"The golden age of infinite music"?

[alexclaber]

[url="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8330633.stm"]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8330633.stm[/url]

Discuss.

My main concern is that since my iPod broke and I returned to listening to the same CD over and over again in the car, I've found myself really getting into and appreciating new music because I was forced to give it enough plays to get it. Does infinite music mean music needs to be instantly gratifying?

Alex

[RussFM]

I'm the same, I usually leave the same CD on in the car for about a week and give it a proper listen. At home, it's usually the iPod, which is usually ripped from CD as I rarely buy MP3s (I don't like paying for something that could be deleted or lost to a dead harddrive).

In the office however, I love Last.fm, Spofity, We7... just for the random selections as background noise.

[wateroftyne]

music = packet of crisps.

nom nom nom nom

NEXT!

*sigh*

[steve]

interesting article, what I would love to come out of all this is an increase in the perceived value of live performance by musicians, the closure of all clubs and the public humiliation of all dj's (stocks and wet sponges would prolly suffice for this bit)

[Kiwi]

I'm pretty shallow in my musical appreciation generally but there are a few bits and pieces out there which are inspirational. I dunno, I don't think about it that deeply. Music is there to support whatever mood I'm in or want to be in.

[wotnwhy]

i'm a bit of an infinite music lover. my ipod (160GB) is full of music. most of which i haven't heard yet. so when i'm in the van i have it on shuffle so it's almost like radio. but when something good comes on. i can delve into it deeper.

despite this, i still find time to listen to one album several times in a week.

music is different things to different people. so this new trend will be a good thing to some, a bad thing to others.

[thunderbird13]

[quote name='wateroftyne' post='640799' date='Oct 30 2009, 10:00 AM']music = packet of crisps.

nom nom nom nom

NEXT!

*sigh*[/quote]

I agree but thats probably an age thing

[thisnameistaken]

I do like to listen to albums as albums, regardless of storage format. I still think of music in terms of albums - good album, bad album, skip that one, etc. I suppose it's because I'm old though.

Edited October 30, 2009 by thisnameistaken

[Stan_da_man]

I put some new music on my iPod a month ago from my CD's that all worked perfectly - the last week, the songs have been skipping a second or jumping back. I hate digital music. Or iPod's.

[Rich]

I come from the age of vinyl, like the author of that article -- when you went into town on Saturday afternoon with your few quid and scoured the record shops, coming home with 2,3, maybe 4 carefully selected albums. You put on an album, you listened to the whole thing, all the way through, carefully. Listened again. And again, if it really grabbed you. And again, if it was an instant classic. Back then I think I probably knew every lyric to every song on every album I owned, because music was very definitely finite and so we listened more carefully. Perhaps we even treasured it more?

[Mr. Foxen]

[quote name='alexclaber' post='640775' date='Oct 30 2009, 09:31 AM']Does infinite music mean music needs to be instantly gratifying?[/quote]

This has already happened. Thing about music is, some people like it and put the effort in, to make it and to like it. Doom-drone is never gonna be instandly gratifying, and is generally lots of effort to get through, still exisits though. Can't make money on it, but people still do it. Some music is dissociated with market forces, so can't be lumped together.

[Sonic_Groove]

[quote name='Rich' post='641060' date='Oct 30 2009, 01:22 PM']I come from the age of vinyl, like the author of that article -- when you went into town on Saturday afternoon with your few quid and scoured the record shops, coming home with 2,3, maybe 4 carefully selected albums. You put on an album, you listened to the whole thing, all the way through, carefully. Listened again. And again, if it really grabbed you. And again, if it was an instant classic. Back then I think I probably knew every lyric to every song on every album I owned, because music was very definitely finite and so we listened more carefully. Perhaps we even treasured it more?[/quote]

+1 to that -- And you got a 12" piece of art to go with it...

... and the girl behind the counter at RE-cords in Burton-on-Trent was gorgeous...

Yeah I'm old too!

Brendan

[alexclaber]

[quote name='Rich' post='641060' date='Oct 30 2009, 01:22 PM']I come from the age of vinyl, like the author of that article -- when you went into town on Saturday afternoon with your few quid and scoured the record shops, coming home with 2,3, maybe 4 carefully selected albums. You put on an album, you listened to the whole thing, all the way through, carefully. Listened again. And again, if it really grabbed you. And again, if it was an instant classic. Back then I think I probably knew every lyric to every song on every album I owned, because music was very definitely finite and so we listened more carefully. Perhaps we even treasured it more?[/quote]

I come from the CD era and it was just the same for me - you might make a copy of CDs onto cassette but you'd still buy the CD if you liked it because the sound quality was so much better. CDs, like vinyl before them, were expensive and I can clearly remember those early years when my CD collection was so small there was no option but to listen to the same things over and over again.

Then CD writers appeared, then MP3s and everything changed!

Alex

[Pissman]

I mainly just listen to CDs, there's something about listening to the whole thing through .. rather than just listening to odd songs here and there

[Mr. Foxen]

[quote name='Pissman' post='642047' date='Oct 31 2009, 05:50 PM']I mainly just listen to CDs, there's something about listening to the whole thing through .. rather than just listening to odd songs here and there[/quote]

You can download whole albums and stuff, wonders of technology. Real bands record one 35 minute track though.

[ahpook]

[quote name='thisnameistaken' post='641052' date='Oct 30 2009, 01:14 PM']I do like to listen to albums as albums, regardless of storage format. I still think of music in terms of albums - good album, bad album, skip that one, etc. I suppose it's because I'm old though. [/quote]

plus the one

i never shuffle music. to me an album's a whole - the musicians arranged it a certain way, and that's the way i like to hear it.

[silverfoxnik]

[quote name='Rich' post='641060' date='Oct 30 2009, 01:22 PM']I come from the age of vinyl, like the author of that article -- when you went into town on Saturday afternoon with your few quid and scoured the record shops, coming home with 2,3, maybe 4 carefully selected albums. You put on an album, you listened to the whole thing, all the way through, carefully. Listened again. And again, if it really grabbed you. And again, if it was an instant classic. Back then I think I probably knew every lyric to every song on every album I owned, because music was very definitely finite and so we listened more carefully. Perhaps we even treasured it more?[/quote]
+2 (or is that 3)

That was exactly my experience.. And i think because music was once so much harder to access, it was more treasured as a result IMO!

Going back to Alex's OP, he definitely has a point; there's just so much music on stream 24/7 now, either as a backdrop or soundtrack to something else, that it has somehow become devalued as a result. Part of that change has definitely been driven by technology and because we can use cool functions like 'shuffle', the idea of an album as a piece of art in it's own right has become almost meaningless.

That's not to say that it's all bad, just that the landscape has changed. My daughter who's 19 has grown up with the new technology and new formats and she loves music just as much as I did when i was her age..but she listens to it in a very different way.

[Paul S]

+3 (or 4)

For me quick sound bites aren't fulfilling unless from music that I am already intimately acquainted with. I'll play a new record over and over, warts and all. Most often the warts disappear and I get to appreciate aspects of the tracks that didn't initially appeal. I have a CD in the car at the moment by a surf band called The Razor Blades that, on first listen, I didn't really like - surf isn't a big thing for me generally. Now, having played it all the way through several times, I love it. More often than not music that appeals to me instantly is the stuff I get fed up with quickest and don't return to.

I think that is one aspect of playing in a covers band that is so appealing. I listen to music that I wouldn't have ordinarily listened to until I am really familiar with it and get to appreciate it more. Well, except for Mustang Sally.

[silverfoxnik]

[quote name='Paul S' post='642329' date='Nov 1 2009, 09:21 AM']I think that is one aspect of playing in a covers band that is so appealing. I listen to music that I wouldn't have ordinarily listened to until I am really familiar with it and get to appreciate it more. Well, except for Mustang Sally.[/quote]

+1

[Cat Burrito]

I remember holidays as a kid where I'd select 5 or 10 cassette albums and take those away. Probably around halfway through the car journey there I'd immediately realise I'd left an album I wished I'd taken. The Ipod really is a fantastic invention. I miss studying the sleeve and knowing who the studio engineer was (even though I didn't know what that actually meant at the time) but the freedom of going out now with 8,000 tunes taking up less space then 5 audio tapes far outweighs any slight changes in listening habits.

[BigRedX]

The great thing about iPods and the like is that you can listen to music how you want to. If you want to listen to the whole album from start to finish you can or if you just want a random selection of great tracks it's all easily possible. You can also easily remove the duff track(s) that might spoil your listening pleasure. Being able to chose means you can find out which tracks work best for you as part of an album and which are more enjoyable in isolation.

The older posters amongst us knew the albums of our youth so well because we didn't have many. Until I went to university I could afford an album a month at best. Selection for me in the 70s was limited to what was released in the UK by the major record labels, and then of those what WH Smiths and the tiny prog-rock-centric record shop in my home town stocked. If they didn't have it then it might as well not exist. I'm thankful for all the revolutions that have occurred in music production and distribution from the independent/DIY scene of the late 70s to low-run CDR releases and downloads of today. My choice is virtually unlimited and no longer constrained to what the UK record industry wants t sell me. Good times.

As for those who rattle on about the audio superiority of vinyl... The only reason vinyl is any good nowadays is because it has to compete with digital formats. The sorry excuses for pressings that anyone interested in non-mainstream releases had to put up with from the mid-70s to the late 80s are best left in the past. I wouldn't want to return to days of albums on vinyl only marginally thicker than a flexi-disc, whole boxes of records pressed off-centre, pops and clicks from the very first play and knowledge that no matter how careful you were at some point your favourite album was going to suffer damage that would render at least one track unplayable.