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The damage on the artistic side has been severe too. There was once some prattle about getting unsigned bands heard - which led ben to astutely reference the quality of 'free' online writing as compared to what you buy in Waterstones. But what's happened instead is that there's no point in musicians making their music anything other than immediate, straightforward and instance. The music press now idiotically list tracks to 'burn' to your iPod, and discard the rest of the album. What's that going to do for the art of the album, the idea of constructing a 60 minute work, which deserves to be listened to in one sitting? It's going to destroy it, basically.
It also means that every song has to be a single, now. When people can pick n choose which album tracks they download and pay for, they're going to go with the immediate catchy stuff - not the songs that slowly grow on you and become your favourites after months of getting to know them. The pressure will be on constructing albums of sheen-heavy pap.
Finally, the elimination of the physical presence of an album is also affecting the way people connect with their music. Vinyl nuts complain about the way CDs are too small, too plasticky, and don't carry the same emotional resonance as LP covers. Digital music requires you to do away with that altogether - a cornucopia of album sleeves, that put together uniquely identify themselves as your collection, with the visual impact trigering their own response, definition and memory is replaced with a series of scrolling lines on the screen of an iPod. Nice trade off.
So. Music's more about whether you've heard the right stuff, now. Embarrassed by not having the latest effort by Spazzfaced Dweeb on your iPod? It's only a click away, and you won't show yourself up the next time you and your be-Parka'd mates are comparing iPods down the local pub.
That was what i said back at the start of the year, dismissed as a dribbling madman by many members of the forum - but now the BBC News website has finally caught up with my astonishing insight here. Of course the irony is, they paid a real professor to come up with this statement, when if they'd looked, they could have found basically the same thing, for free, on the internet. Written by me. Ages ago.
Anyway, the article stops just short of calling people who disagreed with me (eg, Misc) "stupid fucking wrong fuckheads" and by association making a fool out of anyone who's ever disagreed with me on anything, ever, but that's the implicit message of the piece.
So - yeah. Digital is disconnecting people from their music - it's all just disposable, free, and unengaging. Individuals who have advocated the ipod/ downloading model (eg Scrawny, London, Dang) are personally responsible for ruining music. Nice one guys. You can discuss this, but it's probably best just to post retractions and apologies here, and I'll consider whether you shoul be forgiven, for fucking it all up for everyone.
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This could also have to do with a lot of 'so called' popular music these days being nothing more than disposable rubbish.
It's not fair to lay the blame on a format though, it's about availability, I mean when I was a kid you had to go to a specific shop usually by the footie ground to buy a replica football shirt so they were for real fans only, now you can get them in JD sports every fucker has one on.
Fans of music will always be fans, sheep will always follow what they're told, and there's a lot of sheep about.
This could also have to do with a lot of 'so called' popular music these days being nothing more than disposable rubbish.
I was thinking this the other day, watching Life On Mars (actually I think this a lot, almost all the time, in fact) when the 70s people were walking around in 70s world and listening to Bowie and Lou and The Who... I thought, 'that music is still fantastic, imagine hearing it for the first time'... music hardly ever gets me as excited now as 'old-fashioned' music did/does.
There have been some great bands in the past few years, but nothing that I think will remain stamped into aural history.
I mean both Babyshambles and The Arctic Monkeys have been praised to death by the music press, and while listenable they're really nothing to write home about. Frankly, if so called popular music wasn't in such a fucking state they'd invisibly slide right under the radar.
-------------------- my own brother a god dam shit sucking vampire!!! you wait till mum finds out buddy!
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i think the download culture is a bad thing, well the huge myspace (which is rong) thing about bands building a following (take my mates band feable wiener - huge on myspace) through spacktards on computers. napster/soulseek/limewire/whatever the kids are using today doesn't do anything other than pipe vast amounts of rubbish in. i have so many mp3s from my time of massive download, have i listened to them all? no. they're there for the "ooh i need that". then i never listened to them. nowadays? mp3 blogs. i love them. its someone going through their stuff and picking out gems. like soulsides, the guy who runs that has an amazing collection. i don't even go in every day any more, just now and then. then moebius rex he's good for more "now" stuff. plus i'm buying what i want when i can afford.
downloadatonneo'stuff is like supersizing a mcmeal. its the whole gotta have gotta have. and then carrying your whole collection out with you wherever you go. does it make you love all the stuff you have? no. you just keep flicking through. mixtapes. tapesformates etc. much better. more personal.
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There's probably more articles been published predicting the end of music than there are mp3s on all the iPods in the world added together.
Yeah, the world's speeding up beyond belief, everything's more instant, from cash machines to mobile phones to broadband to microwaves to iPods and all points in between. But it won't last forever. And ideas for good music will never run out, even if there's a bit of a general lull in originality from time to time.
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I think we'd need to know more about this study before we go allowing Thorn to assume that he is correct. How, in two weeks, did they comvie to this conclusion?
Most people who care about music continue to listen to it, and discover it. Yes, you might consume more individual pieces of music rather than listen to same ones over and over, but you could just as easily blame this on DJ culture. Also, if we're talking about previous generations, then music was the key bond for youth cultures, and it was associated with whatever political and social changes were going on. It meant something, because we were less apathetic about our situations in general. Also, we form virtual communities in different ways now, so we no longer rely on music and the scene to define ourselves as much as we would have done.
The study is only supposedly showing the people are 'no longer excited at discovering and playing unfamiliar work' In two weeks - what - did they just bombard somebody with Mp3s? Give somebody unlimited access to music who's never owned an ipod before?
Thorn's arguments seem to rest on music being intrinsically linked with the economy. We have to dismiss his ridiculous technophobia and try and discover what he's actually saying here. That if you pay for something, you value it more...But is this the correct way to appraise art? If you can turn an experience into a 'thing' then it is more emotionally engaging...But doesn't this just reflect how we've been trained by the industry?
And, I would be interested to know who the people in the survey were. The industry presumably targets kids. Kids are more prone to immersing themselves into the culture of an artists - clothes, magazines, ringtones, haircut, basically to become little autonomous marketing drones. It's fine for us to go O yes, ipods are killing music, but that could also be down to the fact that we're cracking on, and a hell of a lot of people from our generation would happily admit to not liking hip hop or rap, when that's the dominant form of music for the kids now. Stand outside HMV on a saturday and you'll get people coming up to you and selling you CDs of their own garage produced hip hop tracks. Did the mixtape make people more apathetic? I don't think so, so this proliferation of accesible digitised music may make people more apathetic to obtaining music few traditional channels, like the music store (online or otherwise), but I would wager that it will be better for people who find this stuff through myspace or some kind of peer system. It's in its infancy, but surely it's better than relying on the same people selling the music to tell you what's good or not?
But what this whole thing sounds like is "there's too much choice". This probably isn't a problem for people who are used to being able to download music for the start, but for us, who were around in its conception, we're at the stage of having being locked in HMV for a few weeks, having listened to everything and watched everything, and now wondering what to do. Blamed the media for our lack of self control. Our attitude conflicts with the technology, but I don't believe that music as an artform does, in terms of presentation and storage. It's less of a revolution that being able to store in the first placeall was, and you could hardly argue that now people can listen to music at home without having to go and see a live performance, music is in some way degraded. Or maybe you could. But it sounds a bit ridiculous. It's up to us to find the music ourselves now, more pro-actively than before.
I'm interested in this, because my gut feeling is that this is technophobia/fear of change, like we've reached the point where we've undergone so much change in our daily lives at the hands of computers, that we're suffering from 'change fatigue' more than anything else.
[ 11.01.2006, 10:40: Message edited by: Dr. Benway ]
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Be aware that this is all coming from a great big vinyl luddite, who still thinks there’s plenty of great contemporary music out there, much of it in the singles/album charts.
The album itself was a product of technology.
I’d dispute that great singles, or even individual songs, have to be “straightforward” in order to be appealing to an audience.
That downloading makes accessible to people great vast piles of music to a generation with ease is inescapably the case, but why does this have to be a bad thing? If young people are able to get copies of Bowie or Joplin or Zeppelin or whoever – that they might otherwise balk at actually buying on CD – from the internet, is that not a good thing? Isn’t there the potential for people to develop and expand a love of and enthusiasm for music of a much wider variety than they might otherwise be exposed to?
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One of the reasons I guess people may think I’m apathetic about music could be that I hardly ever really ‘rave’ about a band like I used to. Time was, in order to discover new music I used to listen to John Peel, read various music magazines (NME, MM and so forth), tune into 6Music or scroll through the numerous ‘indie’ stations on the web. Sometimes word of mouth, sometimes falling for the hype, sometimes by accident, but it was a hunt and the prey I was hunting was elusive and hard to find.
Then the internet proper arrived, there was prey everywhere. No longer did I have to hunt, they prey strolled right up to my door and lay down showing me it’s belly. Without the internet I’d not be listening to these little groups who usually play to 30 or so people in the backrooms of bars in Buttfuck Idaho, well not unless John Peel had been on vacation there.
Now I can cherry pick what I want I’m more choosy, I download a lot, I listen to a lot, and a lot of it is stuff that five years ago I would have called ‘good’ and probably have pushed or gone out to buy, nowadays simply because of the volume of music I listen to they are quickly consigned to the ‘meh’ pile. Now in order to grab my attention it has to be ‘really good’, not because I’m apathetic about music, but because I have more to choose from.
I’d hope that having to compete from the outset on a global stage would cause up and coming groups to try harder, to explore their artistry and hone their skills. Reality is, it just means that you get to hear a lot of crap.
quote:Originally posted by Boy Racer: The album itself was a product of technology.
Yes it is.
quote:That downloading makes accessible to people great vast piles of music to a generation with ease is inescapably the case, but why does this have to be a bad thing? If young people are able to get copies of Bowie or Joplin or Zeppelin or whoever – that they might otherwise balk at actually buying on CD – from the internet, is that not a good thing? Isn’t there the potential for people to develop and expand a love of and enthusiasm for music of a much wider variety than they might otherwise be exposed to?
The potential is there, yes, and it doesn't have to be a bad thing - it's just the way it's worked out. It makes music less personal and even more of a commodity. It's just become about having the 'right' songs on your iPod so that when you all whip them out in the pub you don't look behind the times, or some stupid cock-measuring competition about what's on your media player. This isn't something I've invented - there's a successful book called iPod therefore I am that actually tells people what they should put on their iPod. It's not about getting into music - it's about being assured that you're getting music right. It's similar mentality to people who get their mobile phones out at gigs, either to take a blurry one megapixel flash-less picture or to actually ring someone up halfway through the gig. It's no longer about going there and enjoying it - just about letting other people know you went.
quote:Originally done said by Benway We have to dismiss his ridiculous technophobia
It's not technophobic to consider that technology might have a detrimental effect on the medium it serves - would you consider yourself a technophobe for complaining about CGI in films? Or a better analogy would maybe be kovacs, who continually laments the manner in which DVD has created movies that demand to be watched in slow motion. Another example would be something like MTV - new technology that placed the emphasis on a band's image in a way that meant it could be manipulated and packaged with greater precision than ever before. It might have sounded luddite to slag off MTV in the eighties, but it did have a detrimental effect on the quality of the industry's output.
Something that means albums are reduced to three tracks that immediately grab you, with the rest to be discarded (the approach currently espoused by the music press) isn't really good for the continuation of the album as an artform. As damo says - it just becomes a situation where you get all the stuff you've been told to get and stuff it on your MP3 player and just rest happy knowing that you downloaded the correct tracks.
quote:If you can turn an experience into a 'thing' then it is more emotionally engaging...But doesn't this just reflect how we've been trained by the industry?
But it's MP3 players that are being heavily promoted as an 'experience'. I worked the CE industry for five years and the whole time I seemed to be sitting through presentations about flagging these products up as a lifestyle experience etc etc. It's actually by buying into a substandard format and assuming its the way forward because you're being told it is (and anyway, the music is free, even if it does sound like guff) that demonstrates the way in which people respond to the conditioning of the industry.
quote: but I would wager that it will be better for people who find this stuff through myspace or some kind of peer system. It's in its infancy, but surely it's better than relying on the same people selling the music to tell you what's good or not?
You mention some kind of peer system as though it were a big step forward - yet you've already mentioned the mixtape. I don't know of a time when people relied on the same folk selling the music to tell you what's good or not. When I was a teen I used to swap albums with friends, borrow stuuf from the library basically seek it out. Now, of course, it's all right there in front of you and if it doesn't grab you straight away, i guess you can move onto the next thing. I guess that's the way it engenders apathy in the end. You can get it instantly, dismiss it instantly claim you've 'done' it and just move on. Disposable, effortless, cheap sounding. The future of music.
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Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: It's just become about having the 'right' songs on your iPod so that when you all whip them out in the pub you don't look behind the times, or some stupid cock-measuring competition about what's on your media player. This isn't something I've invented - there's a successful book called iPod therefore I am that actually tells people what they should put on their iPod. It's not about getting into music - it's about being assured that you're getting music right. It's similar mentality to people who get their mobile phones out at gigs, either to take a blurry one megapixel flash-less picture or to actually ring someone up halfway through the gig. It's no longer about going there and enjoying it - just about letting other people know you went.
Surely, though, these people are just wankers and were wankers before iPods were invented and would still be wankers even if we lived in a totally iPodless world? It's not the fault of mp3 players that people like this exist, and it's a tad unfair lay the blame for their existence on the doormat of the mp3 player.
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quote:Originally posted by Louche: Surely, though, these people are just wankers and were wankers before iPods were invented and would still be wankers even if we lived in a totally iPodless world? It's not the fault of mp3 players that people like this exist, and it's a tad unfair lay the blame for their existence on the doormat of the mp3 player.
I dunno - it's hard to imagine a thread about "What are the A and Z CDs in your CD collection". There's something about the way things are now, that actually makes people behave in this terrible way.
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My CD's have always been in alphabetical order Thorn, and they still are. (Well not right now as I've just finished scanning them in)
All Itunes does for me is help me find and play music on demand without ending up like I used to on a late Friday night/early Saturday morning sitting in front of my stereo system surrounded by pile upon pile of CD's.
It's made my usual listening to music sessions much easier.
I think though that had we been asked the A - Z question that the likes of myself and Wayne would probably know the answer, because we 'love' music.
Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: I dunno - it's hard to imagine a thread about "What are the A and Z CDs in your CD collection". There's something about the way things are now, that actually makes people behave in this terrible way.
I don’t actually think it’s much of a stretch. Maybe not ‘what are the A and Z CDs’ but I bet the lifetime of TeeMo has seen a ‘what’s on the top of your CD pile’ typee thread. And the people you were whingeing about originally are sheep who put what they’re told to on an mp3 player because they are straining after some kind of cool. Rather than people with actual really real personal taste, which is who you’re having a bit of a dig at in that last sentence.
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I must admit that since owning the iPod I have become musically lazy - my purchase of CDs has come down at an alarming rate - only a couple of years ago I would buy sometimes 10 CDs a week, yet now I doubt I even bought 10 CDs last year. Its not because I am harcore downloading - quite the opposite in fact - when I did download music, it would be to try before you buy, and if I heard and liked it, I went out and bought it.
The problem I have is that, since having about 60% of my musical collection on a box no bigger than a fag packet, I am actually starting to really listen to all the stuff I had bought before - I am discovering the music I already own - damn there is a lot of crap in there but where there's shit, there's diamonds. Even by bands I knew well, obscure little tracks that have just become instant favourites - undiscovered beauties that get plenty of replay to make up for their ignorance, like a father reaquainted with a teenage offspring and trying to make up for all the years of neglect. Too much too little too late? Music's a bit more forgiving thankfully.
And not only that but songs from the youth that you rediscover or suddenly get a stupid urge to play - christ imagine sitting on the bus and scrabbling around to find an old Jethro Tull or Men without Hats CD - you'd be ashamed, embarrassed - with the iPod you can bop away to Safety Dance in your own private Idaho, everyone around oblivious to your choice of shame. But then I think we are all doing it anyway - whats to say that twenty-something hipster in her sexy boots and courture dress isn't getting down to Iron Maiden, or the City Gent in his trad Pinstripe and Bowler getting Jiggy to fiddy cent?
But I digress. Yes in a way iPods have killed my enthusiasm for new music, but it will return in time, much like the memories of seeing my first gig - Level 42, my 18th Birthday at Wembley - as the joy of hearing Hot Water for the first time in years makes life good.
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Still I'm trying to recover from the trauma of arguing with Thorn whilst agreeing with Louche.
Who does this comparing ipod lists thing Thorn, do you? Surely that book is just an extention of the pathological muso list obsession? Also, no one is forcing people to buy that book. The sort of people who would are indeed twats IMO.
Surely the "Download: these tracks" thing in the music press is intended as a sampler for the album as a whole rather than the instruction; "Download these and bin the rest". And to a certain extent I think that if albums are to continue as an artform then musicians generally need to make them with less filler.
I don't own a media player but even if I did (when I do) it wouldn't be about having any list other than one that conforms to my own tastes, which I'm always seeking to expand and develop. And I certainly wouldn't be comparing it to what other people had in any competetive sense. Although I might compare whilst eulogising about some band/artist/album/track that I thought they'd like that they didn't already have, or listening to/reading someone else doing the same to me. Like I already do.
[ 12.01.2006, 07:23: Message edited by: Boy Racer ]
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My CDs are in alphabetical order too. Never quite understand why this is considered geeky, although I suppose it could be if you only had like five CDs in your collection.
Think the first ones are three Air CDs followed by a large Natacha Atlas selection. At the end would be Yes or Neil Young I think. Don't think I've got any Z stuff, though I was hovering over some Zed Zed Top in the local hypermarket yesterday. I mean the stuff before Eliminator when they were just a great blues rock band.
I have't got an MP3 player anyway, except for the Diamond Rio I bought 7 years ago that's got 128meg space, a non-USB cable and about ten minutes battery life. I'm hoping to sell that to a museum one day as I still have the box and the receipt and everything. I've got a lot of CD-Rs full of MP3s though, which is a kind of compromise because instead of saying "which Stranglers album shall I listen to now?" it's more likely "which punk band's entire output including bootlegs and rarities shall I listen to for the whole day without having to change discs once?" This doesn't reduce my listening pleasure in any way.
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quote:Originally posted by Louche: Maybe not ‘what are the A and Z CDs’ but I bet the lifetime of TeeMo has seen a ‘what’s on the top of your CD pile’ typee thread.
I completely agree that in the past people would have talked about what music they were listening to, rather than the details of their cataloguing system (longest/ shortest song and the number of the times the word 'sex' appears in a search, ffs).
quote:And the people you were whingeing about originally are sheep who put what they’re told to on an mp3 player because they are straining after some kind of cool. Rather than people with actual really real personal taste, which is who you’re having a bit of a dig at in that last sentence.
My point is precisely that it isn't some 'other' group of people who are sheep, and have always been that way - it's much more insidious than that. As you correctly point out, instead of 'what are you listening to', it's now just about presenting raw data and hoping that that paints some kind of picture of you. Dang riffs on this with his comment that Black Mask should get his house in order, because he has more songs about love than hate.
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: It's not technophobic to consider that technology might have a detrimental effect on the medium it serves - would you consider yourself a technophobe for complaining about CGI in films?
No, I wouldn't think of myself as a technophobe for complaining about CGI, but I don't think that it's comparable with the digitisation of music. I'd agree that you're getting a product of inferior quality (in both cases - lol!!!!!) compared to a CD or record, but it's better than a tape, which is how I used to listen to music when CD players cost a million pounds. I know that tape is the obvious one to mention because it's the worst, but on an mp3 player, or mp3 playing home setup, the difference is pretty negligable assuming it's a good quality file, and it's only going to get better as storage space goes up. If you're going to get all what hi-fi on my ass, then of course 'nothing beats vinyl', but people will always be chucking that around.
I don't think that the listening experience is affected by digitisation in quite the same way that the viewing experience is of film. I can see what you mean, that both could be said to alienate the user and reduce authenticity, but for me, I don't mind CGI in films per se, but I don't really get excited by the prospect of seeing something that I see in computer games, something that doesn't exist in reality. With music, of course at some point, there is a person making it, and the music is as real as it ever has been. It's not being simulated any more than it is when it's on vinyl. What's my point again?
quote:Something that means albums are reduced to three tracks that immediately grab you, with the rest to be discarded (the approach currently espoused by the music press) isn't really good for the continuation of the album as an artform.
So far, people are still buying/downloading albums on the basis of singles. Are you suggesting that this will stop? That artists will be discouraged from producing albums? As a teenager (again, sorry), I made mixtapes of things that I liked off the albums, but continued to listen to the albums. When I got a CD player, I listened to a lot mix 'albums'. I don't see how this idea of actively interacting with the medium is either new or album killing. You've always been able to select what tracks you want to hear on an album or cd, use shuffle features etc, so people have been picking and choosing for about twenty yonks. If an album is great, and it's being listened to by somebody who likes the band, are they likely to discard all but the single type tunes?
But, you're saying that people are more likely to do this, because they don't physically have the 'thing', and they may not have paid for it. I don't think they would if they loved the band, and people will continue to love bands. Are you saying that future generations won't listen to albums, or that we now aren't listening to as many albums?
What I see as an advantage, you see as bad. Thanks to Mp3s, downloading etc, I've started getting into the Aphex Twin. I've been able to go to iTunes and pick a few of the top tracks that have been downloaded, and as a result, download the album (for free), and I love it and listen to it. I heard PiL on a soundtrack and as a result downloaded a few tracks and enjoyed them. I'm getting pleasure from music, which surely is the point of it? If people no longer gain pleasure from it, or people stop making good music, then you could argue that the MP3 is killing music. But I don't see this happening.
quote: You mention some kind of peer system as though it were a big step forward - yet you've already mentioned the mixtape. I don't know of a time when people relied on the same folk selling the music to tell you what's good or not. When I was a teen I used to swap albums with friends, borrow stuuf from the library basically seek it out.
Well, the peer system as it is is different to tapes and friends, because virtual communities can be larger, more specialised, and connected to the artists. You've got people out there making lists of their mp3s, putting their favourite artists in their signatures or whatever. Many of these places will be run by Scrawny, but many will not, and here you've got the chance to discover music outside of the ad world. Everybody can start up their own fanzine now, and as Damo said, you've got MP3 blogs, which I dip into myself when I fancy hearing something new and different. This doesn't exst in place of yor mates and their music tastes. This may not seem exciting to us, because we're not kids.
As for people filling their ipods with the 'correct' music, how does this affect what they actually listen to? I've got a few hundred mp3s that I've downloaded and never listened to, but chances are I would never have listened to them anyway if they were on CD or whatever.
I know that I sound like an advert for itunes with the way that I'm blabbing on, but I do believe that these wider virutal peer groups are a huge part of the future, and this is the only way that you can expect music to fit in with that.
quote: Disposable, effortless, cheap sounding.
To be fair, 99% of music has sounded like this for a long time, and it's not the fault of MP3s. I sometimes think this as well, but I realise that it's just a sign that I'm getting old.
[ 12.01.2006, 07:29: Message edited by: Dr. Benway ]
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I won't ever own a portable MP3 player for the same reasons as Benway, and I'll keep buying vinyl for as long as they make it - or until a superior format is invented, but when I do get my Mac I will be getting a Squeezebox, simply for convenience sake.
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I'be got over a thousand CD's and they are anally in order, numericals - (3 Colours Red, 3 Doors Down), through to A (A, Accept) right through the Z (Zombie Rob, ZZ Top)
The last time I had to put them in order it took me the best part of three and a half hours. And then all so I know where they are, and then go and play them on an auto-sorting iPod anyway
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Every new format has changed our experience of music forever. Imagine how mind-blowing the first recordings must have been, piped through a crackly gramophone. Or being able to hear classical music on the radio without having to pay to go to the theatre. Or when the Take On Me video was literally the best thing you'd ever seen in your life.
The digitisation of music has opened up possibilities like nothing else. However, I do genuinely believe that the decline of "the album" as a concise and focussed package of carefully ordered tracks and artwork is imminent, and I think it's a terrible shame. The vinyl purists have shown it is possible to zealously keep a concept alive, and I guess small numbers of albums as we know them will continue to be made. But I honestly think that in 10 or 20 years time long playing records will be a rarity and that most music buyers will be like old, toothless goats- nibbling frantically at anything vaguely edible, but unable to chew and digest.
I just think there is something very solid and special about an album that reflects a specific chunk of time in an artist's career. Individual tracks recorded here and there and released whenever just aren't as weighty somehow as a group of carefully selected and presented songs. I mean, there are plenty of individual songs that have special places in my heart, but albums are something else.
I sincerely believe that digital music is reducing attention span and fanning a sense of lazy, grabby greed that is rewarded by instantly recognisable or pleasing snippets. I am yet to be convinced that this is in any way a good thing.
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quote:It's just become about having the 'right' songs on your iPod so that when you all whip them out in the pub you don't look behind the times, or some stupid cock-measuring competition about what's on your media player. This isn't something I've invented - there's a successful book called iPod therefore I am that actually tells people what they should put on their iPod. It's not about getting into music - it's about being assured that you're getting music right.
Sorry to pick one bit from your post and ignore the rest Thorn but coming from yourself this really made me do a proper laugh...
Music, in part, has always had its snobs. I can think of one occasion last year when I incited George the Robots wrath for posting up a list of cds which I had recently bought. My choice of selection wasnt, in Georges opinion, up to scratch. Is this any different from the people you are talking about who only want the tracks for the cool factor?
Music snobbery is not a new thing and hasnt arisen from mp3 players imo.
I agree with Boy Racer
quote: That downloading makes accessible to people great vast piles of music to a generation with ease is inescapably the case, but why does this have to be a bad thing? If young people are able to get copies of Bowie or Joplin or Zeppelin or whoever – that they might otherwise balk at actually buying on CD – from the internet, is that not a good thing? Isn’t there the potential for people to develop and expand a love of and enthusiasm for music of a much wider variety than they might otherwise be exposed to?
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