Buying Music Stimulates Our Brains

It turns out that there's a little more to buying music that was previously thought. A new study at McGill University has found that buying (or liking/sharing) a song is almost as good as hearing it for the first time, as far as the brain is concerned.

It turns out that the reward center of the brain is stimulated when we purchase music, and the amount of activity there even corresponds to how much we paid for it. In fact, researchers can even predict the likelihood of purchasing by the amount of activity in that part of the brain.

The interesting thing is that this also closely corresponds to other basic needs and rewards in this brain center, like eating and sex.

If we were to look at this another way though, the study confirms a theory that music is something that we need. Some might argue that life would go on perfectly well without it, and perhaps that's true on some level, but the fact of the matter is that our lives are much more pleasurable when we have music available.

That's also one of the reasons that people will continue to purchase music, even as streaming becomes more and more ubiquitous. We'll buy music because it makes us feel good to support an artist we enjoy, or to have a collectable that reminds us of a time or place. We may buy less of it, but we will buy it. Because it feels good.

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