COMPILATION vs. CURATION
Despite the rise of streaming services, the death of vinyl is not yet upon us. Neil Mccormick explains.
Here's a thought experiment for music lovers. I want you to picture one of your favourite albums, an all-time classic you have treasured since you first opened the sleeve, slid out the vinyl, set the record player to 33 revolutions per minute and carefully dropped the needle in the groove of track one, side one with a satisfying hiss. Or perhaps you slotted it into a cassette machine, pressed play on a CD player, or simply typed its title into the search engine of your chosen streaming service and tapped your Bluetooth earbuds for action.
It could be Pink Floyd's mind-bending concept album The Dark Side of the Moon from 1973, or Kate Bush's 1985 cornucopia of delights Hounds of Love, or Radiohead's 1997 masterpiece of premillennial dread OK Computer. Perhaps you personally favour something more up to date, such as Michael Kiwanuka's recent soul-searching odyssey Kiwanuka. Let's just agree that it is an album you personally love and has played a significant part in the soundtrack of your life.
Got it?
Now I want you to think how much better the album might have been if you could just chuck out any of the less immediately accessible tracks and move all the familiar hit singles up front.
Let's be honest, who hasn't been tempted to skip over
Within You Without You while playing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band? I mean, what were The Beatles thinking, daring to let George Harrison introduce a generation to Indian musical scales, instrumentation and hippy mysticism when they could have jumped straight to Paul Mccartney's musical hall singalong When I'm Sixty Four? Actually, you could dump most of side two if you really want an all-thriller-no-filler experience, and just go straight back in for the Sgt. Pepper reprise and epic closer A Day in the Life. Only, the latter goes on a bit, so perhaps fade out that orchestral waffle at the end and ...
At this point in our thought experiment, the hapless critic may find himself dragged into the street by a mob of angry musicians and music lovers, tossed on to a pyre built of discarded charity shop K-tel hits compilations, and then immolated to the sound of Lou Reed's 1975 double album Metal Machine Music, all 64 minutes and 11 seconds of its ambient feedback. Which, to be fair, I have listened to in its entirety, at least twice.
Joking aside, the vast majority of music consumers do now treat albums with such casual disregard. The New York Times pop critic Jon Caramanica stirred up controversy online recently, when he was quoted in an interview saying: “An album is simply a data dump now. That doesn't mean that some artists won't continue to aim to be auteurs of the form, but the minute albums hit streaming services, they are sliced and diced and the songs are relegated to playlist slots ...”
It is hard to dispute the truth of that assessment. Streaming has become the dominant form of music distribution through platforms such as Spotify and Youtube, with an estimated increase of 17 per cent globally last year, to 873 billion streams of individual tracks. It is a format that strongly favours shuffling songs selected to a listener's algorithmically defined taste.
Music streaming revenues are now bigger than the entire music market was worth as recently as 2016, with CD sales dwindling to just 16 million last year.
Streaming counts “album equivalent units,” which certainly don't necessarily involve listening from beginning to end. Here's a statistic to send a chill through album lovers: not one album released in 2020 achieved platinum status in the U.K. (marking 300,000 sales), for the first time since 1973.
Listening habits are changing with technology, but does this really mean the long-predicted death of the album? Where Caramanica really ran into trouble was with his dismissal of the album as a musical format. “The truth is that albums worked as a medium only because everyone was a captive.
“When you look back at your favourite older albums now, I'm sure you see the weak spots that you'd happily have programmed out if you had the technology then. Now you do.”
You can fast-forward through a movie, too, or skip chapters in a book, but I don't hear influential critics proclaiming that this is the way forward in our attention deficit era. Ever since the advent of the ipod in the early 2000s, the album format has been under pressure, a trend accelerated by streaming. Yet, 20 years later, more albums are released every week than ever before and remain the favoured musical delivery method of choice both for the most serious artists and most dedicated fans.
Even on a strictly commercial level, an artist who can lock listeners into their world is going to reap the benefit of sustained streaming, which surely contributed to Taylor Swift's position in both end of the year sales and streaming charts with not one but two new albums in 2020.
But strict commercial considerations are far from the only factor. There is a sense in which Sgt. Pepper might be snappier without George Harrison's sitar experiment, but it would not have been as wide and rich, or taken so many people on unexpected musical journeys. And it certainly would not have created the kind of cultural impact that has made it a revered work of art that people still listen to, 53 years after its release.
There's a place for hits compilations, and I love a good curated playlist. But when it comes to real musical riches, there is plenty of evidence to suggest music lovers will continue plunging into the deep dive of the long player.