Episode 60: Is Music Mostly Disposable Now?

Transcript

so i watched this video from this uh this youtuber that i've followed for a number of years now
his name is uh stevie t i think it's steven steven terryberry something like that um stevie t is just
the only way i know him i guess um it it talked about some things that i i've kind of thought
about to myself for a while and i'm i'm actually trying to figure out whether i feel like the
things he had to say in this video make me feel old and grumpy or less old and grumpy or
what like i'm trying to figure this out i'll link to the video um it has to do with music
and specifically it has to do with connection to music or at least that was kind of my
interpretation of it and how the connection to music has changed over time but how that
specifically connects to the way music is delivered so it's all really abstract but the general idea
goes like this so so i grew up uh born in the 80s grew up in the 90s predominantly and for me
like i i really listened to a lot of music during those years and i loved buying albums at a
you know at a record store or as you know stores got bigger like say a best buy or something whatever
for me that was mostly in the form of it was a lot a lot many years of cds uh many years of tapes
before that so so tapes and cds you know cassettes and cds and there was a whole number of things that
went along with that let's say that you knew that there was a band that put out like a single or
something that you had heard that you really liked well you would go and you'd buy the album
and that right there just in and of itself because an album might be you know 12 bucks or 15 bucks or
you know as time went on towards 20 so you you had to spend money on this thing and as a as a kid
or a teenager you know those years it's not like i had a ton of money floating around to go do this
right like i i don't even know where i got money from like you know at that time of my life you
know what little part-time jobs and doing chores or whatever like i you know i don't even so so to
spend 12 15 dollars on on a cd was not insignificant so you would go and you buy the thing and then you
would bring it home and you'd realize that like a lot of the songs on the album were not really
anything like the single that put out in many cases i mean sometimes they were but sometimes
they weren't and what would happen is that over the course of time like you would you'd probably
you were familiar with the single right so you already liked that track which means that everything
else on that album in comparison was going to be different and unfamiliar which would mean that
at the outset you were less likely to you know love all the rest of the songs as much as you love
that single but then a funny thing would happen at least to me is that over time that album would
grow on you right or on me at least right because it's not like i would just stop listening to the
album when i when i bought a new album that would be the only thing in my cd player for weeks if not
months right because it's the new it's the new album i bought i'm not probably going to buy another
album for a while so you would listen to it and you would kind of get invested in what was on there
and over time these other songs would grow on you and you'd really you would you would kind of form
this connection not just with the single that was originally exposed you to this group but the rest
of the you know the rest of their their music too and then for for groups that had multiple singles
on an album who had increasing popularity or whatever you would almost try to guess or be
hopeful of what the next single was is you'd have like your own favorites and sort of your b-side
favorites and all that kind of stuff but the experience of a of an album of you know 9 10 12 15
tracks that you then learn to love over time that you experience over the course of time that grow on you
it's very different than what we get now where generally speaking it's just a string of singles
you hear maybe a band or a group or more likely just a single artist featuring nine other artists
on some kind of streaming service like apple music or spotify or you know whatever and you may or may
not know that that's may or may not ever ever even hear the rest of that album you might never dig into
it you might just listen to it in a string of other singles and i don't think that's all that
dissimilar from what radio always did right which was just play singles from popular artists
but i think the difference is and what this video kind of goes into is that there's no
there that experience of going out to buy the rest of that creator's work is no longer a thing
even though it's even it would be even easier today to get to that right where in theory you
can very assuming that that that whatever you're listening to has a full album that's connected to
it's easier than ever to pull up the rest of the entries on that album and listen through it
but i think because of the just the sheer quantity of music that's at our fingertips a we probably don't
do that at all pull up an album but b even if you do pull up the album it's very unlikely
that you're going to invest the kind of time and dedication that you might have in a case where
you had gone to the store to buy that album on limited resources and maybe it's the only album
you're going to buy for the next four eight weeks you know or whatever there's an irony right
there's an irony to having all this music at your fingertips and not exploring music as deeply
or as pervasively as we once did because it's so much easier just to flip on some kind of pre-made
playlist or whatever and it'll just cycle you through hundreds thousands of songs and you
may never and so it all becomes a little bit of just a continued experience like and i know i'm
guilty this right i'll turn on i'll go to i use apple music so i'll go to apple music i'll turn on like
whatever the i think uh i have a station on there that's like a station that's supposed to be quote
unquote customized for me or a new music station or whatever and i'll flip it on and then pay
attention to almost none of it you know it's just background i'm not invested in any of it in
particular and occasionally there'll be a song that i'll hear a few times will kind of call out to me and
maybe i'll look a little bit into that but it's not i don't think i've found a band that i've gone
deep in on uh in in years in the way that i used to regularly and there's the there's a whole
conversation here as well around artists and record labels really pushing forward the concept
of a single much more than they used to where it used to be more about the album and of course there
were always singles on the radio but the album was still a worthwhile thing to to promote and whatnot
and and just sort of the overall efficiency of of getting music into some kind of popular venue
there's there's a whole sub conversation here around that stuff but i think at the end of the day
it's like anything else if all of the money and fame and popularity is going to come from a string
of singles because all all people listen to is a string of singles then all the rest of those songs
that might be on an album somewhere are going to receive less effort most likely just naturally
and i'm sure that if you talk to a musician who still put out albums and whatnot they would say no
that's not how this works but i think at some level it almost certainly does it's like trying
to disprove a negative right you can't know for sure for those of you who listened to music in this
other form in this you know through the years where you would buy the albums and listen to them whether
it was on records or tapes or cds or whatever how many great b-side tracks do you remember from those
kind of things and compare that now can even list what a b-side track is uh i in most cases i i can't
even for the few bands that i have kind of caught kept up with over the years anyway the reason that
this video kind of like i'm still trying to figure it out is because this person i i believe is younger
than me like he he looks much younger than me but this the the experience that he outlines is exactly
how i have felt about music through the years and i remember coming up and when you know when a
certain amount of like napster pirating started and we started getting these bigger mp3 players and
all that kind of stuff once we had once we were no longer required to burn cds like mix cds or
record mix tapes right once we got to a point where the technology had expanded beyond that i remember
being very excited about that i was like oh it's more music it's going to be so great i don't have to
limit my my you know my cd my burned cd to 14 tracks or whatever they held like what 70 minutes or 80
minutes on most of them those that limit is gone i can listen to so much more music and and what i
found is it that might be true is there's a possibility that i do listen to more music than i
used to but i think it's also safe to say that the experience of listening to music has become more
disposable to me it's it is not as any listening to any given track song album artist is not as
careful or important or i'm missing the word but it is not as uh as a um as much of a formative
experience at any given time that it used to be and so there's an irony to that with limitless music at
your fingertips music listening to it is less you feel less connected than you used to there's an
irony there uh if any of this sounds familiar i would go check out his video it really did go
through so it's entertaining he's an entertaining guy uh but i did go through some interesting stuff
and some things that i would not have expected to hear someone i don't know exactly how old he is but
again he seemed a bit he seemed a bit he seems a bit younger than me so i i didn't assume i would
hear things about cassette tapes and cds when he was talking but uh it very much mirrored some of the
thoughts that i've had on this over the year years um and i just remember you know some of the things he
calls out for instance he talks about going to a record store and buying a cd based on the cover art
and i'll just end end with this that is an experience that i deeply miss going to a record
store we we had a like sort of a book and record store uh not far from you know where i grew up
and so we would go in there my friends and i and we would poke around through the cd racks and just
find covers that looked cool or funny and i'll tell you i found some really interesting stuff that way
that's actually how i found les claypool and primus that's also how i found oingo boingo
so some popular bands that i just you know through my experience at that time in my life i hadn't heard
of before but i found them because they had cool covers on cds and i'm picking them up and being like
oh this is really neat and then getting into a whole catalog so there there's whole groups that are in the
popular zeitgeist that i might never have really been exposed to uh had it not been for that
experience so anyway um check out the video if any of this sounds interesting to you i thought it was
pretty well done and definitely mirrored you know a lot of the stuff that i think and feel about music
these days and so it was just kind of i don't again i don't know if it made me feel like younger
older validated invalidate like i don't really know but it definitely just was a thing that over the
years i have noticed as well