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>Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful. Does anyone else get a dystopia

>Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful. Does anyone else get a dystopian vibe from this statement? I feel like the old guy in the SF movie pulling his hair and exclaiming, "But what have we lost?!" We used to have vinyl, tapes, finally CDs, and even the ability to rip our library to a computer, which we could carry with us. It was naturally artist/album/track organized, required no internet, came with no tracking, centralized control, or subscription. (A year ago I bought a (now very cheap) nice CD player, a (now very cheap) separate amp and speakers, and a nice (somehow not very cheap) turntable, and it's great! I even kind of like the strong bias toward playing the same album multiple times - good music is complex, intricate, and it rewards relistening like a book rewards rereading. And listening the way the artist recorded is, IMHO, far superior to the digital dystopian DJ of spotify.)

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
Honestly I like physical media because manipulating them is pleasurable especially vinyl but the issue with playlist is only a Spotify UX issue. Apple Music doesn’t have it. YouTube Music doesn’t have it. It’s just that Spotify has decided that the way to optimise revenue is to focus on being an exclusive provider of some original contents in the form of podcasts and has slowly started making the listening music side of the application worse and worse since.
loloquwowndueo 4y ago
Turntables are not cheap because of the vinyl revival, so they are trendy, hence expensive. Nobody wants CD players :(
- javajosh 4y ago
  I know! CDs are such a great format, and as long as the ink doesn't corrode the aluminum layer, they can last a very long time. They are more compact than vinyl, they don't suffer from lots of vinyl's error modes but they still have things like liner notes. Plus they represent an album at a theoretical maximum of fidelity and reproducibility. What's not to like?
  - kayodelycaon 4y ago
    Physical storage space. ;) My laptop is smaller than any collection of CDs and can store an entire building of them in the space of 12 jewel cases. If you include my phone and a cellular connection for streaming, the entire world of music can be accessed in a device smaller than any portable CD player. And the speakers in my iPhone are better than most stereos from the same era. We truly live in the world where science fiction has become reality. :D
    - ddingus 4y ago
      The speakers... A while back, my wife and I went for a week way out in the sticks. We live in Oregon, and our favorite place is out in the Ochoco high desert National Forest. And nothing works there. I mean nothing except for AM radio late at night.[1] After a few days, our hearing settles back to what is supposed to be normal. City life is loud and our hearing system compensates in various ways that reduce our ability to really appreciate sound. After hearing that our ability to listen has relaxed into high potential mode, we decided to get the MacBook out and watch a movie. We had been saving this experience for a good time and it all came together nicely! We were blown away![0] Seriously. The amount and quality, fidelity of sound coming out of that MacBook was insane! Of course it all was soft on the low end. Not too much we could do about that because physics, but otherwise the whole experience was a real treat! I find it difficult to communicate the impact. Here we are, gentle noises from our camp fire a modest distance away, various crackles, pops, hisses and an equally gentle breeze and our own bodies were the only sounds present outside of the movie sound track. Mixed in nicely with all that was our movie. Actually a couple of them because we repeated the experience a couple times. It was so damn good! All I can really say here is you should definitely give this a try! So much engineering, better materials, better software, and it all adds right the fuck up. I really did not expect what I heard at all. Very highly recommended. ------ [0] And to be clear, I am talking about all that we did hear when we did not expect to. Truth is, we were camping with a MacBook. The sound we heard wea respectable, despite it being small speakers and all that goes mobile devices. It seemed sci-fi like to us. The tech advances, engineering all add up. And that's the blown away part. Experiencing a sum like that, rather than incrementally. The context really helped raise the impact. [1] And that is a great experience! Any radio will be fun, but if you can get hold of a 70's maybe 80's era one with multiple frequency bands, say short wave, broadcast, and any others, the isolation means getting to connect to the world old school tuning stuff in from all over the place! AM, on a good radio, is an interesting experience and again on a good radio optimized for what the tech actually does, will sound better than you think. And how it colors the material is something I crave. Comes from growing up listening to a fine Zenith "Trans Oceanic" radio with almost god like performance, but I digress...
- rosseloh 4y ago
  I like CDs. I just don't listen to music on physical media enough to really justify having a dedicated setup anymore. My boss, on the other hand, collects the damn things. He's got an entire large bookshelf filled with vintage CD players... To me, vinyl is a collectible, or at least, a way to show "yes I appreciate this music and want to show off that I enjoy it". If I like an artist/album enough, I'll buy the vinyl if I can. But it usually just sits on the shelf looking pretty. I got lucky and my player (nothing special but it works so long as you have a good cartridge) was from my dad. When I actually listen to said album, it's usually on my phone over bluetooth (earbuds or in the car), or even if I'm listening on the "hi fi" it's streaming. Not to say that I never play albums on the turntable, it's just not that often.
  - patentatt 4y ago
    > vintage CD players Now I feel old. I remember the first time I saw and heard a Compact Disc. It was a rainbow colored object straight from the future. It was magical, the whole family gathered around the little boom box like thing playing some classical music CD. Also, I hope your boss doesn't actually listen to any CD player built before about the mid 00's or so. Maybe mid-90s if you're talking mega-bucks (at the time) like a Mark Levinson or Theta Digital. But advances in DACs in the last ~20 years made everything prior very obsolete. Nowadays you can get commodity chips in the single digit dollar range that are for all intents and purposes faultless.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  Tapes seem to have made a comeback in certain Punk/Rap scenes, but a lot of it seems mostly aesthetic/an attempt to replicate some period l (see Memphis phonk: where home recorded tapes were a cornerstone of the genre and have had a bit of a revival in the last years)
m1gu3l 4y ago
> "But what have we lost?!" make a comment or thread about spotify/pandora/tidal and sit back and wait to see how long it takes for some “audiophile” to come along and to admonish you and tell you a story about their setup and music appreciation “workflow” and how it is better and somehow more correct. we lost nothing. it is all still here. and, apparently, the added bonus of droves of sweaty people telling you you’re doing it wrong. life is grand.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Looks like we lost the ability to go through a list of songs from an album, episodes from a podcast, or podcasts from a collection, which is the subject of TFA.
  - sosull 4y ago
    Slightly beside the point, but it is a problem that just doesn’t afflict Apple Music: those folks seem totally happy to make the kind of software that plays albums in sequence. The true surprise is that a century-old function has become a differentiating feature.
- javajosh 4y ago
  You might reasonably call me a Luddite, but an audiophile? Not in the sense you mean. I don't claim I can hear expensive speaker cables (I got mine at Home Depot btw). Great gear from the 90's and 00's is available cheap, and it's great. It has buttons. And I don't have to pay someone to continue accessing my music and I can listen to music in an album centric way. Nor am I claiming I'm more correct (although I guess I'm pretty proud of having found a somewhat contrarian path to take the trade-offs I think matter most.) You want to listen to spotify on your phone and bt headphones - all of which is subject to decay, decay of money, battery, connectivity - meanwhile I'll listen to my library with wired components that run smoothly and no latency without drops or a monthly bill. You get all-in-one go anywhere convenience, I get old school tactile control. Neither of us is doing it wrong. But yeah, I like mine better which is why I do it that way (and I assume the same is true for you, unless you're a masochist, and if so I say great, keeping doing you.)
- 4y ago
frogstomp19 4y ago
I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. In the streaming era, it's easier than ever before to discover new artists and listen to an unprecedented variety of music with minimal investment. If it's slightly cumbersome to listen to albums on Spotify, it's still much less cumbersome that going to a store to buy a CD or purchasing online and waiting for it to arrive + keeping your collection physically organized and in good condition. I don't absolutely love Spotify but I'm not going back to a CD collection.
- javajosh 4y ago
  >I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. We've lost: cover art, liner notes, the ability to share or sell your music without 3rd party permission, music stores, and in many cases local music scenes that formed around music stores. Bret Victor has been harping on this for years, but we've also lost a great deal of tactility - putting a CD in a player and pressing buttons to play it uses your hands in pleasant ways that screens just aren't. As for discovery, the promise is greater than reality. I used Spotify for a while specifically for this purpose, but I didn't discover a single new artist through it. YouTube, by contrast, has introduced me to new artists, as have a few radio stations like KCRW and KQED (who both have excellent YT channels too). And you know what? Music discovery is a different mode of listening than enjoying my library and ne'er the twain shall meet, IMHO.
  - so_dewy 4y ago
    >We've lost: cover art Spotify does have cover art for albums, at least for me it does. > Music discovery is a different mode of listening For me it really is the same mode. I regularly discover new artists when my handcrafted playlists finish playing and it starts to play music based on the playlist I just listened to
    - mariusor 4y ago
      > Spotify does have cover art for albums, at least for me it does. I think parent means something like this: https://www.encartespop.com.br/2012/09/encarte-pink-floyd-dark-side-of-moon.html https://www.encartespop.com.br/2012/09/encarte-pink-floyd-da... The vinyl and especially CD covers were sometimes a little more than just barren images.
daveoc64 4y ago
Enjoyment of music linked to a specific physical item seems incredibly shallow to me. If the music is worth listening to, the medium shouldn't matter at all.
- objclxt 4y ago
  > Enjoyment of music linked to a specific physical item seems incredibly shallow to me. To a certain extent, but across the arts there's always artists that want to play with the format, so a changing of format can result in something being re-contextualised. For example, you can have [multisided vinyl][1] with hidden tracks, or loop a track onto itself so the record plays forever (like Sergeant Pepper). Neither are really possible with MP3 (there's a Brian Eno record that does both (the track bifurcates and loops at them end), so you get a random sample looping at the end of the LP). I am not saying this means the enjoyment of the music is lessened when you listen to it digitally - just that plenty of artists have written and produced pieces with the physical format at the front of their minds. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisided_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisided_record
  - sqlacid 4y ago
    I'll never forget discovering the third track of Monty Python's Matching Tie and Handkerchief, thought I'd lost my mind. As an Eno fan I'm not familiar with the mentioned album. King Crimson would put hidden messages printed in the vinyl inner track, I remember seeing "The next step is Discipline", which was their next album. I also miss the thriving bootleg community, picture discs.
  - alexvoda 4y ago
    I see no reason why all of that could not be done in software. Same as DVD menus. For the record, VLC supports DVD menus and the Matroska container format (mkv, mka, mks, and the basis for webm) supports all of the features imagined so far. I believe the demand for the content far outweighed the demand for the presentation layer. All of these forms of interactivity however didn't prove popular in the digital world. Think of DVD's again. How often would you have ripped a DVD into a 4 or 8 GiB ISO in order to preserve the full experience and how often would you have rather ripped just the video file ~400 MiB, reencoded using a modern codec. Netflix optimises for the latter. If you allow for programability, all features of music albums and more can be recreated. What people want is no fuss instant access to the popular music of the moment therefore we have streaming services with good enough quality for most people and vast enough but incomplete collections of music. All while navigating the maze of licensing internationally. How many listeners do you believe would rather open Spotify/iTunes/WinAmp and press play to hear music and how many would rather navigate a album specific experience. If experience is so important, it can still be done in the streaming focused world of today (without standardised formats like Matroska). Just package it as an app (native or web), publish it on the app stores and let the app store take a 30% cut. Apps do not appear to be a popular format for music albums or for movies, even though they were attempted.
im3w1l 4y ago
Yes I get a dystopic vibe, but for an entirely different reason. As for what we lost, I would say a gradual loss of the social element. Music used to be something that everyone did. Then become something that musicians did and other people listened to, but at least you got to see them perform and create a shared experience. Then we started recording music so you could listen to it at home, but there was still the social element of listening to the same music and sharing recommendations and forming subcultures based on listening to the same music. Now with dj spotify you don't even need to discuss music with other people. Now don't get me wrong, of course there are still lots of people doing music for the fun of it, people still go to live performances, people still share recommendations. So it isn't fully lost by any means, just a question of degrees.
hyperbovine 4y ago
Dystopian you say? For $15 a month I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button, wirelessly on an ultrapowerful mobile computing device that fits comfortably in my pocket. Place yourself in about 1997 and savor that statement for a moment. But what have we gained?
- javajosh 4y ago
  You're right, baby scifi Josh wanted this, got it, and somehow, violating all expectations, it sucked. It happens.
  - mindslight 4y ago
    The difference is who controls the software, and ultimately what their incentives are. Back then, you imagined the software serving you - details you hadn't thought of were to be be fleshed out in a way that made sense to you, to serve your interests. Now it's like our old dreams in name only. It hits all the bullet points, but the functionality is all wrong because companies want to make users the dataset rather than operators in control. And while one of their incentives is user satisfaction, it's competing with engagement, revenue side channels, price discrimination, etc.
- caymanjim 4y ago
  And what do people do with this power? Listen on shitty tinny phone speakers or comically bad earbuds. Give me back my glorious 80s stereo.
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    You'll be hard pressed to buy comically bad earbud nowadays. In terms of fidelity and price, average earbuds beat an average 80s stereo so hard, it's not even funny.
    - javajosh 4y ago
      Um, what? I mean, sure wired $15 earbuds exist that sound amazing, but their existence does NOT preclude the existence of terrible earbuds, especially of the BT variety.
gilbetron 4y ago
The physicality of cassettes/records/CDs/mini-disks was fun, and listening to an entire album sometimes was really cool - but almost entirely not. Most albums were padded with crap to fill it up so people didn't feel ripped off. Remember, an album in 1985 cost $40 in 2022 dollars. Sure, there were occasional albums that the artist really thought about, including the slipcase, and the physicality of that I miss. But you can still great albums and listen to them in their entirety. Revisiting that nostalgia in 2022 recently, and I've found the joy from an album isn't really what it used to be - mostly because we aren't trapped anymore. Want to listen to albums? Stop using Spotify. I honestly don't get why people choose that one. Youtube music blows it out of the water, and you can get ad-free youtube with it as well, and share all of it with your "family". Plus it has whole albums as one of the options when you search for artist/song.
- allturtles 4y ago
  > Most albums were padded with crap to fill it up so people didn't feel ripped off. This may be true, but you could always just buy the good albums. I owned a number of CDs/cassettes back in the day and I would listen to them and enjoy them front-to-back, over and over. Another aspect of it is that very often what's familiar sounds good, so by listening to the whole album, all of it (or more of it) would start to sound good, not just the radio tracks you were already familiar with. Finally, there are tracks on some albums that may seem odd, or not even particularly musical out of context, but still add to the overall experience (e.g. "Fitter, Happier" on OK Computer, or the instrumental filler tracks on Ill Communication).
  - gilbetron 4y ago
    I 100% agree about the different experience of listening to good/great/amazing albums and the benefits of doing so. It's just that it is a pretty rare experience, particularly these days! A definite downside of our current music situation is that making an album like that is something that is really exceptional, since people rarely listen to music in that manner anymore. However, I wonder if the total number of "holistic" albums are greater now, just because there is far more music being made? :thinking-emoji: I wore out my Synchronicity tape back in the 80s :) Listened to the album randomly a couple of months ago and it is spooky how the experience re-asserted itself into my being. I just know every nook and cranny of the album.
fivre 4y ago
The media of the day have always had an outsize influence on the format of music. The modern album _exists_ because LPs became available, and the format just kinda persisted because the media after were also limited to a particular length. We're used to this, but we just happened to be born well after the point where listening to music required hiring a chamber orchestra, and the music listened to was designed for that format. I don't like the playlist (and now, TikTok)-driven market--I too prefer listening to a full album straight through--but there's not really anything more inherently musical about the formats that came before. For better or worse, that's just the nature of the industry.
cortesoft 4y ago
You can still buy music in physical form, so nothing has been lost. If you like that method, you can still do it. Most people don’t, however, because it is much cheaper and easier to stream. Clearly what we have lost is not worth the price to maintain what we had, or people would still be buying music instead of streaming.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

Honestly I like physical media because manipulating them is pleasurable especially vinyl but the issue with playlist is only a Spotify UX issue. Apple Music doesn’t have it. YouTube Music doesn’t have it. It’s just that Spotify has decided that the way to optimise revenue is to focus on being an exclusive provider of some original contents in the form of podcasts and has slowly started making the listening music side of the application worse and worse since.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago

Turntables are not cheap because of the vinyl revival, so they are trendy, hence expensive. Nobody wants CD players :(

javajosh 4y ago
I know! CDs are such a great format, and as long as the ink doesn't corrode the aluminum layer, they can last a very long time. They are more compact than vinyl, they don't suffer from lots of vinyl's error modes but they still have things like liner notes. Plus they represent an album at a theoretical maximum of fidelity and reproducibility. What's not to like?
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  Physical storage space. ;) My laptop is smaller than any collection of CDs and can store an entire building of them in the space of 12 jewel cases. If you include my phone and a cellular connection for streaming, the entire world of music can be accessed in a device smaller than any portable CD player. And the speakers in my iPhone are better than most stereos from the same era. We truly live in the world where science fiction has become reality. :D
  - ddingus 4y ago
    The speakers... A while back, my wife and I went for a week way out in the sticks. We live in Oregon, and our favorite place is out in the Ochoco high desert National Forest. And nothing works there. I mean nothing except for AM radio late at night.[1] After a few days, our hearing settles back to what is supposed to be normal. City life is loud and our hearing system compensates in various ways that reduce our ability to really appreciate sound. After hearing that our ability to listen has relaxed into high potential mode, we decided to get the MacBook out and watch a movie. We had been saving this experience for a good time and it all came together nicely! We were blown away![0] Seriously. The amount and quality, fidelity of sound coming out of that MacBook was insane! Of course it all was soft on the low end. Not too much we could do about that because physics, but otherwise the whole experience was a real treat! I find it difficult to communicate the impact. Here we are, gentle noises from our camp fire a modest distance away, various crackles, pops, hisses and an equally gentle breeze and our own bodies were the only sounds present outside of the movie sound track. Mixed in nicely with all that was our movie. Actually a couple of them because we repeated the experience a couple times. It was so damn good! All I can really say here is you should definitely give this a try! So much engineering, better materials, better software, and it all adds right the fuck up. I really did not expect what I heard at all. Very highly recommended. ------ [0] And to be clear, I am talking about all that we did hear when we did not expect to. Truth is, we were camping with a MacBook. The sound we heard wea respectable, despite it being small speakers and all that goes mobile devices. It seemed sci-fi like to us. The tech advances, engineering all add up. And that's the blown away part. Experiencing a sum like that, rather than incrementally. The context really helped raise the impact. [1] And that is a great experience! Any radio will be fun, but if you can get hold of a 70's maybe 80's era one with multiple frequency bands, say short wave, broadcast, and any others, the isolation means getting to connect to the world old school tuning stuff in from all over the place! AM, on a good radio, is an interesting experience and again on a good radio optimized for what the tech actually does, will sound better than you think. And how it colors the material is something I crave. Comes from growing up listening to a fine Zenith "Trans Oceanic" radio with almost god like performance, but I digress...
rosseloh 4y ago
I like CDs. I just don't listen to music on physical media enough to really justify having a dedicated setup anymore. My boss, on the other hand, collects the damn things. He's got an entire large bookshelf filled with vintage CD players... To me, vinyl is a collectible, or at least, a way to show "yes I appreciate this music and want to show off that I enjoy it". If I like an artist/album enough, I'll buy the vinyl if I can. But it usually just sits on the shelf looking pretty. I got lucky and my player (nothing special but it works so long as you have a good cartridge) was from my dad. When I actually listen to said album, it's usually on my phone over bluetooth (earbuds or in the car), or even if I'm listening on the "hi fi" it's streaming. Not to say that I never play albums on the turntable, it's just not that often.
- patentatt 4y ago
  > vintage CD players Now I feel old. I remember the first time I saw and heard a Compact Disc. It was a rainbow colored object straight from the future. It was magical, the whole family gathered around the little boom box like thing playing some classical music CD. Also, I hope your boss doesn't actually listen to any CD player built before about the mid 00's or so. Maybe mid-90s if you're talking mega-bucks (at the time) like a Mark Levinson or Theta Digital. But advances in DACs in the last ~20 years made everything prior very obsolete. Nowadays you can get commodity chips in the single digit dollar range that are for all intents and purposes faultless.
the_only_law 4y ago
Tapes seem to have made a comeback in certain Punk/Rap scenes, but a lot of it seems mostly aesthetic/an attempt to replicate some period l (see Memphis phonk: where home recorded tapes were a cornerstone of the genre and have had a bit of a revival in the last years)

m1gu3l 4y ago

> "But what have we lost?!" make a comment or thread about spotify/pandora/tidal and sit back and wait to see how long it takes for some “audiophile” to come along and to admonish you and tell you a story about their setup and music appreciation “workflow” and how it is better and somehow more correct. we lost nothing. it is all still here. and, apparently, the added bonus of droves of sweaty people telling you you’re doing it wrong. life is grand.

pessimizer 4y ago
Looks like we lost the ability to go through a list of songs from an album, episodes from a podcast, or podcasts from a collection, which is the subject of TFA.
- sosull 4y ago
  Slightly beside the point, but it is a problem that just doesn’t afflict Apple Music: those folks seem totally happy to make the kind of software that plays albums in sequence. The true surprise is that a century-old function has become a differentiating feature.
javajosh 4y ago
You might reasonably call me a Luddite, but an audiophile? Not in the sense you mean. I don't claim I can hear expensive speaker cables (I got mine at Home Depot btw). Great gear from the 90's and 00's is available cheap, and it's great. It has buttons. And I don't have to pay someone to continue accessing my music and I can listen to music in an album centric way. Nor am I claiming I'm more correct (although I guess I'm pretty proud of having found a somewhat contrarian path to take the trade-offs I think matter most.) You want to listen to spotify on your phone and bt headphones - all of which is subject to decay, decay of money, battery, connectivity - meanwhile I'll listen to my library with wired components that run smoothly and no latency without drops or a monthly bill. You get all-in-one go anywhere convenience, I get old school tactile control. Neither of us is doing it wrong. But yeah, I like mine better which is why I do it that way (and I assume the same is true for you, unless you're a masochist, and if so I say great, keeping doing you.)
4y ago

frogstomp19 4y ago

I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. In the streaming era, it's easier than ever before to discover new artists and listen to an unprecedented variety of music with minimal investment. If it's slightly cumbersome to listen to albums on Spotify, it's still much less cumbersome that going to a store to buy a CD or purchasing online and waiting for it to arrive + keeping your collection physically organized and in good condition. I don't absolutely love Spotify but I'm not going back to a CD collection.

javajosh 4y ago
>I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. We've lost: cover art, liner notes, the ability to share or sell your music without 3rd party permission, music stores, and in many cases local music scenes that formed around music stores. Bret Victor has been harping on this for years, but we've also lost a great deal of tactility - putting a CD in a player and pressing buttons to play it uses your hands in pleasant ways that screens just aren't. As for discovery, the promise is greater than reality. I used Spotify for a while specifically for this purpose, but I didn't discover a single new artist through it. YouTube, by contrast, has introduced me to new artists, as have a few radio stations like KCRW and KQED (who both have excellent YT channels too). And you know what? Music discovery is a different mode of listening than enjoying my library and ne'er the twain shall meet, IMHO.
- so_dewy 4y ago
  >We've lost: cover art Spotify does have cover art for albums, at least for me it does. > Music discovery is a different mode of listening For me it really is the same mode. I regularly discover new artists when my handcrafted playlists finish playing and it starts to play music based on the playlist I just listened to
  - mariusor 4y ago
    > Spotify does have cover art for albums, at least for me it does. I think parent means something like this: https://www.encartespop.com.br/2012/09/encarte-pink-floyd-dark-side-of-moon.html https://www.encartespop.com.br/2012/09/encarte-pink-floyd-da... The vinyl and especially CD covers were sometimes a little more than just barren images.

daveoc64 4y ago

Enjoyment of music linked to a specific physical item seems incredibly shallow to me. If the music is worth listening to, the medium shouldn't matter at all.

objclxt 4y ago
> Enjoyment of music linked to a specific physical item seems incredibly shallow to me. To a certain extent, but across the arts there's always artists that want to play with the format, so a changing of format can result in something being re-contextualised. For example, you can have [multisided vinyl][1] with hidden tracks, or loop a track onto itself so the record plays forever (like Sergeant Pepper). Neither are really possible with MP3 (there's a Brian Eno record that does both (the track bifurcates and loops at them end), so you get a random sample looping at the end of the LP). I am not saying this means the enjoyment of the music is lessened when you listen to it digitally - just that plenty of artists have written and produced pieces with the physical format at the front of their minds. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisided_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisided_record
- sqlacid 4y ago
  I'll never forget discovering the third track of Monty Python's Matching Tie and Handkerchief, thought I'd lost my mind. As an Eno fan I'm not familiar with the mentioned album. King Crimson would put hidden messages printed in the vinyl inner track, I remember seeing "The next step is Discipline", which was their next album. I also miss the thriving bootleg community, picture discs.
- alexvoda 4y ago
  I see no reason why all of that could not be done in software. Same as DVD menus. For the record, VLC supports DVD menus and the Matroska container format (mkv, mka, mks, and the basis for webm) supports all of the features imagined so far. I believe the demand for the content far outweighed the demand for the presentation layer. All of these forms of interactivity however didn't prove popular in the digital world. Think of DVD's again. How often would you have ripped a DVD into a 4 or 8 GiB ISO in order to preserve the full experience and how often would you have rather ripped just the video file ~400 MiB, reencoded using a modern codec. Netflix optimises for the latter. If you allow for programability, all features of music albums and more can be recreated. What people want is no fuss instant access to the popular music of the moment therefore we have streaming services with good enough quality for most people and vast enough but incomplete collections of music. All while navigating the maze of licensing internationally. How many listeners do you believe would rather open Spotify/iTunes/WinAmp and press play to hear music and how many would rather navigate a album specific experience. If experience is so important, it can still be done in the streaming focused world of today (without standardised formats like Matroska). Just package it as an app (native or web), publish it on the app stores and let the app store take a 30% cut. Apps do not appear to be a popular format for music albums or for movies, even though they were attempted.

im3w1l 4y ago

Yes I get a dystopic vibe, but for an entirely different reason. As for what we lost, I would say a gradual loss of the social element. Music used to be something that everyone did. Then become something that musicians did and other people listened to, but at least you got to see them perform and create a shared experience. Then we started recording music so you could listen to it at home, but there was still the social element of listening to the same music and sharing recommendations and forming subcultures based on listening to the same music. Now with dj spotify you don't even need to discuss music with other people. Now don't get me wrong, of course there are still lots of people doing music for the fun of it, people still go to live performances, people still share recommendations. So it isn't fully lost by any means, just a question of degrees.

hyperbovine 4y ago

Dystopian you say? For $15 a month I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button, wirelessly on an ultrapowerful mobile computing device that fits comfortably in my pocket. Place yourself in about 1997 and savor that statement for a moment. But what have we gained?

javajosh 4y ago
You're right, baby scifi Josh wanted this, got it, and somehow, violating all expectations, it sucked. It happens.
- mindslight 4y ago
  The difference is who controls the software, and ultimately what their incentives are. Back then, you imagined the software serving you - details you hadn't thought of were to be be fleshed out in a way that made sense to you, to serve your interests. Now it's like our old dreams in name only. It hits all the bullet points, but the functionality is all wrong because companies want to make users the dataset rather than operators in control. And while one of their incentives is user satisfaction, it's competing with engagement, revenue side channels, price discrimination, etc.
caymanjim 4y ago
And what do people do with this power? Listen on shitty tinny phone speakers or comically bad earbuds. Give me back my glorious 80s stereo.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  You'll be hard pressed to buy comically bad earbud nowadays. In terms of fidelity and price, average earbuds beat an average 80s stereo so hard, it's not even funny.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    Um, what? I mean, sure wired $15 earbuds exist that sound amazing, but their existence does NOT preclude the existence of terrible earbuds, especially of the BT variety.

gilbetron 4y ago

The physicality of cassettes/records/CDs/mini-disks was fun, and listening to an entire album sometimes was really cool - but almost entirely not. Most albums were padded with crap to fill it up so people didn't feel ripped off. Remember, an album in 1985 cost $40 in 2022 dollars. Sure, there were occasional albums that the artist really thought about, including the slipcase, and the physicality of that I miss. But you can still great albums and listen to them in their entirety. Revisiting that nostalgia in 2022 recently, and I've found the joy from an album isn't really what it used to be - mostly because we aren't trapped anymore. Want to listen to albums? Stop using Spotify. I honestly don't get why people choose that one. Youtube music blows it out of the water, and you can get ad-free youtube with it as well, and share all of it with your "family". Plus it has whole albums as one of the options when you search for artist/song.

allturtles 4y ago
> Most albums were padded with crap to fill it up so people didn't feel ripped off. This may be true, but you could always just buy the good albums. I owned a number of CDs/cassettes back in the day and I would listen to them and enjoy them front-to-back, over and over. Another aspect of it is that very often what's familiar sounds good, so by listening to the whole album, all of it (or more of it) would start to sound good, not just the radio tracks you were already familiar with. Finally, there are tracks on some albums that may seem odd, or not even particularly musical out of context, but still add to the overall experience (e.g. "Fitter, Happier" on OK Computer, or the instrumental filler tracks on Ill Communication).
- gilbetron 4y ago
  I 100% agree about the different experience of listening to good/great/amazing albums and the benefits of doing so. It's just that it is a pretty rare experience, particularly these days! A definite downside of our current music situation is that making an album like that is something that is really exceptional, since people rarely listen to music in that manner anymore. However, I wonder if the total number of "holistic" albums are greater now, just because there is far more music being made? :thinking-emoji: I wore out my Synchronicity tape back in the 80s :) Listened to the album randomly a couple of months ago and it is spooky how the experience re-asserted itself into my being. I just know every nook and cranny of the album.

fivre 4y ago

The media of the day have always had an outsize influence on the format of music. The modern album _exists_ because LPs became available, and the format just kinda persisted because the media after were also limited to a particular length. We're used to this, but we just happened to be born well after the point where listening to music required hiring a chamber orchestra, and the music listened to was designed for that format. I don't like the playlist (and now, TikTok)-driven market--I too prefer listening to a full album straight through--but there's not really anything more inherently musical about the formats that came before. For better or worse, that's just the nature of the industry.

cortesoft 4y ago

You can still buy music in physical form, so nothing has been lost. If you like that method, you can still do it. Most people don’t, however, because it is much cheaper and easier to stream. Clearly what we have lost is not worth the price to maintain what we had, or people would still be buying music instead of streaming.