sometimes I think too hard about like. how the ability to record audio fundamentally changed how humans interact with music. can you imagine if the only time you ever heard music in your whole life was when you or another human being in your actual physical presence decided to create it. and 99.99% of the time that person was not a professional but just like your wife or your dad or your co-worker or church choir singing or playing whatever they happened to know. i honestly don't think we can fathom it
The OP is correct -- but for everyone talking in the comments about how music wasn't ever heard outside of church, or how people might only hear music a couple times in their life, that's just not true (even JUST talking about Europe), and the truth is so much more amazing and exciting. Local pub sessions are an ancient human tradition, and we know this from discussion or representation in plays (Shakespeare's Henry IV), and paintings by people like Brouwer (1605-1638) and Jan Steen (1625-1656). We know that people sang as they worked all the time (think of sea shanties! They're a great way to coordinate and lighten the mood -- but it's not just sea shanties, Yankee Doodle started as a harvest song probably in 1400s Holland). Travelling AND local musicians were a thing. The late 1600s showed the rise of the music publishing industry so people could go home and play the things they'd heard out and about. John Dowland (1563-1626, possibly the world's most famous lute-player) even actively wrote music for market trends! Composers registered their music, and authorship bylines appeared on published music as early as the 1500s.
We have always had music. Singing and music is human condition. We have bone flutes dating back to 40,000 years ago. How many silly songs have we sang to our cats, with tunes we just made up or with words we add to melodies we've heard before? We have mythologies of the creation of music because it's such a constant in human society, and that's amazing. We just, to the OP's point, haven't always been able to hear everyone's music anywhere around the world, and doing so changes things compared to it being something associated with interacting directly with other people.
