“I love music but I hate it” is what my new friend said to me, and at first I thought it was just a controversial take for the sake of being interesting. As someone who listens to a lot of music, I couldn’t understand how someone could hate it. However, as I’ve started noticing the constant presence of music, especially with the ubiquity of streaming, I can see what he means.

Thanks to streaming, it is easier than ever to consume music whenever we want. And while this is amazingly convenient, it also means that every waking moment can be accompanied by music. I probably should have realized I had a problem when I felt I needed to play a song to get me out of bed in the morning, or when I put headphones on for the few minutes it takes to brush my teeth at night. The truth is, filling every bit of silence with music may not be all that great; music is effectively cheapened as it becomes the background noise of our lives. I wonder if Swann would have been so captivated by Vinteuil’s little phrase if he were able to listen to it on repeat every day.

Listening to music used to be much more intentional. You would have to go to a live performance or buy someone’s record to listen to it; you would make the active choice to listen to something. Now you can’t escape it. Mariah Carey will play for the umpteenth time while you do your Christmas shopping, whether you like it or not. Your Uber driver will put on Taylor Swift to avoid the awkward silence, or worse, the awkward small talk. Even playing your own Spotify playlist ends with the algorithm choosing songs it thinks you might like—anything to keep the stream of music flowing. As Spotify’s founder said himself, their only competitor is silence.

Now I understand that my friend doesn’t hate music, he hates its excess, its intrusion.

As music becomes more a product of consumption rather than that of enjoyment, mainstream media, and now AI, will produce more and more of the frictionless noise that can be listened to without paying any real attention. What matters most is that it is playing at all times. This ties into a video I watched recently about Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, a philosophical theory suggesting that capitalism, not the given political regime, rules over society. The political regime is nothing more than a mask, a spectacle, obscuring who really holds all the power. The video made me realize the semantic link between the terms “folk music” and “pop” or “popular music”, both meaning “music of the people”. While one has retained its meaning, the other has come to denote commonness and banality. As the video explains, popular music used to be music made by the people. Nowadays, pop music is music made for the people: a product designed to sell and to appeal to the masses.

Streaming has transformed music into a highly efficient and pervasive branch of the spectacle, a blanket of noise to pacify us and drown out any thought or reason. If this is the new definition of music, then I hate it too.