Starting from the 18th century, there was a growth in the amount of time people spent listening to music, due to an intensification of the musical scene in Europe. This marked the first popularisation of music with the advent of the Renaissance, followed by the emergence of great composers like Mozart, Händel, Bach, Beethoven, and others. The harpsichord and piano became popular, and many households owned these instruments, especially in Victorian England. A music lover could now listen to music every day if they wished, but they still had to know how to play an instrument or attend events like festivals or operas. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that humanity could finally listen to music whenever they wanted without having to play or hear others play live, thanks to the invention of mechanical music, i.e., music recorded on wax, then vinyl, later cassette tapes, and more recently on CDs, culminating in today's widespread digital music formats like mp3, wma, m4a, and so on. Today, we can get almost all the music we want for free, just by searching for it on file-sharing programs, not to mention streaming platforms. We can listen only to the songs we like, without having to buy an entire album just for one song; today, you can download or stream a whole album and only keep (paid or free) the songs you actually like. Until the end of the 20th century, you either bought your favourite artist’s album or submitted to radio programming, which was (and still is) almost always based on payola, resulting in a questionable musical taste being shaped by those who only listened to (or still listen to) the radio... Our generation was also introduced to the Walkman and later to mp3 players like the iPod: we can go wherever we want, accompanied by our favourite music.

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Our generation is even more privileged than the one from just ten years ago when mp3s didn’t exist yet. Back then, we would have had to spend thousands of dollars to build the music library we have on our computers today... Now we have the internet, which gives us access to almost everything (and credit where it’s due, thanks to Napster's inventor, Shawn Fanning).

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Through sites like Wikipedia, last.fm, Soundcloud, 4shared.com, or applications like iTunes and Soulseek, along with music podcasts and blogs, we have abundant access to information and immediate access to (almost) every music scene in the world. This way, we can stay informed without being influenced by the opinions of the mainstream media, which is almost always corrupted by interests, whether monetary or otherwise. Today, we can also work while listening to music podcasts on our computers, and we can walk the streets or travel while carrying our entire repertoire with us, literally thousands of songs accessible instantly, and this is all very recent. And although we’re currently experiencing a major crisis in the music industry, this crisis is limited to the music industry itself because it hasn’t led to less production; on the contrary, it has never been easier to produce and share music. In fact, it’s this abundance—largely thanks to the internet—that is the origin of this industry crisis.

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Some criticise that this abundance has killed the joy of buying records in stores—until the late 1980s, there was a whole mystique around discovering new artists; friends would go to each other's houses to listen to their new records, but nowadays, that doesn’t happen anymore. I don’t deny that this "ritual" was very interesting, but you can’t stay in the same routine forever, right?... And this nostalgia is certainly not felt by the younger generation.

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And why would we be more privileged than future generations? Well, it may be that technology makes the "art of listening to music" even more fascinating: in a future that might not be too far off, they’ll certainly invent fascinating gadgets, like chip implants where you just think of a particular song, and it starts playing in your head with crystal-clear sound at the volume you desire. (Hm... did I go a bit too far with that idea? haha). But seriously, I think something like that is possible in the future... But the big difference between our generation and future ones is that only we lived through the emergence of the popularisation of counterculture in music, with the birth of great musical styles like rock, jazz, bossa nova, and electronic music, among others, which despite numerous death sentences they’ve faced (especially rock), are likely to remain around forever. These styles marked the shift from 0 to 1, making them a significant milestone.

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Until the mid-1950s, the kind of music people listened to followed a different pattern: it was more conservative, Christian, and aligned with the system. It wasn’t until artists like Little Richard and Elvis Presley in the late 1950s that rebellion and protest became prominent in music—taking inspiration from Beethoven and Mozart, who were also considered subversive in their time. But during their era, relatively few people had the privilege of hearing their music. The 1960s really marked the beginning of the popularisation of counterculture in music.

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Even though I didn’t live through the 1960s, I still had the privilege of seeing The Rolling Stones live in Copacabana at the start of the last decade. And we still have legendary musicians alive, like Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osbourne (at least as of the day I’m writing this...). Punk rock and the Sex Pistols exploded when I was still in nappies, but I saw the Sex Pistols live in Rio in 1996. I also saw Nirvana live, a band that simply shifted how rock was made and forever changed the way rock music is created. I witnessed the rise of electronic music in the 1990s. I attended the first techno and electro parties. I saw the birth of trance and the emergence of raves. I saw a live performance by one of the pioneers of electronic music, Kraftwerk. I grew up listening to the newly released albums (at the time) of the king of pop, Michael Jackson. Even Os Mutantes got back together. Not to mention that I witnessed the birth of many other musical styles, like industrial, hip hop, shoegaze, downtempo, disco punk, etc. So, is this a golden age for music lovers or what???

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Of course, it was a great privilege for people in previous centuries to attend live concerts by Beethoven and Mozart. A golden age, no doubt. And it’s obvious that many more great moments in music history will emerge in the future. But I consider the current generation to be the luckiest of all because, compared to past generations, we now have much more access to music. And compared to future generations, it was our generation that first managed to popularise counterculture in music, which will forever change the way music is made—it’s impossible not to influence it. It’s like a family tree. We can divide popular music into "before the 1960s" and "after the 1960s." And since I’m a contemporary of the people who made this cultural revolution in the 1960s, I consider myself a lucky guy. And I want to enjoy every minute of this era... 😉