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Drag-And-Drop: The Current Status of Album
04/07/2009 The world has gotten so small. I have 700 albums by 400 different bands that play music that fits neatly into 57 different genres all sitting on my iPod that I can stick in my pocket. That's over 22 hours of solid music. And I'll add more tomorrow. How do I know? Because it's there. Because I can. Because either the world is tiny or I am a giant. But probably the first. Someone 50 years ago, even someone 20 years ago would probably be amazed by something like this. If someone walked into a house in 1990 and saw 8 B.B. King albums, the entire collections of Steve Miller, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Elton John, and Billy Joel, plus a hundred albums from that decade alone, they'd probably think it was pretty cool - if not completely astounding. But 6 people on my hall in my dorm freshman year had more music than I do. Rough guess; I really have no idea. Sadly for the music industry, I was probably the only one who could account for where mine came from; but that's a conversation for another time. The point here is we're all overexposed - the guys on my hall, myself and the entire world, or at least everyone who can access the Internet. Music used to mean more. Remember CD's? You might. Remember when you had to physically go to the store to purchase music and actually looked at the album art? Bands used to stick hidden bonus tracks on the end of their albums. That "last track" was supposed to be 5 minutes long, and then all of the sudden when you got to the end there was 10 minutes of this weird silence and then BAM! Totally unexpected free music. Not anymore. Now, iTunes makes sure that you are aware that Track 11 is actually 15 minutes long, and that there is definitely a Track 12. How about cassettes? Remember those? You might not. Remember when you had to flip over to side B for the rest of the album and you had to manually fast forward to the song you wanted? People didn't used to skip tracks. Now they do. Limewire makes sure that you’ve got access to every album you could ever want, complete with plenty of tracks that never made it to radio. You can download and skip over with ease, thanks again to your user-friendly iTunes software. And remember mix CD's? Or better yet, mix tapes? See, here's the saddest part of all. This is the part of the story where Apple's On-The-Go playlists have emptied the love from our music. Mp3's have stolen the special something from songs that used to connect people. CD's weren't far off, but mix tapes were from the heart. You might have to watch an old movie to understand. It wasn't drag-and-drop, click-and-burn. People used to sit and listen through the duration of songs to make something for someone else, again for the duration. A mix tape meant using someone else's poetry to say something yourself, and giving context to a song in a no-longer-existing interpersonal way - a way that didn't allow for the effortless skipping of tracks. So go ahead and give me a mix CD. Burn me your favorite playlist. In fact, burn me your favorite 5. Or just give me your 10 favorite albums. I won't appreciate it as much as a single cassette, but that's nothing personal. It's not intentional. See, I can't help my attention span, so I might have to just skip a track or two, or maybe ignore a couple of those albums. And that's alright because I know you didn't really listen to this stuff either. Comments [post a comment]
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Friday, September 03, 2010
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