Album-med out

I've noticed something about my music listening habits: I don't tend to be inclined to sit through an entire album except in rare cases. It's not necessarily that I don't like all the songs enough to listen to them; it's merely that I don't want to hear them one after the other after the other.

Now, it seems like the culprit here would be the download paradigm, and the method of the music playing the music being the mp3 player, but if I'm completely frank with myself I suspect it's more that technology has finally caught up with the way I preferred.

In days of yore (which for purposes of this entry is as recent as the early portion of the last decade) I got music by purchasing the album as a physical object, be that a vinyl LP, a cassette, or a compact disc; to hear the songs I put the record on the turntable, or placed the cassette in the tape deck, or inserted the CD in the disc player. The last of those allowed for more easily accessing a particular track than the previous two had, but still the format limited what I had available to merely the tracks on that disc.

What I wanted was to hear a variety of songs. I think the paradigm I grew up with—listening to the radio, with a song by one artist followed by a song by a different artist—was the one I always liked better, but for years (from the mid '80s when I started buying CDs until really only a few years ago) I was limited by the medium. The best the CD player could do was perhaps play the tracks in a random order, but that was still the same tracks.

It's not that I won't listen to complete albums, but that's the exception; I need to really be in the mood for that, and while technology allows for that, it doesn't force me to do so.

It is a grand and glorious time for music listening (that will be covered further in the next post).