#spotification

"I never buy, or rarely buy Greatest Hits albums any more. Because Greatest Hits albums... okay you get their best songs... but they never quite fit together because they're all from different periods. Whereas if you buy someone's album, it's a slice of their creativity over the space of a few months. And even though not all of the songs are as strong, it kind of works as a unit."

Frank Skinner, 2006, comparing the England football team to a Greatest Hits album.

There is a wonderful series of podcasts by the comedians Frank Skinner and David Baddiel recorded in 2006 at the World Cup in Germany. If you like international football, the episode after England's exit is very poignant, cutting between the despondent post-match Frank and David with real recordings of them at the match [warning, link contains grown men crying, swearing and being politically incorrect towards the Portuguese]. The 2006 England team, known as the 'Golden Generation' are described as being like a Greatest Hits album - lots of individual highlights but no cohesive whole. Essentially a group of individuals with no collective soul.

The 'Spotification' of music is leading us to a point where curation of music collections is becoming a serious issue. In the space of barely ten years, we have moved from very well-understood formats with clear slices of musical creativity, to delivering individual tracks by their millions organised by a single search bar. Let me give you a personal example:

In 1997 I used to walk to work with my Sony Discman with 5 CDs in my rucksack. To get this music, someone had recommended it and I had gone to buy it from a record store. I chose the CDs from the CD rack in my room before leaving the house. In many cases I grew to love this limited selection of albums as I was essentially forced to listen to them again and again.

In 2001 I left the house with my Apple iPod (the video one, 3rd generation I believe). I uploaded about 3,000 songs to my iPod from a choice of about 20,000 on iTunes. Although the choice was pretty extensive (about 200 albums compared to my previous 5), I found that I grew to love many of the albums, and that the playlist function helped me to make my own digital mixtapes of good new tracks.

In 2014 I leave the house with my iPhone 4 and Spotify Premium. I am carrying 20 million songs with me. The equivalent of carrying the whole of an HMV store in my backpack. In the moment I go to choose something to listen to, I am researching, buying and playing all in the space of about 10 seconds. It's an overwhelming feeling, as noted by people in countries where Spotify has launched.

Spotify does not help me with this dilemma. It does not have an iPod-style way of transferring your favourite albums and tracks to a place where they are easily to categorise. It has only playlists or search. A gaping white bar with a flashing cursor in it, asking you what you want to listen to. Or a pre-defined set of your own choices or someone else's. Music fans: try not to panic.

Although Spotify collates music into albums in the way the music was originally released, it does little to help you organise these albums as you would have done with your vinyl, tapes, CDs, iPod or iTunes. It seems to have little respect for the formats that music has grown up in.

This appears to be unique to music in its digitalisation. Despite overwhelming choice in what to watch, TV programmes are still half an hour or an hour long. Box set series have not been shortened. We do not find ourselves watching one episode of Game of Thrones to the exclusion of others because it happens to be more exhilarating. And the format of films remains the same. How is it that music has been reduced to a search bar and some recommendations?

And is this downplaying of the album format an oversight, or are we witnessing the "Spotification" of music - a deliberate ploy to disrupt the formats we have been used to listening in?

Read more on Spotification:

The Spotification Diaries on Cyborgology.

Spotify and its discontents - The New Yorker