The ‘celestial jukebox’ is here. Well, almost. The term- coined by Stanford professor of copyright law, Paul Goldstein, in 1994- is commonly used to refer to streaming services that allow us to access inconceivable amounts of music at the click of a mouse.

The ‘jukebox’ is still in its fragmented form, before the market is monopolised by one company and so finding music inevitably involves trawling through various sites in the hope of finding the album you were looking for. ‘Celestial’ probably has more in common with the squabbling Olympian Pantheon than the centralised omnipotence of the Abrahamic God.

‘Jukebox’ is also misleading, as modern conceptions of streaming have embraced other media, something that could have profound implications on how we engage with music. Listening to music online takes away an important part of the ritual that we have so valued in our interactions with music. Music has lost its place in the heavens to become part of a fluid entertainment landscape.

In February 2013, Billboard’s flagship ‘Hot 100’ chart began to include YouTube views in their calculations. Digital streaming was included on the charts as far back as 2007 and so it is unsurprising that Google’s video service would add to the count. Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month. A large proportion of that is musical, and Google Video must be the most important source of online musical access.

Will this meanthat popular music becomes a tedious soundtrack stuck onto videos produced to create publicity for themselves? When MTV arrived in 1981, video supposedly ‘killed the radio star’ and so debates over video’s role aren’t new. The music video has become an important aspect of music’s culture and its commerce, but it is worth noting that it was initially designed as a promotional tool for albums and singles.

When YouTube views can take songs to the top of the charts, it comes as no surprise that since February we have had so many video-related controversies (think Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus). One of the principle methods of valuing music’s importance, the charts, have now declared that music is not something purchased but rather something accessed.

Our interactions with art are rooted in value and so when music is streamed rather than bought, our relationship with it changes. We value it based on use rather than exchange value. We have valued music so much in the West for hundreds of years because it tells us something about ourselves through our submission to it.

Like religion, music survives when hidden just out of human understanding. C.S. Lewis described this value system in his An Experiment in Criticism when he wrote that to truly appreciate art you must “lay yourself open to what it… can do to you” instead of how you can make use of it.

The end of music’s commodification has been heralded as a post-modern utopia, in which endless remixes can be accessed at all times, shattering antiquated notions of the musical work as static and unchanging.

On the other hand, we can see the change in music’s role within the media landscape as something that gives us too much control. We lose our sense of relationship with music. 

When we pay musicians (albeit indirectly) for their work, we become the paymaster. But we cannot escape the feeling that when we attribute value to something we also submit to its authority as something to be cherished. This creates a dialogue in which the work has a voice.

The British journalist Pete Paphides recently discussed this submission in an article on why we should buy Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories on vinyl before criticising it. He notes that “if you’re wedded to a format that sets you back approximately £20 an album, it stands… that you’ll work harder to justify the purchase.”

Without the anticipation and fear of buying an album that you have never heard before, it can be easy to be dismissive before ever engaging with it. If I just listen to something on Spotify, I almost always forget what it is called and the tracks blur into one another. Instead of using a celestial jukebox, streaming services can too often be like surfing a silicon junkyard.

We listen because we can but we don’t recognise that every time we listen to a piece of music we will have a different reaction; every time we can hear more. Like anything in life, there is more value in listening to a few things that you care about than trying to listen to everything just because you can.

Record companies and artists need to create innovative models of distribution that place the music first, and don’t just tell everyone what I’m listening to on Facebook. The words freedom and choice are strewn like marketing confetti over every new platform but we should all be wary when we are told we are getting what we want.

Our connectivity provides incredible access that has made so many of us pluralists in our taste but too often we are left without the time to create a relationship with music. At the moment our best chance to hear the divine is still firmly rooted in the material.