How do you listen to music?

Bob-Dubery · 2013-06-04T07:50:31+00:00

An article I recently read mentioned the author's mode of listening to music: Whole albums on a physical medium. My way of buying music has changed recently (shock! Horror! Bob goes "digital" ?) but I still like to listen to ALBUMS. Usually not greatest hits type things, though I don't have any religious objection to them. The Supremes album I bought recently works because they were really a singles act, and with the same songwriters, producers and studio band the sound is pretty consistent anyway and so it works. But I see when I buy albums now, from iTunes or the Nokia thingy, that things are geared towards individual tracks. Within an album you can cherry pick the tracks you want. This makes sense in some ways: If you're a Christina Aguilera fan, say, you probably really only want to buy the 2 or 3 big singles at so much per song and pass on all the filler. So that works. Also your Dad might have liked a particular Richie Valens song and you want that one song for nostalgia's sake. Now there's no need to bother with a whole album. But clearly I'm not the only album-oriented old fart left on the planet. I like to listen to an entire album for various reasons - and albums have to have a flow. You can render some great albums less great by rearranging the sequence so that it doesn't build in the same way (imagine Sgt Pepper's with "A Day In The Life" being the second track on side one and closing with "Within You, Without You"). My own tastes aside, I can see how the buying of individual tracks could work. I'm less phased about the physical medium bit. MP3s can be compressed to a point where the recordings take a serious beating, but they don't have to be. On the weekend I finally got around to purchasing the Buena Vista Social Club album (R35 on Nokia! Bargain). It came as a bunch of MP3s. I haven't checked the file properties, but a listen on decent headphones reveals that the original's fabled ambient sound is largely intact, maybe even entirely so and certainly it's sonically satisfying. So MP3s, at high quality settings, are not the end of the world as we know it. So what about y'all? Albums? Tracks? Is it changing for you?

chris77

It's evolved a lot over the years. When I first started to really appreciate music, it was mostly influenced by how much, or rather little, money I had. I couldn't just buy what I liked. There was x amount available and that had to go a loooong way, not just to buy music with - So when I bought something I was determined to get full value out of it and listened to it from start to finish over and over and over again.
Then came the student years where money was a little bit less of an issue, and music was more readily available. Which was great because I then had enough time to enjoy it and with the headphones on spent a heck of a lot of time listening to music while playing games or reading. Mostly still albums, but having a pc for the first time meant I could now make my own playlists, and also that I could get music from my mates for mahala now as well. (Yes, we were pirates. Sad but true. :-[)
Nowadays though, I only get to listen to music in the car and sometimes over weekends. There is no more time to really get into an album anymore. I will listen through it once or twice, make a little mental note of the songs I like and next time I make a playlist include only those songs. Or I just go on to iTunes, preview the album and only download the songs I like. Mostly if there are more good songs than bad ones, I would still download the whole album anyway. It does weed ot a lot of crap though.

Hammeron

I tend to use my ears, but hey, guess I'm funny that way.

singemonkey

One of the key reasons for albums, and especially concept albums was, let's face it: dagga. When 80% of listeners smoked a fatty before listening, immersion with the band's vision was much enhanced. Not every listening experience is a magical mystery tour.

For the non-chemically enhanced, the coherency of an album can also be described as saminess. Sometimes you want more of the same, but often your mood for some particular sound is satiated after a few tracks and your attention wanders. Every song by an album sounds more like the other songs on that album than songs by a different band do - by definition. Take Come Together and Polythene Pam. Very different. But not as different as Come Together and Wish You Were Here.

So in those moods where you're not in the perfect mood for Abbey Road, hearing Wish You Were Here rather than Polythene Pam can refocus your attention on the music. Shuffle wasn't much good with a 3 CD changer. Or when you had to make a mix CD every damn time. It certainly wasn't great when you had to shuffle through your 85 Lps during every song and change them each time. But it can be pretty rewarding with 32GB of songs where you've weeded out all the stuff that you just can't stand anymore.

p.s. I'm not suggesting that people should illegally smoke dagga to enhance their listening experience, nor am I suggesting that it doesn't have profound effects on the appreciation of music ?

Bob-Dubery

singemonkey wrote One of the key reasons for albums, and especially concept albums was, let's face it: dagga. When 80% of listeners smoked a fatty before listening, immersion with the band's vision was much enhanced. Not every listening experience is a magical mystery tour.

Shoooo. I don't even know what half those words mean.

I was reading about the history of the Jeff Beck band today, and another factor in the swing to albums was mentioned: the advent of FM radio in the USA in the late 60s. Peter Grant saw this coming and realised that bands would no longer have to use singles as a means to massive sales.

Grant wanted to sign Beck, but Beck had a management contract and was disinclined to change. Grant's Plan B was Led Zeppelin.

What happened with FM radio was that the FCC imposed a rule that prevented FM stations from merely replicating the programming of AM stations. This left the programmers on the new stations short of ideas and the DJs less constrained. Soon they were playing tracks that the labels weren't pushing, longer cuts and even entire live shows.

Kush

I definitely prefer to listen to whole albums. I mostly listen to the older stuff so back then you at least knew there was some proper effort put into every song on the album. When it comes to the newer stuff though, I find that there are usually 2 or 3 good tracks and the rest is just filler material. There is nothing I hate more than, halfway through an album, getting to a certain song and thinking " How could they have possibly though that song was good enough to record??" So for that reason I will listen to a whole album if I get a new album or come across a new artist but sometimes after that I just skip the songs I dislike when next I play that album.

lindsmuse

I've got a selection of old and new music - I find with the newer music I've picked out favourites. Then I put the whole lot together together and shuffle. Because I trust my taste in music I know there'll always be something nice playing. So I can get things happening like System of a Down 'Spiders' followed by a nice Paco de Lucia flamenco piece, followed by Errol Garner playing a bit of jazz piano, bit of Alt-J, Steeleye Span etc etc. Never boring - always absolutely gorgeous. Anything new that comes along gets played to death and then blended in with the rest.

Psean

IceCreamMan wrote

so far from the perceived idea that it was to brea a cuppa there is actually a reason for it...brilliant ...

inner groove distortion....wow ....now that's the name for a pedal I reckon

Hehe. That could be a good one.

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