A Political Economy of Music:

People buy more records than they can listen to. They stockpile what they want to find the time to hear… Transforming use-time into a stockpileable object makes it possible to sell and stockpile rights to usage without actually using anything, to exchange ad infinitum without extracting pleasure from the object, without experiencing its function.

It’s a simple equation—there can be no perfect listener if we don’t listen. The perfect listener in this case is replaced by the perfect consumer, who doesn’t listen to anything at all, because why bother? I’ve made £50 in the last couple of weeks by selling old Cooper Temple Clause, Christina Aguilera, JC Chasez, and Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster albums second hand. 

(Stylus Magazine)

This little series (the passage above is from part two of a two-parter) is really good. That it was written in 2006 shows that in writing about music we just keep going around in the same equipoidal circles. Yeah? 

Maybe it’s even worse, now. I know that I am a consummate music collector, a downloader. That’s worse than even consuming (if better/worse are the right terms for the continuum—a big if). I spend half the day listening to audiobooks and podcasts—not so much for their content, but just to hear interesting voices. I’m listening a lot more to music this week because I bought new headphones, and that’s exciting. But is the passion all gone? It’s bad. Sometimes I’m afraid that new music doesn’t have a lot to teach me. Do I believe in aesthetics as a transcendental end? I have ten records that I can listen to all day every day. Will the new Panda Bear really be the eleventh? It seems to be more plausible, rather, that I’ll decide that Purple Rain or even Return To Cookie Mountain is the eleventh. I’d love to hear the new Arcade Fire, but I’m pretty sure their first album is virtually perfect. And that one’s like number 39 on my list. Don’t even get me started on the Big Boi album…