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What we lose in the gamification of music
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TPR: The Public's Radio
(Erika Goldring/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Mana | Getty Images North America)This essay first appeared in the NPR Music newsletter.
Did you hear the noise enveloping the pop music world last week?
What I think is most different about music-driven popular culture now — though not wholly unprecedented — is the gamification of everything.
No one has grasped better than Swift how music in the attention-deficit century requires a multi-media frame to keep people engaged.
Despite the fact that fans have always made music loving into a game, and that artists have historically engaged with that process in creative ways, the dominance of gamification within music is relatively new.