M y daughter is nine years old. When I was her age, in 1989, I had my own small cassette player and a beloved pile of my own tapes – brand new, or made up of songs from the radio – that I could listen to whenever I wanted. The same went for my parents’ modest CD collection (Genesis’s Invisible Touch was awesome; their three Lionel Richie albums were boring).
There were a few vinyl records knocking about and there were at least two radios – invariably set to Capital FM – that I could turn on whenever. My daughter has none of these things. The only way she can access music is by making me get my phone out and play a song on my Spotify account.
The inconvenience is trifling, but more painful and alarming is the growing gap between us when it comes to musical experience. A a whole age group of kids – let’s call them “pre-phone children” – are now unable to access music of their choosing. In fact they have virtually no musical autonomy at all, not helped by plummeting investment in music tuition.
As Naomi Alderman , the novelist, game writer and author of best-selling sci-fi novel The Power sees it: “So much of our technology is coded up by 25-year-olds working for companies run by 37-year-olds. They maybe have not raised children to adulthood and don’t have friends who have, so the question ‘how do I give my kid easy access to some but not all of my music’ hasn’t come up.” There’s no concern over this and worryingly, no sense of panic about a d.
