How Neuromarketing Hijacked Culture and Killed Deep Art
Something has changed in the way we experience art, and I don’t think it has much to do with artists suddenly becoming less talented. For most of history, music, literature and theatre asked something from us; you had to give them time. A symphony could take forty minutes to reveal what it was really doing, while a novel might require fifty pages before its world began to live inside you. Even a melody depended on memory, you heard something, carried it with you for a while, and only later understood why it mattered.
Today, almost everything around us is moving in the opposite direction and our attention has become enormously valuable. Social media platforms, streaming services and advertisers compete for it every second, and they have become remarkably good at learning what makes us stop, click, watch and come back for more. Neuromarketing has pushed this even further, using tools such as EEG, eye tracking and, in research settings, fMRI to study reactions that people themselves may not even be able to describe. The result is a cultural environment increasingly built around immediate reward. This is where dopamine enters the picture, although the popular expression “dopamine hit” simplifies a much more complicated biological system. What matters for our purposes is the mechanism of anticipation, novelty and reward. Give the brain something new, then something else, then something else again. Don’t allow enough silence for boredom to appear, because the next stimulus is always waiting.
It works wonderfully for selling things but I am far less convinced that it works wonderfully for art. Think about music, a real melodic narrative needs time, a phrase establishes an idea while another phrase answers it. Something remains unresolved. We remember what happened several minutes earlier and recognise it when it returns in a different form. Tension accumulates and eventually means something precisely because gratification was postponed. But postponement is exactly what today’s attention economy dislikes. Much contemporary music therefore seems to me increasingly designed as an environment rather than a journey. Pads, loops, repeating arpeggios, enormous cinematic textures, carefully manufactured sounds — often technically beautiful, sometimes genuinely impressive can create an immediate atmosphere without asking very much from the listener. The sound itself becomes the event.
I sometimes think of it as a musical wallpaper. Very expensive wallpaper, perhaps, produced with extraordinary technology, but wallpaper nevertheless. This is not an argument against technology, I use technology constantly in my own music, modern sample libraries, digital notation, audio processing and virtual instruments give a composer possibilities that would have seemed almost miraculous a few decades ago. The problem begins when technology stops serving the musical idea and the musical idea begins serving the mechanism of consumption. The same thing is happening outside music, videos become shorter, headlines become more provocative, interfaces eliminate every possible moment of friction. Everything must be immediately understandable, immediately attractive and immediately rewarding. This, however, prevents you from creating music that truly unfolds over time, music that allows you to experience it, to live with it as it gradually builds in intensity toward a climax. The point is to inhabit the music as it moves through time. J.S. Bach certainly did not compose his music while wondering whether somebody might swipe to the next cantata after eight seconds. Great works ask us to remain with something long enough for it to change us.
Perhaps that is why writing complex music today can feel strangely rebellious. To spend weeks constructing a twenty-minute orchestral movement is absurdly inefficient by the standards of the modern content economy. To develop a motif patiently instead of producing an immediate climax is inefficient and to expect somebody to listen twice is almost an act of defiance. Perhaps that is exactly the point, I don’t want art to become more efficient and I don’t want every difficult corner polished away until nothing can disturb us. Art should occasionally demand patience, concentration and even a little discomfort. It should leave something behind after the immediate sensation has disappeared. Algorithms are extraordinarily good at discovering what makes us click again, but the more interesting question for an artist is still the older one. What makes us remember?