My music taste has travelled along a similar trajectory to what I imagine a porn addict’s to be. I’ve consumed so much for so many years that not it’s hard for me to be buzzed as easily as in the past. In fact, to feel the stir I usually need to go looking in weird, hardcore valleys until I unearth something horridly brilliant like Death Grips or You Won’t Get What You Want by Daughters.
Why has this happened?
I blame Spotify…
Almost every piece of recorded audio that the world has ever produced is in my pocket. I still cannot fathom this fact. In my lifetime, we still had to buy CDs, or rely on radio. How many millions would you have had to spend to have a CD of all the music on Spotify? Now for around £10 a month there is almost everything you could possibly want. Yet from time to time, I am numbed uncomfortably by musical fatigue and meh over countless albums that artists have sunk months of work into.
I love music. It was always present in my life since I was young but my gateway moment to it becoming an obsession was listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band by the Beatles when I was 14 after I had got my head around the world of downloading music. From then on there was so much I wanted to hear and my parents’ CD collection wasn’t broad enough to satisfy my tastes. I wanted to gorge on Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums. I started to illicitly download music with the insatiable determination of an addict.
My friends used to ask me why I wasn’t playing Xbox with them. The truth was, I spent a substantial amount of time downloading music. Track by track. I would find the Wikipedia article for an album and sift through dodgy uploads of covers and fuzzy audio until I could stick the right tracks into my iTunes library, in which I would upload the right album artwork and format the titles With Correct Capitalisation Until It Looked Right.
My iTunes library became a symbol of pride. I had invested not money, but time into sculpting it as though it were my own record collection. I didn’t pay a penny for any of it, yet there was a sense of ownership. Every album had been researched, chosen, and built. Digitally but realistically.
Spotify mocks those hours of efforts. An army has carried out the same work as I did in my bedroom but on a giant scale. It’s remarkable that everything is accessible, though it is undeniably only accessible, the feeling of ownership is non existent. I don’t own any of these songs nor feel like they’re mine in any sense. I’m going to a friend’s house and borrowing their CDs, making sure to give them back when I’m done without food or fluid stains on them.
I’m not complaining, I don’t want to go back to BeeMP3 and its bouncing between 30 seconds or 30 minutes of download time. But I can’t reconcile how losing that feeling of owning something affects the way I feel about it. As dumb and arbitrary as feelings can sometimes be, they do have a say.
With Spotify, I don’t wait for new albums to come out any more. I casually flick through the new releases category -oh there’s a new Beach house album, maybe I’ll give it a go. It’s all mightaswell and ohthatscool.
Music has become so disposable I will sometimes hear and album and forget about it completely whether I enjoyed it or not. Or need 6 more listens to parse out each track from the rest. Or even hear an album multiple times but be unable to recall a single song. Then there is trying to store all the names of artists who manage to keep digging out new nouns to attach to ‘The…’ or have either absurdly common names or ridiculously complicated ones. Khruangbin? Nilüfer Yanya? Come on.
We can get used to anything us humans. What is available in seconds is incredible. Yet I don’t think I will be able to connect to music with as private an intensity as I could when there was some work and time involved in attaining it like when I walked to HMV on a rainy day after school to buy Noel Gallagher’s first High Flying Birds album after waiting for it for months. I bought it with my own money, walked home, soaking, put the CD on and savoured every track like it was a dish. A boring and mundane story to tell twenty years ago but one that now feels like a relic from a past era.
I was set off in an excited mood recently after stumbling across an article about De La Soul’s album 3 Feet High and Rising, maybe my favourite hip-hop album of all time. In the article, De La Soul announced that after a drawn-out conflict over music rights, the album would be steaming on Spotify soon.
I could have paid for it physically. I could have downloaded it in its entirety off a torrent site, I could have even just listened to the version that’s uploaded in full on YouTube. But there was something tantalising about being deprived of something at a time when so few things are.
Most likely, on the day that 3 Feet lands in my Spotify I will gush over it for a few hours before launching it on top of the pile of other stuff that I can barely appreciate having.
Maybe I should try S&M.
