I think everyone should.be reminded how weird and new our media consumption is to humanity.

You know those memes about how a single nacho cheese dorito has more flavor than a medical peasant would have had in their whole life? Well, that meme is not really measurable and glosses over what those peasants actually ate. But what about everything else?

Nowadays almost everyone has some sort of streaming service with unfathomable quantities of music. Here is an article fron 2024 that can only report that Spotify has >100,000,000 songs, and they were adding an estimated 60,000 songs every day at that time. That means if every song was a really short 2 minutes long, you have 2,000 hours of music every 24 hours.

I remember the days when even pirating music was an endeavor. Back when it would take a couple of days to download an album, and my desktop only had 40GB of storage.

I remember the days when you had to go to a physical store and buy a CD to get music. Some enthusiasts had thousands of albums, but most people hae a small collection of a 10-100 of their favorites. People would.use the radio or MTV to get samples of new music to try.

But what about before the spread of music recording and playback devices? Just a few generations ago the idea of capturing sound from.one moment in time to re-create it repeatedly later would have been seen as witchcraft. The average medical peasant woulf have had religious music and folk music, but nowhere near the insane quantity and variety we have today. I think it will take several.generations for human brains and societies to fully adapt to this change.