Let's say you get seven hours of sleep a night. Congratulations. If you are so lucky, each year you're awake for 6205 hours. If you live to be 70 years old, that makes 434,350 hours (or 26,061,000 minutes) in your waking life. That seems like plenty of time to hear all the music that's ever been made. Right?
Maybe not.
One popular source of information about music is allmusic.com. This website documents publicly released music in a huge relational database. Allmusic includes albums released through professional channels in most genres of music. Although it has been appropriately criticized for errors, it is still a useful gauge of the scope of music out there. As of 8/17/2011, allmusic.com lists 20,139,834 tracks.
But hey, you've got 26,061,000 minutes in your life to listen! You could hear a minute and twenty seconds of each track. Sure, some tracks are longer, such as classical pieces, prog rock and jam bands, but I won't tell if you fast-forward to the catchy parts. Get cracking!
Hold on, did I mention that there's a bit more music out there besides recorded and released music?
First, there's live music. I checked a pretty large source for live event info, eventful.com. It reports that this coming Saturday there will be 8,282 concerts in the United States. Road Trip! Freebird!!!
Wait a sec, how about music that was recorded but not released? I've been an audio engineer for almost nineteen years, and I know that for every song that is released, there are dozens more alternate studio takes, demos, rehearsals, and even more that get recorded but never make it to the public. These days live concerts are routinely recorded, and only a few tracks from the best performances are released.
Oh, and one more thing... professional projects are recorded as multi-track audio, with a dedicated track for each instrument in the band, including each part of a drum kit. A simple four-piece band will easily need twenty-four or more tracks. That means twenty-four minutes of audio for each minute of a song.
Oops, I forgot music in movies, TV shows, video games and web videos.
So, it's not likely you'll get to sample everything. But, cheer up, chum! It's easier every day to find and learn about music. Most of the new music being made is available online, and easily found.
Some of the older ("back catalog") music is available, and there is progress to make it more available. There is work being done to find, restore, preserve and digitize endangered music. And artists are revisiting their archives to finally put out those unreleased gems. But it's a daunting task in need of consumer financial impetus. As more interest and dollars flow towards mining these collections, more will become available.
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Everyone can name their favorite artists, albums, and songs. But in reality you've only ever heard a tiny sliver of the vast musical world. You're just listening to the tip of the iceberg. There's much more out there that you'll love even more... once you hear it.
So dig deeper. Explore, listen, learn and share.
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Here are a few cool sites to dig into:
