“LOOKS LIKE I’M GOING TO HAVE TO BUY THE WHITE ALBUM AGAIN”

It sometimes still seems very odd to me how much the world has changed in so short a space of time. Few things seem to be a better example of this than the way we buy music these days. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, musicians got together and made music. If they were very lucky, or just very good, they might get signed to a record label and get to release their music to a wider world than just the people who lived next door to the garage they practiced in, or the school or youth club or local pub that allowed them to play in public.

Their music might get released as a 7” single with an absurdly inappropriate “B” side, or they might just get to release an “album” of, on average, about 12 songs, six for each side, or about 1 track per inch of the vinyl they were pressed onto.

Glossary of terms used so far for those who might not be following this:

A 7” single (or seven inch single) was a plastic disc with grooves in it which caused a needle on an arm on a gramophone player to “pick up” the sound carved within the grooves and reveal music when the record was spun around at speeds of up to 45 revolutions per minute (RPM). Sometimes as many as two songs per side could be sold in this format, if it was an EP (Extended Play) but it was more usually just the one song per side, sometimes as long as a full five minutes. Other speeds like 16, 33 (and a third) or 78 were also possible, but for “singles”, 45 was the preferred revolution.

“They tell me that it’s institution, oh well, you know…”

The “B” side was a way of filling up the blank side of your hit single with some other nonsense that nobody really cared all that much about. Shrewd record label executives might sometimes release a “Double A” side to get more airplay, but shrewder ones still soon realised that releasing them separately made them a ton more money if the artists producing the music became “popular” and they might very well have a second “hit” in the “hit parade” and avoid the historical ignominy of being a “one hit wonder”.

Glossary of the glossary:

“Airplay” was getting your record played on the radio. A “record” was another term for the plastic or vinyl disc itself. Vinyl was the preferred term for the material the records were made of. The hit parade was… Oh, this is getting absurd, and I’m starting to feel very old. Look, this is just how we bought our music from record shops when I was a kid, okay?

What do you mean, “What’s a record shop?”

I suppose that buying records like that seemed exciting and modern and new to older generations when I was doing it. My parents and their contempories had lived through the birth of rock and roll and the coming of the age of popular (or “pop”) music and affordable personal record players and transistor radios replacing the juke box and the light programme as their chief source of music to listen to. Their parents might have bought their tunes as sheet music and played them on the piano down at the club or in their own living room, in much the same way as those young musicians in their garages did.

Formats seem to be changing at a ridiculously fast rate nowadays and it sometimes seems that almost as soon as these latest trendy, hip sounds have penetrated as far down the food chain as Lesser Blogfordshire to the point of me hearing about them, accepting that “this has got a good beat”, thinking that the song might indeed be “the most” (©David McCallum on “Juke Box Jury”  …and no, I still don’t know what he meant by it…) and deciding to buy it, it’s already been released on a format that I can no longer play on any of my equipment.

I’m not trying to say that I’m quite old enough to remember wax cylinders, but I am just old enough to remember the wind up gramophone rusting away in the basement and the stack of old 78s that sat upon it until it went off to the tip.

“Little Miss Bouncer, Loves an announcer, Down at the BBC…”

Nowadays its all downloads, uploads, streaming and bit rates, when all I want is a format that plays just as well in my car as it does on my old stereogram. Some new cars now don’t come with CD players, you know, but instead have tiny plugs for the kind of devices we might very well be mocking in a decade’s time, much like we did with the “8-Track” which will no doubt play havoc with my CD collection the next time I have to venture into the used car market.

I still miss having an old cassette player in my car. Oh, I know that your MP3s and your iPods mean that you can carry what used to be the sort of back-breaking quantity of music that only a wedding DJ used to cart around with him in a device the size of a postage stamp nowadays, but I kind of miss putting together the kinds of compilation tapes you used to do for parties or for people you just liked. Somehow, even that didn’t seem the same once we started “burning” tracks to CDs, but it did at least have the same idea going on, just with a bit of “random shuffle” to ruin your carefully honed running order (yet more evidence of “control freakery” there, I guess…). This modern thing that gets called “sharing” sometimes doesn’t seem to me to be much like sharing at all, just another in a long series of marketing exercises.

Concept albums seem to be a thing of the past when you can just pick and choose individual tracks to buy, but I still prefer to have an actual plastic disc in my hand, even though the plastic disc is so much smaller than even the singles I used to buy, rather than some enigmatic “cloud” of music out there somewhere, just waiting to be hacked and lost forever. Somehow I feel safe and secure in the knowledge that I have the hard solid disc in my hand, even though I know that discs do corrode with time, no matter what “Tomorrow’s World” might have promised, and that villains can’t break into your house and run off with your cloud.

“Hey, you… Get off of my cloud.”