The rise of digital music and streaming has many crimes to answer for. Like a hardened assassin, it does what it has to and gets better at it all the time, seemingly unaware of the musicians and fans left in its wake. The latest victim, and perhaps the most depressing when it comes to the slow but steady bludgeoning of creativity within the field, is the album. Though fans cleave to it as a format, producers, presenters and industry pen-pushers know the writing is on the wall. Lana Del Rey’s latest topped the UK charts with only 48,000 in first-week sales under her belt.
I love a good album. I like consuming music in the way that someone who knows more about it intended me to. From the order of the songs to the colour of the artwork to whether they want me to be able to do the sing-along-a lyrics thing by including them in the booklet. (Thumbs up if they have.)
Then again, I’m quite lazy and I like being instantly gratified. Having been shown a way of life in which you don’t have to listen to the three minutes of feedback whine to get to the good bits, which doesn’t include the terribly earnest spoken-word intro, I’m loth to look back. With a digital playlist, which is what experts say has well and truly nailed shut the coffin of the album, you are in charge. You pick the order; you decide exactly how much dross is in there.
There is plenty of mourning to be done, that’s for sure. Not only for the albums never made nor even the ones recently not paid enough attention to, but also for how this affects music itself. Before digital took over, artists could put out an album and release any number of brilliant singles from it. Now, given the turnover, they’re duty-bound to do one a year, release all the singles practically a week apart before we tire of them and pad them out with terrible fillers. Nobody wins here.
But there’s something delicious about creating a playlist made up solely of songs that you love pulled from diverse sources. Where funky house rubs shoulders with metal and Bryan Ferry winces in the background – or he would, if he knew the company he was keeping.
I was the sort of didact who made a lot of mixtapes as a teenager. I gave them out to nearly everyone because I believed I had a talent for putting songs next to each other. I still believe that, if I’m honest. But I also had a lot more time on my hands.
Now everyone has that talent, or the opportunity at least. But playlists risk making everyone either highly specific or woefully generic. You load songs onto a playlist with the precision of a brain surgeon, everything packed in just so, or you whack them all in using copy and paste because you need something for the gym. Neither promotes an enjoyment of music in the old sense, nor does it foster a sense of community between fans.
And it doesn’t make us nice either, all this want-it-now, my-way-or-the-highway grabbiness that characterises our contemporary listening habits. I once read that changing the music at a party was a symptom of extreme narcissism.
And I saw as much the other weekend when I DJ-ed at a wedding from a playlist the happy couple had helped me build. Every time I tried to get a drink, someone snuck in and put on something they loved but no-one else had heard of. By the end, my boyfriend and I were practically tackling people to the floor before they could reach the sound system.
Before you ask, the problem was not with my playlist. My playlist was brilliant.