First, let me just say....I love Spotify. It changes everything. I know there have been other companies who have tried the same thing, Rhapsody, Microsoft's own ZunePass.. but these companies all seemed to be in the iTunes business. They were music stores that let you listen to what you liked, but much of the focus was still on the purchasing of tracks to keep. Loading your MP3 player.
Spotify, as it is structured right now in the US, is simply a Cloud based music collection. Access to 15 million tracks in a decent interface, Ad supported (Pandora's popularity proved this works well enough), and offering a couple of improved pay services.
I have a feeling this is the way everyone will soon consume music. If Google Music ever gets out of Beta, much of people's collections will migrate to the cloud, and off their gadget's hard drives. Amazon has already opened up a service for this, and Apple's iCloud is also trying to cash in.
Of course, there will always be folks who have to physically have their collection, even if that means it is just sitting on drives around their house. Hell, I have somewhere north of a Terabyte of music around the house. Honestly, I welcome a service that will sort and catalogue millions of tracks for me.It is't an easy job, and at a certain point takes the fun out of things. This switch isn't going to happen overnight, but all the signs are there.
Soon all media will be streamed, on demand, from server farms we never see. We will pay to access collections it would take us decades to amass. Look at it this way: if an average album contains 12 tracks, Spotify offers 1.25 million albums (and counting) for your listening pleasure. Sure, they don't have the Beatles, or Zeppelin, or even Tool; but seriously, do you not have these albums already?
As much as this sea change excites me, there are aspects of it that I really hate to see. This direct access to all could change the core format of music: the album.
It has been coming for a while. iTunes was a serious wound to the album, with easy downloads to all the popular music, iPods everywhere filled with favorite songs formed into playlists. Tradition is hard to break, though. The album seems to have weathered that. We still buy music in album containers, because that is how artists release them. Can it weather a world where we do not buy the music, though?
Really, that is mostly academic. What happens will happen, and the market and listener's tastes will decide in the end. What saddens me the most is the inevitable end of the Deep Cut.
At one time, we bought an album, invested some amount of time and money in the purchase, and wringed all the enjoyment we could out of it. We put the album on and listened to every track. We gave songs that didn't strike our fancy at first listen time to make places of their own in our head. After a while, many of these tracks became my very favorites, the radio singles my least liked.
Maybe it was the way we listened. With vinyl, you put the record on, and only got up to flip it over. Sure, with a little effort, you could skip straight to the track you wanted, but this was a rare occurrence. One side might have gotten more play than the other, but it wasn't too terribly common to play a single track from one album, then a single track from another album, repeated throughout your evening. Hell, that is so troublesome we pay people to do it for us at parties. With vinyl, the easiest thing to do was just listen to the album.
Cassettes were pretty similar. Advancements in technology gave us some players that would flip to side B for us automatically, and more control over picking out single tracks, but still, the easiest way to listen was an album at a time. Cassettes gave us blank media, though. Blank media was a game changer. It brought that exalted ancestor of the playlist, the Mixtape. With a mixtape, we were our own Disc Jockeys. With a little effort, we could arrange things however we wanted. It was a harbinger of things to come.
Compact Discs were the first real blow to deep cuts. With simple (and just as importantly, accurate) one button track skipping, we could easily redact a song from the album, like it was never there, as long as we had the remote handy.
Certain songs had less of a chance to sneak into our heads. Some tracks were now less likely for us to ever get to know them. Still, we bought albums, and many of us listened to them from beginning to end (no flipping sides!) because we just shelled out $15 or $20 and we were going to get our money's worth. Some of us listened to the whole thing out of habit. We listened to the whole record when it was records, the whole tape when it was tapes, and the whole CD now that it was Discs. Habits are hard to break. The jewel case was like a record sleeve with a better spine, and they looked so good there all lined up on the shelf. In our hearts, the album was still king.
Mp3s and the digital revolution was the big shift. No container, no jewel case. The album now was just an idea. A comfortable way for us to relate to how artists released their work, and a convenient form for record companies to release it. Sure, they still sell CDs (I think...), but when was the last time you spent an hour browsing the racks at a record store? I can't even think of a store dedicated to selling compact discs within a half hour's drive from here. When was the last time you saw someone with a portable compact disc player on their side? The mass of music has gone completely digital, and we have to live with all the good and bad that brings.
The question now is, how long does the album persist? How long until musicians are putting out 3 or 4 new tracks every four to six months, rather than an album every year or two? Even with the album, or at least the idea of the album, still with us, how many of us listen to whole albums, beginning to end? With all that music right at our fingertips, it is a great temptation to skim the cream right off the top. Songs that don't catch our fancy right away are likely to never get another listen. Why would they? It isn't like we are stuck with them, property that is our responsibility to get to know. There are tens of millions of other tracks just waiting for a click of the mouse or flick of the finger for their turn at us. And what is wrong with that, you ask? Maybe nothing.
It scares me though. My musical tastes have been acquired. I did not only listen to what I liked. I found artists who did things I liked, and let them show me other things. I did not take to much of this "other" at first, but trusting the artist, I kept at it. Eventually, I came to understand a little more of what was going on with these songs that I didn't originally care for...whose melody didn't match the beat properly, or was too slow and melancholy, or too fast and frenetic. Eventually I came to like this stuff, and was grateful for the artist including it. My horizons broadened. My tastes developed. Many of my very favorite songs take a few listens to initially get comfortable with.
How often will this happen if we have no real reason to give a song a second chance, much less a third and fourth?
It is possible that I am worried over nothing; that music will keep growing and evolving like it always has, even benefiting from being free of that prison called the album, that music was never meant to be sorted into boxes, that each song is a jewel meant to stand on its own, judged for its own particular sparkle and clarity. Maybe so. Change is good, right? I guess we will have to wait and see.
My best wishes to Spotify. I like the service, and will continue to use it. For now though, I will keep listening to albums, those convenient little meals of music, looking for morsels I have never tried before. For me, nothing has really changed except who is serving it up. Oh, and the menu. The menu has gotten so much bigger.
1 comment:
Well said...
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