You can bet I listened to every note and nuance on the records I bought.
I've always done that, whether it was on vinyl, tape, CD or MP3. I still do that. While I can hear, I'll always do that.
Nowadays people have archives of thousands of tracks--so many that I bet many of the tracks are rarely, if ever, listened to.
But isn't that ultimately the concern of the individual punter ? Why should anyone care whether or not someone else listens to all the music they have ? Lt Bob has 6000 vinyl albums. Assuming he sleeps 7 hours a night and none of his albums are doubles, he could listen to all of them once a year, provided he did
absolutely nothing else but listen to his albums.
So in reality many people with large record collections aren't going to be listening to them all the while either.
I used to feel that I should give everything in my collection an airing at least once a year. Then I thought, "stuff that !". Now, sometimes I'll focus on an album or even a song for 3, 5, 10 days at a time. Choice is king !
I use the word "tracks" deliberately.
I think one of the neat things about the MP3 revolution has been the ability to acquire singular songs that are not 'singles'. That has had both a positive and negative~lite effect. On the positive, I think of a band like Traffic whose stuff I
should like but in truth, I only like "Paper sun" and "Coloured rain". So I could buy those two tracks instead of having to buy the whole album that they were on.
On the negative~lite side, in the old days, I'd buy a whole album cheap in a second hand store because it had one song that I liked or was aware of and I'd buy it for that song. It was as cheap as buying a single, cheaper often. And I'd listen to the album just to see if there were any good songs on it. It was through that that I discovered superb albums like "Outlandos d'amour" and "Ghost in the machine" by the Police and "Changes one" and the immortal "Hunky Dory" by David Bowie.
Would classic albums of my youth--say Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road or Houses of the Holy--become classic in their own right or would people just cherry pick one or two tracks?
I think you'd get both. Crucial to the debate is the fact that popular recorded music's initial heyday was because of the single. Then the album began to dominate. 1968 was the first year in the US of A that sales of LPs overtook that of singles and coinciding with this was the album becoming an artistic medium on it's own terms and in it's own right.
So albums were
BIG. But they weren't that way for everyone. Loads of people still bought singles and TV programmes catered to singles and much radio catered to singles and even now, we often gauge older bands on the singles they released.
I think many artists today make albums but they also cater to those that may not want entire albums but they don't necessarilly want to release singles so it seems to me that the MP3/4 has enabled them to spread their scope. They've had to.
