An active response to an inert argument about music listening

Sep 23, 2025

In a recent post on his (Substack) newsletter about music listening practices, "Are you listening?," composer/songwriter Gabriel Kahane uses the word "moral" or "moralizing" twice, in both instances to try and describe what his post is not doing:

In the first paragraph of the second section, he writes:

I don’t intend to make a moral argument about the attention we bring as listeners.

Then, just two paragraphs later, he says again:

Again, I don’t wish to moralize.

But it seems to me that whether he intends to or not, he very much does moralize here. That's the whole point of his article.

Some context:

Kahane's article basically argues that, when it comes to music, the streaming economy encourages hearing over listening. The abundance of streaming and its design creates a form of choice paralysis that for Kahane is more than mere choice paralysis. It is the condition for a lack of investment in the music we engage with, which he argues we should be at least as interested in as questions of streaming economics:

Rather than comparing royalty rates—all paltry enough to constitute a distinction without a difference—perhaps we should instead be asking: what kind of listeners do we become when we have access to tens of millions of songs? Do we listen more deeply? Or are we more likely to sample a good deal of music superficially, while listening to very little of it with focus and intention? In other words, do we sample several jams and walk out of the store empty-handed?

(In this case, the "jams" actually refers to an example he draws from earlier in the article, a business study involving a jam display at a supermarket... but I like the pun.)

The rest of the article is a pretty typical waxing on active versus passive listening, albeit one that pays a bit more attention to the place of streaming in that very long, imo rather tired debate. It has all the hallmarks of a piece in this vein: it doesn't just privilege one form of listening over another, but also suggests intentional listening is about paying the proper attention to the artist, to making appropriate use of our own time, etc.

There is even an obligatory ode to the act of listening to vinyl and the supposed investment it takes. ⊕ I am trying very hard to marshal my better angels and not straight up clown this passage. We'll see if I hold out to the end of this post.

By the end, he has in fact made an argument about how to listen to music as well as how to buy music, an argument that is trying to tie the act of music listening to something "more" than mere hearing and consumption. Listening with intent, he says, pays both moral and financial dividends for both self and artists. In this passage, he highlights the second part of that equation:

If we commit to listening intentionally, we may listen less. But in so doing, we might discover that we actually can afford to pay for the music we enjoy, offering dignity and respect to artists twice over: first, in granting them our attention, and second, in compensating them fairly for their work. Perhaps, in the end, six jams can keep us sated.

I think this is the very definition of moralizing, no? One definition from the OED reads:

To make moral; to give a moral quality to or affect the moral quality of (actions, feelings, etc.).

Kahane even suggests that his particular solution - returning "to listening habits I'd first developed as a teenager" - might be the most enlightened mode of musical engagement:

For me, reviving older listening habits is a way to demonstrate respect for the artists I admire. To purchase an album is to acknowledge the labor and resources that went into making it. By listening to it actively and repeatedly, I also offer respect through attention. A few months into this renaissance, I find myself unshackled from the FOMO that once paralyzed me when I streamed. In a world oversaturated with information, giving up access to our sonic “Library of Babel,” it turns out, is not limiting, but liberating.

Call me crazy, but I think that's exactly the sort of thing a moralizer would do. ⊕ As I'll argue at the end of this piece, I actually don't think moralizing is bad. I sometimes wonder if we shouldn't do more moralizing, but consciously so.

It has to really suck to be a committed musician these days.

The immense inner and outer toil you put into your work is added to the digital ocean as a mere drop. The power of the algorithm seems absolute. The old paths to visibility are nearly gone; the new paths are often inscrutable. Robots are making music, and the new de facto record companies are now making the robots.

Then there's the money. Or rather, there's not the money, the money isn't there. Pay attention to one or two music publications for a minute and you're sure to read a story about a reasonably well-known indie artist who has nevertheless struggled to pay their bills.

The road doesn't pay very well. Few people buy physical albums. And streaming pays pennies, if it pays at all. Talk about imaginary numbers.

But what must really be frustrating - what I think I would be most frustrated by - is the sense that even when you get some streams, even when you get a review, the world is already on to the next.

It's fairly common even for smaller acts to effectively re-release their records a few times. Release the album. Release a deluxe version. Release a set of remixes.

You can hear the thinking out loud, the effort to find ways to stay in the zeitgeist just a bit longer.

All to get a few clicks that translate to a few pennies.

You don't have to have bottomless stores of compassion to empathize with how much the current situation for musicians stinks, even for many of those who appear to have made it.

I hear that frustration in a lot of Kahane's recent writing, including this piece. I get it, as much as I can I think without being in the same shoes. I can do the math: the math of dollars and sense, but also the moral math -- the math of feeling valued and heard.

None of it adds up.

Nevertheless, I really rolled my eyes through this entire piece, as I have rolled my eyes at this sort of argument for a while.

Everything about it feels... overwrought.

It's not that I don't agree with any of it. In fact, I agree with a lot of the basics:

• the streaming economy sucks financially for artists
• the streaming economy has changed the way we listen to music in countless ways, including by encouraging forms of passive listening over forms of active listening
• the abundance of music available via streaming has made it easy to think of music as disposable

And I think that Kahane and I would probably agree on the following generic goals:

• we would do well as a society to find ways to forge deeper relationships with some of the music we listen to
• we would do well to find ways to better support artists, preferably by reaching beyond streaming into forms of more direct support

So what's my beef? I have a few, but I'll focus on the big one: the passive vs active listening piece.

Kahane's argument basically splits listening into two modes - passive vs active - and suggests that one is authentic, one is not. Or, let's use his words:

But if you’re streaming music in the background while engaged in another demanding mental task, I would argue that you’re not really listening — you’re just hearing.

I think that this sort of thing sounds right at a certain level, to a certain person, because it validates what we think listening should be. But I think it misses a really basic fact:

We don't hear in one way. We don't listen in one way. We hear and we listen in lots of ways. We are rarely in just one mode of hearing or just one mode of listening. We move between levels of intent and focus, consciously and unconsciously.

To illustrate this, I want to again turn to Kahane's own words, in which he offers what I think is an absurd analogy:

Plenty of people listen to music while they write or study. But you never hear anyone claim that they read a book while they write, or look at paintings while they cram for a math test. That’s because these tasks require our eyes as well as some degree of cognitive activity.

Or again:

You wouldn’t read a Toni Morrison novel “in the background,” so why would you relegate a beloved songwriter to that status? If we are to derive uplift or edification from art, surely some degree of attention and intention is required.

BUT WE DO THIS ALL THE TIME.

We read Toni Morrison on a train, on a plane, in a car, at a bar, and in our favorite quiet, secluded spot where we know we won't be bothered which, by the way, might be outdoors, might be indoors, might be private, might be public, might be ANYTHING.

I didn't say, upon completing Morrison's amazing Song of Solomon, that I only really read 50% of it, because the other 50% my attention wasn't always turned all the way up. I don't measure my focus every time I crack open a book and then enter that into some stats-crunching machine to figure out how real my reading was.

What's more, the character of my reading comes in a thousand different flavors. Sometimes I read closely, for the luxury of language. Sometimes rapidly because I can't wait to learn what happens next. In the historical research and writing class that I teach every semester, we talk about all the different ways we might read and how the act of reading itself changes across those modes.

This isn't rocket science. I'd argue this is stuff we know intuitively, from just the barest observation of how we move through daily life.

And sure, when I crack a book open mainly to grab its argument and basic structure, I don't typically say I "read" that book. But it doesn't change the fact that I engaged with it, I spent some time with it, I made a note that references it mental or otherwise. And if a colleague says, "Hey, have you read that new scholarly book on terrible analogies?" I don't spend a lot of time parsing my response: "I didn't give it a super close read, but I spent some time with it," is something I have said before and will say again.

Similarly, if I walk through a museum, I don't give every painting the same amount of attention or consideration. I have dozens of painting-engagement strategies, some I am aware of and some I am not, that shape the way I interact with any given work, from the thirty-second glance to the ten-minute immersion to any manner of things in between or beyond.

But I don't parse this later and say I only really saw the painting I spent more than thirty seconds looking at.

Not to belabor this, but here's one more example:

Above our dining table, we have a few paintings of trees by an Indiana artist named Robert Browning Reed. I look at them occasionally while eating. I never sit and say, "Now I am going to look at these paintings we have hung." I do, however, look at them while doing other things. And quite often, they draw my attention. And as I eat, or open the mail, or read, or tinker with an instrument, I look up and I notice something new. Maybe I stop and linger longer. Maybe I don't. Maybe I ask them questions, then; maybe they answer in aphorisms.

In ten seconds, maybe, or sixty. Between bites, between envelopes, between pages.

This type of looking is not one thing or another. It's not real or fake. It's looking. It's seeing. It's all of the above and maybe none of it.

This isn't just about semantics. To assess the work of the listener within the current musical ecosystem through a false binary - between hearing and listening as distinct modes with clear boundaries and characteristics - is misleading. We hear and listen and hear-listen and listen-hear in innumerable ways, ways that defy easy categorization.

Acknowledging this makes diagnosing what ails our listening -- that is, if anything ails our listening -- much harder, for it makes the activities in question far more complex. But if there is something to be solved, certainly we want the truest picture of the thing in question that we can attain, no?

I have other problems with the article such as:

• I hate the use of "friction" and would be really happy if people would stop using this term so freely, and assuming it represents an absolute good.
• It weirdly assumes that there is a magical balance out there between the amount of money one has and the reasonable amount of listening one should do in a day/week/month/year. What kind of invisible hand logic is that?

But for now, I'll just leave this here and suggest that you can argue that we should maybe make more room for active listening without diminishing or dismissing other forms of listening.