YouTube and music

Yesterday afternoon my children were doing as little as possible with the greatest determination. As they sat around, they engaged in one of their favorite pastimes, listening to music off YouTube. This allows them to take turns choosing songs, or to click on a suggested link and hear something none of us has ever heard before. It's a delightful thing to do, even when some of the songs my sons choose sound like an army of alleycats trying to stop bulldozers in the act of tearing down their neighborhoood. YouTube, in combination with iTunes, has solved one of the major annoyances that beset life in the second half of the twentieth century. There is a fabulous quantity and diversity of recorded music in the world, but how do you learn about anything beyond the tiny sliver that gets played on the radio? And if you did manage to hear a song you really liked, the only way to get it was to buy a whole album or cd loaded with stuff you didn't like. I have a whole stack of cds I never listen to because the only song on them I like was the one I had heard before buying the thing.

But now, with YouTube, we can spend whole afternoons listening to unfamiliar music. Hear a rumor about a band? Listen to a song. Simple as that. YouTube is very limited in some kinds of music I'm interested in, especially folk, but even so it is enormously richer and more diverse than the whole radio dial. And if you find something you like, you can hop over to iTunes and, much of the time, buy it right then and there. Just the one song, not a cd loaded with 40 minutes of filler. I know some music industry people are worried that YouTube will hurt their sales, but I have bought more music this year than any of the previous dozen.

I was thinking about this, and I remembered that there was a fragment of Sophocles about the power of music, and using that other modern marvel, the internet search engine, I tracked it down:

By Memory's daughters, the Muses,
Forgetting, named Lethe, is hated
And not to be loved. But for mortals, what
Power there is in songs,
What greatest happiness
That can make bearable this
Short narrow channel of life!