Week 159: Griping About The New Fangled Way We Listen To Music

We were talking about how we store our music.

We currently have vinyl and CDs in several locations throughout the house. There is also a crate full of cassettes in one of the closets. There are several computers with almost, but not quite the same selection of MP3s in them. And several Ipods also with similar, but not exactly the same set of MP3s.

So if we want to listen to a particular album, we have to first think whether we have it on vinyl or on CD, then if it’s on CD, we have to try to remember whether we load it into the computer, or we can go check the various computers to see if its there. If its not in the computers, then we have to start going through the CDs. The CDs are stacked in batches of 100 inside reused blank CD cylinders, and there are about 10 of these, and they are not alphabetized, so it’s no fun to try to find a particular CD. The vinyl is also not alphabetized and spread out through various locations around the house, so if the album we want is on vinyl, then we best be prepared to spend a good 30 minutes looking for it, unless we get super lucky.

This is not my preferred arrangement. Certainly we would prefer to have a music room with all the vinyl, CDs, cassettes, 8-tracks and all the players needed to play these and a central computer which would hold all this material in MP3 form ready to download to any given portable device.

Sure that sounds really nice, but I don’t even have the room to put all the vinyl in one place, nor the time or memory space to upload all the CDs into one central computer. So the dream is out of reach.

The result though is greater than just making it difficult to find a given album.

In the days of yore, there was not much choice, your choice was to either turn on the radio and listen to whatever station you could find that you liked, or you could find a album (CD or vinyl) in your collection or maybe a mixed cassette and play that. If your music was in disarray, as ours currently is, you would then have to settle for something you could find, grab any album from the pile, but as soon as that was over, you’d have to reach for another one.

I don’t know about you, but back then my albums were always alphabetized and easy to reach, whether CDs or vinyl. Now, as much as I’d like to have them all alphabetized and easy to reach, there is not as much incentive. I have more music in any given computer or Ipod than I ever had on vinyl, and at the touch of my fingers I can find any of the albums that are on the computer of Ipod.

But like I said, not everything is in MP3. So if you think of a record, you might find that it’s not available at the tip of your fingers, but instead it’s in a closet. This happens enough times, you stop going there. In other words, I’ve started settling for what is readily available. And as we all know, few things are more readily available than the random setting on the mp3 player.

So the way we listen to music has changed, no big news there. And maybe one day I’ll get around to getting a dedicated music computer, like a stereo, and all my music will be alphabetized in the same room. I hold on to that thought, but I’m not certain that all that great vinyl is not going to just go by the wayside. You know when I used to put on a vinyl record, I would listen to, at least, one side of it. Unless it was unbearably bad. And I would listen to songs from beginning to end. I mean, I’m too lazy to get up every ten seconds to lift the turntable needle to the next song. But mp3s… if the song gets even slightly annoying at any given point, that skip button is just right there, I barely have to move. Just too easy.

Those difficult records that grow on you over time, require therefore that much more commitment to them, many just don’t make it.

So what then? Get rid of the mp3 player? But that Ipod is so nice and portable… And yeah, I could convert all that vinyl and all the CDs into mp3s but that doesn’t really solve the problem. Maybe it’s one of those pandora’s box things, once it’s out, can’t be put back in. It really puts a gloss over a lot of music, a lot of music. How does something stand out in this environment? I don’t know… but maybe music is no longer meant to be heard as individual songs, but as a mass of songs and compositions, large groups of tunes that only take their shape when heard as a group. So you would get something called Music Batch 35, and its 10,000 songs that when you hear them in any order or any section of it, it gives a particular effect, no matter what section of it you hear. The parts are equal to the whole, but only if the whole is present. Eh, I don’t know. But I am out of time.

See you next week when we’ll discuss, the secret music of the oceans.