When Did Sharing Music Stop Feeling Personal?

A reminder that music is one of the few things that can bring complete strangers onto the same dance floor.

There was a time when sharing music took effort. You spent hours making the perfect mixtape. You burned CDs for friends. You carefully downloaded songs onto your MP3 player because every track meant something. It took time, it took thought, and somehow that effort made it feel even more personal. Sharing music wasn't just about recommending a song, it was a love language.

Long before that, music was shared in even more personal settings; places of worship, pubs, festivals, concert halls, restaurants and living rooms. It wasn't simply listened to; it was experienced together. Music has always been a social experience, bringing people together long before technology existed.

Technology changed all of that.

The IFPI's Engaging with Music report concludes that "people are listening to more music, in more ways, than ever before." Today, the average person spends over 20 hours every week listening to music across streaming services, social media, short form video, radio, gaming and live events. They're right. We've solved access. We can discover almost any song ever recorded in seconds. But I can't help wondering whether we've confused access with connection.

Somewhere along the way, sharing music became frictionless, but it also became fleeting. A link in a group chat. A song attached to a meme. A thirty second clip that disappears into an endless feed. We've never had more music at our fingertips, yet somehow it feels harder to share what that music actually means to us. Sometimes it feels like those moments disappear into the void of an endless scroll before they've even had the chance to mean something.

Music has never just been entertainment. It has always been one of humanity's oldest forms of communication. It has helped us celebrate, grieve, fall in love, protest, remember and belong. So why doesn't sharing it feel as personal anymore? More importantly, how do we make it personal again?

These are the questions that occupy my mind every day.

Maybe the next chapter of music technology isn't about helping us discover more songs. Maybe it's about helping us rediscover one another through the songs we already love; because music was never just something we consumed, it has always been something we shared.

Even when sharing took effort.

Perhaps because sharing took effort.

And perhaps that's what we've been missing all along.