What Are the “Benefits” of Music?

I am currently reading the wonderful The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman. It is full of clear rules and principles of business from product, value and marketing to sales and finance. It is designed as an alternative (alongside real-world experience) to the lifelong debt that is business school. Quite brilliant and revolutionary.

As a musician, I find myself wondering about how the so-called “Core Human Drives” apply to music. The Core Human Drives are basically what people want and why they take the actions that they do. Any product or service that hopes to communicate effectively with its customers had better understand their motivations.

Kaufman references powerful marketing campaigns like the iPod’s “1,000 songs in your pocket.” The campaign was successful because it highlighted the benefits of owning an iPod. Namely that you could carry way more music with you than if you use a tape or CD player. The opposite would be to highlight the features, like a touch screen or 32GB. Features are cool, but they are too cerebral and they don’t communicate as powerfully as benefits. Sadly, far too many people and businesses focus on features instead of benefits. Which of course got me thinking.

What are the benefits of music? It is easy to talk about virtuosity, cleverness, production value, even beauty when we discuss music. But those are features. What are the benefits? I go back and forth between believing that music is entertainment (and therefore dispensable) and believing it is fundamental to human understanding of existence (read this speech and you will never think about music the same way again).

Why do people listen to music? My closest guess, referring back to the Core Human Drives, is The Drive to Learn coupled with The Drive to Feel. And music concerts certainly fall into The Drive to Bond category. Does that mean that we should market concerts as “a great place to meet people”?

As a bit of an existentialist, I can’t help but think there is also a more ethereal drive, like The Drive to Understand Why We Are Here. Does music help with this? It certainly informs my need to create music, because I feel more at peace when I am writing and playing music. Perhaps it doesn’t tell me why I am here, but it makes me truly happy for awhile. Do other people feel this unrest?