Like a few who have ploughed through the Steve Jobs biography, I am now heartily tired of early adopters, those strange men who are always at the front of the queue at the Apple shop when some dismal new gewgaw is coming out. I myself am a classic late adopter, discovering the new and exciting only when it’s old and worn out.
I had a CD player years after everyone else; a tribesman in Papua New Guinea was the only person to have an iPod after me; and now I am faintly obsessed by Spotify, the music-streaming service out there on the internet, wherever that is. For a mere £9.99 a month, which is just under a tenner more than I want to pay, you can play any piece of music it has stored in its large computers any number of times, and it has extraordinarily large computers. There’s almost a feeling of triumph when you look for a song and it’s not there.
Needless to say, I have the freebie option. For this, mothwallets can play a maximum of ten hours of music a month, and play a particular song up to five times. After every two or three songs there’s a 30-second radio ad for some product you not only don’t need but also swear never to buy, even if you did need it. This is the price we have to pay for being wilful, contrary and mean, but the limits thus imposed do concentrate the mind rather.
Every song I choose has to count, so I use the service not as a replacement for my CD collection — which you might do if you were paying £9.99 a month — but as an adjunct, even a research tool. Albums I have only read about can now be listened to and found wanting for no outlay at all. It’s the ultimate Try Before You Buy service. I like to think that it has saved me a small fortune in rubbishy CDs I might have bought late at night on Amazon after a few drinks. But then I have spent that small fortune on other, rather good CDs I have bought after listening to them on Spotify. For the first time, rigour has been introduced to the previously random process of accumulating music. In time, I imagine, I might come to miss the frisson of excitement when something cardboardy plops through your letterbox and you have no idea what it is, and no memory of ever having ordered it. For now, though, I am enjoying it all thoroughly.
So how do other people listen to Spotify? If you have an infinite jukebox to hand, the temptation might be to dabble and hop about in the manner of a pop radio station, or at least, the slightly demented version of a pop radio station each of us has in his head. Recently, though, Spotify has linked up with Facebook, which is something newish I do use, and rather a lot. So, after browsing salaciously through their friends’ photo albums, Facebook users can now find out what everyone is listening to on Spotify. There aren’t a huge number of surprises. People tend to listen to what you would expect them to
listen to: with my friends, there tends to be more Mozart than Metallica, for instance.
But one thing I have noticed is that almost all of them, at any one time, are listening to whole albums. They are not hopping between single tracks. They are not even compiling playlists and then playing those. Given an infinite jukebox, they use it as a CD player. I find this oddly comforting. The death of the album has been widely foretold, but for the habitual listener over (shall we say) the age of 30, it’s still the most satisfying way of consuming music. We don’t just need the best two or three tracks. We need the not-quite-so-good tracks, too, because they make the best tracks sound better. Listening to music seriously, we realise, is about deferment of gratification. It’s about waiting as much as it’s about listening. And the ability to defer gratification, as any therapist will tell you, brings contentment, even happiness.
The rock album might be long past its peak as a commercial product, but as a cultural artefact it remains the gold standard. One day someone might work out a good way of giving us back side one and side two, but that’s another story.
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