Do people appreciate music? Live performances? Is youtube the blame? Is I-tunes (Amazon and other) the blame?
Are award shows the blame?

I'm so sick of this "Singles' era.

Edited by user 12 December 2009 03:19:22(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

You pretty much summed everything I feel so no need for another long rant from me. Although it'll probably turn into one.

I will say though, something that's really dangerous artistically, is this everyone-is-a-DJ shtick, that now you can make your own playlists and worse, that now computer algorithms will generate them for you. There's certainly a place for making a playlist, but the problem comes from people sort of discarding half the album for a selection of songs they already heard before they got the album. For as long as I've been seriously interested in music, I've taken the album to be the primary format of recorded music. This probably comes from listening to the likes of Pink Floyd.

It may sound dickish, but if someone tells me their favourite band is, I don't know, Kings of Leon, Muse, or something like that, my immediate assumption is that by listening to this band they think they're not part of this chart culture, this mainstream, but Kings of Leon are huge, and Muse are even huger. If someone tells me a list of their favourite bands, and they're all bands who've been in the mainstream to any degree, then I immediately suspect them to not be proper music fans. It suggests to me that they're not looking for music, they're waiting for music to come to them, to be sold to them by promotion, by the media.

As for the casual piracy/leak debate, I've got a lot to say, but I have to go see Porcupine Tree at the ABC in about ten minutes, so I'll save it.

Listening to an album from the beginning to end it's a cathartic experience, one of the saddest things I can think of is Pink Floyd's records being bought just to listen Another Brick in The Wall and Wish You Were Here

So, here's the piracy thing:

In ye olden days, a young lady or gentleman would walk into a music emporium, and exchange their hard-saved pocket money for a single gramophone record, which they would then take home, place on the player, drop the needle, and sit and listen. If they want another record, they have to go back to the shop with more money. So they try and get the most out of every album.

In the digital world, if you want to hear Dr. Dre, three minutes on Google, and you're downloading a RAR of Dr. Dre's entire discography for free, while sitting on your arse. Clearly that's a serious devaluing of music.

Also, in the past, if a record came out on March 7th, people would wait and get it on March 7th. Now, if people don't have the album two or three months before the release date, they get extremely agitated. Then it finally leaks, and people download it, and within a single day they've formed an opinion, which then becomes fixed in concrete - i.e. it's either shit or it's great, no in between, no time to grow. And of course, if the opinion is negative, that's expressed as angry disappointment, as if the artist has failed their personal responsibility to keep that one listener happy. And on top of that, the actual act of listening to an album for the first time, it does not live up to the crazy anticipation, so immediately after the leak, they're waiting for the next leak to drop. It's part of the digital drug of modern life.

So anyway, what I'm getting at is that while the internet revolution has been good for breadth of music listening, its been very bad for the quality of music listening. And make no mistake, listening is a skill. It is not simply the same as hearing, and even now I'm still learning how to listen to music, while it seems most people stop learning how to listen in their teens, and then stick largely to one area of music from their 20s for about the rest of their lives. The journey of listening to music for me, drifting from genre to genre, band to band, gathering an internal catalogue of music has been one of the few things I do not regret in my pitiful life, and it seems like now people are simply not taking that slow and measured journey, and are instead just gorging themselves without stopping to appreciate it.

Just to expand on your point about devaluing music a little bit:

I think the devaluing doesn't necessarily come from the act of downloading it illegally but from the sheer amount of music you can access. I can download the whole discography of Radiohead. The most common next step I see among my friends is that they then put all the songs into iTunes (or their player of choice) and then sample them. By sample I mean they start a song, listen for about 10-20 seconds, skip to a new section of the same song and listen for 10-20 seconds, and repeat that process for a random selection of 15-20 songs. They don't take the time to organize or label the music (whenever I add new music to my player I make sure the album name, tracklisting, genre, track order, are correct and that the albums are ordered by release date for each artist so I can really experience their growth or changes over time, and I do purchase all of my music) they just sample it and then form an opinion. Then they move on, start another torrent and repeat the process for every artist they hear about. There is no real time taken to actually really listen to anything, it becomes more about having the collection so you can tell your friends "oh yea I totally have all their stuff" to keep your credibility. To me that is where the real devaluing of the music exists.

I would argue that the artists intended for the album to be heard from start to finish in order and in their entirety so anything other than that is really using it in a way the artist had not intended.

On a more newsworthy note, this debate about artists' intention is going to be important going forward. The RIAA tried to sue people for ripping CDs to their PCs because they argued they were using the music "in a way the artist did not intend or anticipate."

I get what you're saying, but I disagree strongly. To clarify, I'm not suggesting listening to music cannot be a background task, in fact, I often listen to music in the background, but the point is that I really listen, and I choose what I'm going to listen to. I specifically pick something based on my mood, an album, and listen to it in the intended order, where possible, in one sitting.

It's not so much about attention paid, although that is an important aspect, it's more about the perceived place of music in our lives, and the value attributed to it. If all the music ever recorded is available to steal almost instantaneously at any time, then who has the time to actually sit through an album? How do you decide which one? Especially if you're trying to keep up with all the music ever.

Beyond that even, something I've heard occasionally on last.fm, something which made me extremely angry, was in response to the idea that this guy who didn't like an album should listen to it more, to which he said something along the lines of "If you don't like something at first and you have to keep listening until you do, then you're just forcing it." That is the exact opposite of everything I believe about music. Most of the music I listen to I did not get immediately, but neither did I force myself to like anything I did not like. When I hear something new for the first time, I know going in it's not going to be like listening to an old favourite, so I'm looking for potential, something that I know will grow on me. The albums I enjoy the most are ones that I can listen to over and over and still hear new things, discover more and more.

It seems to me like if you download stuff for free, almost everything you actually listen to, it's like an audition, to see if it grabs you, and if it doesn't move onto the next thing right away. No maturation period. It also leads to people making ridiculous snap judgements about a new album so quickly, and so far in advance of its actual release. Since the music is going through this auditioning process all the time, that seems to breed an attitude of easily dismissing albums. Same fucking thing with movies. People will review new movies based on shitty quality rips they watched on their computer, windowed, while surfing the net. Music deserves your respect and your attention.

A lot of the time, a person really gets attached to the first release that they heard by a beloved band, so a new album is always always facing up to an insurmountable weight of expectation, and when you're in the mindset of making these snap judgements, there's no way you can decide in the space of 2 days that an album is shit compared to the old one that you love, and have been listening to for three years. And if you're making these binary judgements, you're likely also the sort of person who express opinion as fact. It's not that "I don't like the new album" it's that "the new album is shit, they used to be great, but now they sound like <insert unfashionably popular band here>", and because they then don't listen to that release again, further down the line that turns into "this band has been shit since album X, and if you like the new albums you're not a proper fan." Fuck that shit.

That is the devaluation I'm talking about.

Edited by user 13 December 2009 10:44:55(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I think it's the artists prerogative to dictate the nature of their art. And believe me, album track order, artwork, the presentation of an album, these are all painstakingly decided upon, not necessarily by artists, but at the very least usually approved by the artist.

You say that how other people listen to music doesn't affect how I listen to it, and I completely agree with that, but I'm not talking about people devaluing the music I listen to, I'm talking about them devaluing the music they listen to. I'm saying that Music is no longer special to most people, it's no longer given the attention and respect it deserves as a cultural medium. That is the devaluation I'm speaking of.

I am so sick to death of this attitude that music should be free, therefore I should not pay for it when I can get it for free. People have this attitude that they would never spend money on the album so it doesn't make any difference to the artist if they steal it, and that is the biggest load of bullshit. It's a crime that's become so casual people don't even think twice that they're listening to something that cost a significant amount of money to record and distribute, and that the people making this music are doing this for a living - many of home are struggling to make ends meet - because apparently music has no monetary value to these people.

The internet is great for discovering new bands, hearing new music, all of that, and for culture in general. But at the same time, having immediate access to the sum of all human knowledge devalues it. It's simple human nature. The anticipation of Christmas is so great when you're a kid, then you open all your presents, and it gets to that last present and you sit there surrounded by stuff, and you sigh because as good as all that stuff is, now you've nothing to look forward to.

Some say, even if 95% of an albums downloads are illegal, if those people were not going to buy it in the first place, that's just spreading the word which is good for the artists. Which is of course bullshit, because sales are largely decreasing, or increasing much more slowly. People seem to think that live music is where musicians rake it in, but that's bullshit too. Very little ticket price for a mid-level act in this country will make it into band profit, once expenses are paid, and if you've got five guys in the band that's stretched even thinner. And as for merchandise - people who steal music online but go to shows, they're simply not going to buy merchandise. They'll even baulk at how they're being ripped off at £15 a t-shirt - when was the last time you bought a t-shirt in a clothes store that was that much cheaper? The people buying merchandise are the same people who're buying the album and supporting the bands as much as they can, and thankfully enough of the bands I listen to can scrape by on that.

The real money in music is all in licensing. Adverts, TV, movies. And when a label owns the recording copyright as they do in the vast majority of cases (there's another lengthy rant on that subject but I'll not go there now) then a great deal more of that revenue stream goes to the label than the artist anyway. So the best way to actually support the artists that you love (assuming of course they're not signed to a major label - in which case the artist is basically fucked on this front) is to try and purchase the album by as direct a route as possible, attend a concert, and maybe buy a cool t-shirt or something if you can.

I think there is a problem with just listening to the singles. Like I said before, listening to just the single is listening to the piece out of context. The single is part of the album and as such should be heard as part of the album. People listen to the singles and nothing else, they don't actually get the full experience of the single as part of the album. It is just like taking a quote out of context, you can get some meaning from it, but to get the actual message you have to read it in context.

It isn't about being rigid, its about the best way to listen. Listening to a song and giving it your full attention is a better way to listen than to have the same song on while you are driving. Listening to the single in context with the album is a better way to listen than to just listen to the single. It is about increasing the quality of listening, not claiming that there are specific rules for listening.