If you secretly Shazam songs in public, you’re a loser. In a time where personal taste is highly curated, and seen as a performance of identity, the discovery of music has become hyper-individualistic. In curating the self one Shazam at a time, the “I already knew this song” economy is abrasive. The dichotomy between the private Shazam and the public self has led to a crisis of true community.
Shazam is an app designed as a tool to quickly and easily discover new music. Through their device’s built in microphone, users provide the app with a sample of audio, and if it finds a match, Shazam provides the song title, artist, and album. The app has over 300 million monthly active users and has helped identify over 100 billion songs. However secretly Shazaming music in public has become an epidemic within itself. This performance foregoes the beautiful intimacy that can arise from a shared love of chords and melodies in favour of cultural capital. We all want to appear as if we’ve discovered something organically and to hide the labour behind true constructions of identity. Despite this, we aren’t born with cultural knowledge; you have to find it somewhere.
The song, the scan, and the shame are all interconnected—the performance of effortless taste through music preference to distinguish oneself from the “average” listener put forth that taste is innate rather than actively acquired. Postmodernism and the digital age have led to a cutting culture of superfluous artificiality and insincerity. Because of course, how else can coolness be measured? Modern coolness depends on concealing how hard you curate yourself to put on a display of the ‘right’ personalities. Through this, we lose sight of the importance of being earnest which potently speaks to how society seeks knowledge independently in a world that rewards seemingly effortless expertise.
To treat music discovery as clandestine is ironic, when above all, music is community. Scarcity once made the display of sonic choices meaningful. Over time, music has become less communal and more autobiographical. Now, algorithms replace communities. The chance connection made at local concerts, visits to record stores, or merely asking “what song is this?” have been replaced by Spotify’s Discover Weekly. Everyone using the same platforms and the same algorithms means individuality is mass-produced. While music becoming frictionless has democratised access, innovative technology like this unwittingly empowers a touch of subterfuge all in the name of looking “cool”. Instant retrieval changes the emotional experience of connection, using technology to remain socially self-contained means music becomes overly detached.
This is also the difference between good discovery versus bad discovery; music that is perceived as underground and organic is viewed as superior to songs that are algorithmically fed. That’s where the shame in Shazam comes from; where music is a fundamental pillar of character, asking about a song may reveal that your identity is not fully formed. Also central to the concept of gatekeeping, the act of policing other’s consumption to keep the scene authentic and prevent it from being watered down, mechanisms exist that define whose identity is true and worthy of belonging. Performances surrounding selfhood in an era of intense conformity, function to make us afraid of seeking more.
To avoid the casualties to individual taste when taste itself is defined by other’s tongues, these rituals must be rejected to prevent the total absorption of self into a polarised collective. Without conscious intervention, we all become victims of culture who do not know what we actually like.
