THE NEW MUSICAL BOX

MUSIC - AS EASY AS  ABC?

The trend started 30 years ago with the introduction of the Sony Walkman - and today, it is spelling the death knell for the traditional album. It has become all-pervasive and everyone from BBC radio to Amazon to iTunes is pushing it like there's no tomorrow.

What is this LP-slaying, paradigm-shifting and clearly popular piece of cultural change when it's at home then?

Playlists.

The simple compilation of disparate songs into a chosen sequence to suit the consumer. 

They've been around for many years, of course, stretching back to the early days of popular music on the BBC Light Programme. Controllers created a playlist of songs from which presenters could select, happy in the knowledge that they would all be safe, inoffensive and ideal for day-time airplay. The BBC determined what was on the playlist and this had the effect of record pluggers and labels all trying to get their latest product play-listed. It was a perfect circle for them, but perhaps not so exciting for increasingly sophisticated listeners. The launch of the compact audio cassette transferred the sequencing power into the hands of the music fan. Cassette recorders became de rigeur in the 70s and the turn of that decade saw the rise of the mix-tape. Sony's Walkman completed the power-shift by making the mix-tape and playback completely portable - you could take your music anywhere - jogging, to the gym, on the bus or train - whatever took your fancy.

Vinyl LPs - Alphabetical?

Personal playlists still depended upon source material, what tracks you had on your vinyl LPs and singles - how easy they were to source and record - and this process could be fraught with challenges. Scratches and jumps on your vinyl transferred themselves in all their glory to your tape. Then you actually had to find your chosen track in the first place. No instantly searchable on-line database in those days. Did you keep your albums in proper alphabetical order? By artist or genre? Or did you keep them in a haphazard pile between the bookcase and your record deck? Were the correct LPs restored to the correct sleeves after use? Did they get left on turntables - or out in the sun near a window to warp into all manner of bizarre shapes, none of which were remotely playable?

And assuming you did find what you wanted, the whole taping-experience was a challenge. Timing pieces to fit into the 45 minutes per side of a C90 cassette. Cursing that tapes stretched, or crinkled  - or occasionally reversed themselves. Or broke after a few plays, necessitating emergency repairs which then introduced slight bumps or gaps or distorted sounds at crucial points in your favourite song. It was a taxing process - and not one for the faint-hearted.

CDs - More compact, less space - Alphabetical?

But - power was with the music fan and although the mere act of recording from an album or single was illegal ("but everybody does it"), the floodgates had opened. CDs took matters a stage further with improved fidelity - and then the launch of home PCs and then in time, CD burners, recordable and rewritable CDs and the process became even more straight forward. Playlists abounded and music fans became more discerning about what songs they actually wanted. If only these pesky albums didn't have "filler" tracks, if only there was some way of buying just what you wanted and then using the tracks in whatever sequence you liked.

Enter iTunes from Apple.

Napster - At one time - it would have been
bigger than iTunes

Here was a store, a store bursting with all manner of songs and crucially, you could buy them on-line 24 hours a day. The downside was cost - and that sneaky little thing DRM - Digital Rights Management which prevented you from copying the download to anything other than an Apple product such as the iPod. Pirate sites like Napster sprang up and for a while, there was a delightful anarchy for the consumer if not the record companies and  artists who lost out on income. Piracy was a short-lived phenomenon and Apple and other download sites realised that to make profits, fans needed to be able to play their purchases on the device of their choice. DRM was consigned to the bin, pricing structures were altered and iTunes even permitted songs to be converted to MP3 format and copied onto CDs, PCs, Memory Sticks, Smartphones, Tablets and a myriad of other devices. What a revolution that has been in the past few years.  

Lana Del Rey - 2014 album straight in at #1 in the UK
Album Charts - and yet in its first week,
barely 48,000 copies sold.

Cherry-picking from albums became the order of the day - and although download sales increased, hard-copy album sales started an inexorable down-turn. Charts contain results from both hard-copy and download, but with fewer physical albums being sold - and download albums not replacing them (most fans picked songs rather than a whole album) - it now makes quite a mockery of the UK Albums chart. One of the most recent releases to go straight to number one on release was the third album from Lana Del Rey "Ultraviolence". It's a good album, thoroughly deserving of this accolade - and yet sold less than 50,000 copies in its first week of release. In the 70s and 80s, that would have barely registered and it might have scraped into the lower reaches of the top 40. 

So Playlists - cherry-picked songs from download  sites - have become ubiquitous. But, as I noted recently, downloads themselves are under threat from Streaming Sites like Spotify where it is even easier to create a playlist. Just pay your £10 or so monthly fee - and anything that the service has is yours if you so desire. Playlists no longer sit on your own device, but are stored in the cloud or with the streaming site. Keep paying your monthly fee and all those playlists and all those new songs still to be enjoyed are yours. No wonder album sales are rushing headlong down the river to the waterfalls of doom.

BBC Playlister

Radio too is getting into Playlists as clearly, we still hear and learn about new music from our favourite radio stations. What if there was a way to bookmark songs as you hear them - and then create your own playlist as you go along? That's just what the BBC's Playlister facility does - and I must admit, I am a keen user. If you listen on-line, as a song plays, an option appear to playlist it. Just click - and the task is done. It applies across the BBC's national stations - and your playlist builds up and is held on your own BBC Playlist account. Not every song is available, but the vast majority are. And when you playback, you have the option of listening to them via (for example) Spotify or iTunes - with whom the BBC has reached various "accommodations".

One of many Music Databases available

With the array of database formats available on-line, you can also store, download and upload all manner of music to a single database, instantly searchable  - and thus never again will you suffer from mislaid songs, album sleeves, warped vinyl and stretched tapes. Some of them allow album artwork, artist profiles and even let you rate each song so that your top choices are easily found. As a radio DJ, I'd be lost without my musical database - but, there is still no subsititute in terms of aesthetics to having racks and shelves stuffed full of LPs, CDs and so forth. But then I am a bloke - and blokes are supposed to alphabeticise and categorise everything which (in theory) makes it easy to find stuff. But much as I enjoy my music collection, even I find that it's the database and the digital versions of songs that I go to first.

I still buy albums though. Duff tracks and all because, as I find, what I didn't like at first, years later has the strange quality of becoming better and more enjoyable with the passage of time. Usually.

So, how long before albums disappear as a key method of getting music to music fans? It's hard to say. There's nothing quite like a band "working on an album" to get the creative juices flowing. It's handy to buy a bunch of songs in one go as well. They'll be around for a few years - but in ten years time? Hard to say. Vinyl limited editions - yes. CDs? Unlikely I'd say. And when that happens, the album will be a rare beast. But where do we go beyond streaming? Complete wireless cloud access? Google Glasses implants? Direct matter transference into some kind of mind-modem? Who knows - but right now, I have an urge, a craving, a nostalgic desire to play some vinyl - crackles and pops and all.

Now, which sleeve did I put my copy of Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing At Baxters in? Somehow, the copy of Singalongamax that fell out of it doesn't quite cut the mustard.

Alan Dorey

30th July 2014