I am currently (as in right now) listening to Head on the Door by The Cure. Every track is a gem and part of it is about the expectation of the next track, the familiarity and remembrance of listening to this album over and over and over again when I were a youth. And it made me wonder about what the listening experience is of anyone under 24 nowadays.
Things that occured to me are that I don’t have to listen to anything I don’t like anymore (and not just because I’m married and don’t gifts of mixtapes from callow youth any more!) I’m getting musically lazy in my listening, whereas in the past you couldn’t skip it. Spotify gives you whatever you like on a plate and Blip is about the longtail so sites like NME that highlight genuinely new music (in the form of singles) are more important than ever. This is necessarily going to result in a reduced market for tracks. Singles are once again going to become an incredibly important medium for musicians and there is definitely a recommendation market to be tapped.
Also I think about how have I anchored myself in a certain period of time through consecutive tracks on albums and how that might be being eroded or changed by digital listening experiences I have now. In what ways will I track my time in the future? And is this universal consideration – or do other people track their time through visual stimuli.
Any thoughts?
