How We Listen to Music

December 2022 / January 2023

By Jessica McKenna-Ratjen

Humans have been making music for thousands of years. Scientists have found animal bone flutes that were carved by early humans 60,000 years ago! But it wasn’t until 1877 that music could be recorded and played back with Thomas Edison’s invention called a phonograph. This device played music using rotating cylinders etched with tiny bumps.

Each cylinder of the phonograph could play only one song. But later music players—like record players in the 1930s and CD players in the 1980s—could play multiple songs again and again. In 2001, MP3 players first allowed users to play music digitally. People could download libraries of hundreds of songs and play them all from the same device.

Nowadays most people listen to music through streaming apps that have millions of songs to choose from. The line plot on the right shows typical monthly subscription fees for music streaming apps in 2022.

Line Plots

Line Plots, also called dot plots, are a type of visual display. They show the frequency of data, or how often each value occurs, in a data set. Line plots display data using dots, X’s, or other symbols on a number line. The number line includes every data point in the data set. The number of symbols plotted above each value indicates how many times that value occurs in the set. The line plot below shows the frequency of monthly subscription fees among popular music streaming services in the spring of 2022.