New music

It was my birthday recently so I decided to spend some of the money I got on new CDs. This is not a regular occurence – most music I get is either made by friends, a free download, or bought from charity shops.

I bought:

I still like buying CD’s, as opposed to downloads, and of the element of risk involved: Will it be any good? As good as their last album? Or will there just be one or two good tracks? And of course there’s the artwork and credits.  Nowadays, I’m almost as interested in where the album was recorded and who produced/engineered/mixed/mastered it as I am in the actual music.

I also love albums. I’ve never been a single buyer (and rarely download single tracks) as I love to hear what someone has to say over the course of a collection of songs rather than just the one. We hear a lot nowadays about people not buying CD’s anymore, and also about the good old days of vinyl, but the format I grew up listening to most was cassette. I think this is one of the reasons I love albums so much; if I was listening to an album on tape it wasn’t quite so easy to skip forward to my favourite track and I learnt to find satisfaction in listening to albums as a whole.

I remember getting a part-time job one summer and having some spare money for the first time. I went to John Menzies in Clarkston and, after much deliberation, bought ‘Hats’ by The Blue Nile and the Batman soundtrack by Prince. I must have listened to those tapes a thousand times over. I invested time in deciding what music to buy, I spent well-earnt money on purchasing it and then spent countless hours getting to know the songs until they became more and more familiar, often becoming the defining soundtrack to what was going on in my life at that time.

Now, instead of this, a mind-staggering amount of recorded music is available in a few keystrokes, if not for free then for a smaller price than I would have paid for my precious tapes half a lifetime ago.

I don’t know what to make of all this most of the time, even after having read countless blogs and articles on the subject. I am, after all, one of the countless recording artists giving away a lot of my music for free and not demanding that someone invest their money in it. Modern recording technology and the internet have made it possible for anyone, including me, to make their music available to the whole world very simply without the help of a record label. And with so many bands and artists now doing this, and with less and less investment involved in us obtaining new music, will we still love music as much as we used to? Or will we just love it in a different way?

Bob Lefsetz has written about this better than I have in this recent post. It’s worth taking the time to read the first 2 and last 2 paragraphs at least.

As for my new CDs, I’ve not been disappointed. Death Cab for Cutie continue to be one of the few bands I get excited about, Iain Archer is (as always) a total genius, and The Notwist combine acoustic and electronic sounds better than I could ever wish to.