HOW VERY “MODERN”

A colleague told me the other day that they had downloaded “a couple of tracks” from an album they liked and, as is the nature of all things mildly bewildering in this exciting world of (y)ours, this caused me to start thinking (and perhaps pontificating just a little bit...) about the differences between how previous generations used to buy things and how these things are done in this big and brave new world we’re all shuffling along through as best we can.

Because, how we buy music nowadays is very different to the way it was when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, and that way was, of course (because of developments in the creation of vinyl in the 1950s), just as different to the generation before it. The world does not stand still (no matter how much some of us way want it to...) and things change, and those changed things are perfectly “normal” to those who grow up with them as the “status quo” as our old ways were to us.

We must adapt or die, even though it sometimes seems bewildering to the next generation of knee-high grasshopper botherers that we ever managed to survive at all without a telephone in our mitts at every given moment, the entire history of popular music in our pockets, and the opportunity to only play games after weeks of planning to get enough people to play it, hours spent hunting around for the missing pieces, and a PhD in reading the instructions.

“In my day” (and oh, how I hate to have become someone who uses phrases like that one…) you listened to an L.P. in the order it was intended and you bought the whole thing, and the only to most radical of individuals would go about playing side “B” before they had already played side “A” and those who merely played a single track off an L.P. usually did so because they were making a living by doing so, or were busily putting a “compilation tape” together so that they could inflict a “running order” of their own choosing upon somebody else.

Musicians who managed to get to the almost “giddying heights” of their career that they got themselves a “record deal” would spend week and months and sometimes even years honing their tunes and carefully creating a “track listing” for their “album” that was supposed to carefully thought out in terms off precisely what went where and which track blended most effectively with the ones both before and after it.

Some would even go as far as to release the almost ridiculous sounding “concept album” which would try and tell a musical “story” across its perhaps “epic” seeming forty-minute running time. I think that might be, in part at least, why the surviving members of “The Beatles” were, for such a long time anyway, resistant to their records becoming available as downloads. Their notion that the track running order of the concept album was rather sacrosanct and that a masterpiece like “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is rarely improved by listening the tracks in the wrong order, no matter how wonderful (or not) you might think that the two minutes of “Eleanor Rigby” is...

After all, that’s what singles were for...

Nowadays you can pick and choose the tracks and the running order and musicians have to try a lot harder to put together enough tracks that they can only hope will all appeal to the fickle public and which might just mean that those “eccentric” little pieces, those “experimental” or “off the wall” pieces of music might just die on the vine instead of having the chance to “grow on you...”

I tend to think that it was having the “shuffle”  option on CD players that started it and, to an old style music listener like me, I’d be the first to admit that it was refreshing to be able to listen to certain albums that I’d possibly tired of in a new, original and exciting way. Later on, this option would, of course be available on devices that contained a large number of different albums so that you were able to not only change the running order of that old “greatest hits” album, but just get to hear random tracks from records that you might not otherwise have considered listening to, and which might sometimes mean that you hear tracks you might normally avoid.

Sometimes those tracks will take you completely by surprise, but they can only really do that if they’re there in the first place, of course. If you’d not chosen to download them in the first place, you wouldn’t have that option and this is where the whole concept of creating an album now starts to fall apart for modern era musicians. You can no longer rely on the fact that you might have some kind of “vision” if there’s only one track on your album that anyone likes or buys. Everything has to be an “instant classic” otherwise it might never get heard at all, and the notion of the “concept album” has to be very strong if you’re hoping that the public will download the entire thing, strangely weird and wonderful tracks like “When the Tigers Broke Free” and all.

I am after all, like many people I suspect, a hopeless “track skipper” myself. Even if I love every track on a “greatest hits” C.D. I will still find that I “might not be in the mood” for, or “can’t actually be bothered to listen” to certain tracks, and I’m a bit of an old traditionalist, so what hope is there if you’re trying to appeal to a music buying generation who will decide to buy their tracks based upon what they hear on the radio, what their friends tell them is good, what they just happen to find on the internet or based on a ten second sample on a music downloading site...?

Strange times, but probably not as strange as the way that music is sold to us in ten years time might seem to us...