One of the fundamental paradoxes of contemporary culture is that musical art has never been more accessible and yet never more deprived of symbolic weight. Sound production today is massive, but music’s capacity to structure collective experience appears increasingly diminished. This shift is not primarily technological, but rather anthropological.

Traditionally, music functioned as an initiatory practice. To become a composer, musician, or performer meant to pass through a regime of discipline, transmission, and the internalization of cultural memory. The master, the repertoire, and the community were not merely pedagogical frameworks but mechanisms through which the individual was formed, educated, and cultivated.

In the contemporary era, we are surrounded by sound but rarely touched by it. As a result, music has become omnipresent and therefore almost invisible. What is today called “democratization” is in fact a much deeper transformation. Music has been displaced from the space of initiation into that of domestic intimacy. It increasingly functions like home-cooked food—warm, predictable, comforting, and relatively easy to prepare. Historically, however, music was not a language of comfort but one of transformation. To become a musician meant to enter a discipline, a tradition that imposed rigor, demands, failure, and sometimes humiliation. It was a process of forming the self, not of expressing it.

Today, this kind of trajectory is perceived as suspect. Contemporary culture favors rapid access, immediate expression, and instant validation. The master is replaced by the platform, apprenticeship by the tutorial, and the silence required for formation by a continuous stream of content. The consequence is not freedom but a form of sonic flatness. From this perspective, what is often described as democratization is in fact the domestication of a practice that was historically dangerous and socially transformative. Music no longer destabilizes, no longer demands, no longer requires transformation. It becomes a medium of emotional comfort—excessive in quantity but shallow in depth. Music turns into a personal emotional object rather than a force that structures collective sensibility.

In this context, the artist whose formation demands time, discipline, and concentration becomes an uncomfortable figure. Culture prefers the adaptable creator—constantly present, easily recognizable. Identity comes to matter more than competence, and visibility more than truth. Music does not disappear. What really does disappear is the idea that music ought to change us. When art is no longer a trial but a comfort, it ceases to be a tool of becoming. What remains is only a sound that accompanies us—pleasant, familiar, but incapable of pulling us out of ourselves. Just like a mother’s home cooking—and this is precisely where the decisive rupture occurs.

When music stops being a trial of transformation and becomes merely an affective background of private life, it loses its function as a symbolic institution. There is no longer a “beyond” of sound that calls one forward, no alterity that forces self-transcendence. Everything folds back onto the already-given subject. Music no longer shapes the human being—the human being reshapes music according to his own limits.

This domestication also has economic and political consequences. If music is no longer a space of formation, it no longer justifies public investment as a cultural good. The state no longer sees why it should fund something that functions as a private hobby or personalized entertainment. Instead, cultural entrepreneurship is encouraged, much as in the Renaissance, when jongleurs and troubadours lived from their own visibility rather than from a symbolic mission. The artist becomes a provider of experiences rather than a bearer of memory.

Yet this analogy with the Renaissance is misleading. Then, the wandering performer moved within a world in which the sacred, the community, and tradition were still alive. Today, he moves through a symbolic desert in which the only real currency is attention. When music turns into “content,” it enters the same circuit of consumption as any other stimulus. What matters is no longer what it says, but how quickly it can be digested.

What is ultimately lost is not music itself, but its civilizational function. A culture that turns art into background and the artist into a comfort provider relinquishes one of its few remaining mechanisms of self-correction and depth. Music was never meant to soothe us; it was meant to dislodge us from inertia, confront us with our limits, and reorganize our sensibility. Once we fully domesticate it—make it accessible, constant, risk-free—we strip it of its initiatory power. And a society without rites of initiation, without practices of difficulty and transcendence, becomes a society that no longer knows how to produce meaning, only how to consume emotions. Perhaps the true crisis of contemporary music is not aesthetic but moral: we have forgotten that art does not exist to confirm us, but to transform us. And where transformation disappears, all that remains is the comfortable noise of a world that listens to itself but no longer truly hears.

In a world where nothing is allowed to wound us, discipline us, or transform us, art comes to be loved precisely because it demands nothing and merely confirms us. This may be the supreme paradox of our age… we have more music than ever before, yet fewer and fewer chances for it to truly change us.