TheCulturalDominanceOfMusic

Context: TechnologyAndMusic, MusicHistory

If you think about it, "stand-alone music" dominated culturally from the 1950s through to the early 2000s. That's roughly the period between the invention of cheap portable transistor radios and cheap portable smartphones.

In other words, the period when people (and particularly teenagers) could afford to have their own personal, portable audio player, but didn't have their own personal, portable video player.

I suspect that was the real reason for music's dominance (both culturally and economically) in that half century.

And now they DO have a multimedia player in their pockets, which can do music but also video, and photography, and also social media and games and creative selfie filters etc etc, obviously music is going to lose its pre-eminence in the ecosystem of portable, personal culture, and have to take its place alongside, or in concert with these others.