22,000 Songs and Nothing to Listen To

Faced with such an overwhelming amount of music, most people are fine settling into choice-simplifying filters. The danger with such inundation is that we're unaware of how dependent on filters we are and how they filter in the first place. Hence, all of those jocks listening to Top 40 (a cheat sheet of the songs least likely to cause social scorn) and all of those hipsters on Pitchfork and the Hype Machine. And don't forget about the kids and their MySpace, "discovering" new music by checking out which other bands are the "Top Friends" of their favorite bands. (These bands tend to overlap demographically to a calculated degree, as managing MySpace pages becomes big business.)

We're forced to leave out a lot, possibly never even finding the song that will change our lives, and it's to our benefit to be OK with it. But how can I deny myself the potential to hit the jackpot when pressing "shuffle" is as easy as pointing? I never had this problem in high school, listening to OK Computer on repeat; at the gym, my iPod is like a remote control or a slot machine, flicking through 500 songs, searching for another emotive spike. I now find myself getting bored, even in the middle of songs, because I can. The paradox of spending so much time changing songs, trying to find one that you like—without giving it time, meanwhile thinking about what else you could be listening to—is that you wind up attached to none of them. (This sentiment should also resonate with single people in their 30s.)

Vlad Alvarez

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• Dan Levitin
• Barry Schwartz
• Apple iPod
• Social and Behavioral Sciences
• Science and Technology

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"Yes, there is too much music product, and most of it is terrible," says Peter Crabb, an assistant professor of psychology at Penn State University. "Kids can spend more time trying to figure out what to listen to and fiddling with their computers and MP3s than actually spending quality time listening to good music."

And there is good music out there. As Ravi Dhar, Ph.D., the director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management and a professor of psychology, says, "At some point, one has to stop looking for the best strawberries and start eating them!"

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