I recently bought a record player, and dusted off my old vinyl collection from my student days. After having streamed music for years now, I noticed a real shift in my appreciation of music as a result. Here are my observations.
The Purchase
Three weeks ago, I received notice that I had secured a great new job. Serendipitously, Depeche Mode’s latest album, “Memento Mori” was released the same day, so a copy of that seemed very apt. On a whim I bought it on vinyl and needed a record player to go with it. I wanted something small, neat and with reasonable sound quality that would enable me to hear the details in my music. Nothing showy or expensive.
I like music with complex structures, like electronica (e.g. the Aphex Twin, Autechre), jazz (Charlie Mingus, Ornette Coleman) and other tightly-produced albums like Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Ocean Rain” and Depeche Mode’s “Violator”. However music, once a great love of mine, had inexplicably fallen off my radar over the last 10 years or so. I wasn’t sure why.
From Digital to Analogue
I honestly don’t remember the last time I bought any music in a physical medium. My last vinyl purchase must have been back in 1995 from Norwich Market. As a student back then, buying an old vinyl LP for £1.99 was an inexpensive and low-risk way of trying out new bands. As for CDs, I think my last purchase was Autechre’s “Exai” a decade ago.
Since then, I found digital media to be liberating: there was no longer any need to clutter my life up with CDs, Blu-ray and other stuff. It seemed to me to be easier on the environment to not purchase bits of plastic which would one day end up in landfill or (more optimistically) recycled. After all, I have no children so in all likelihood when I die someone will have to dispose of all my stuff somewhere and somehow. As Depeche Mode’s album reminds us: “one day you will die”. And when you die your stuff’s still about and needs a place to go. Probably landfill.
So I streamed. I discovered many new artists (Editors, The National), experimented with Jazz, Folk and other genres I’d never have bought, and cultivated a life around digital media to keep my space free of loads of books, CDs and Blu-rays.
Something didn’t feel quite right though…
I noticed that I rarely listened to an album all the way through. Music had somehow become disposable and cheap. A few years ago, a good friend asked me: “Gav, do you remember when we used to just sit around listening to CDs all evening… When was the last time you actually did that?”.
I realised I’d fallen into treating music, something I used to value, something that gave me deep joy, as a disposable commodity. I could hardly name any songs by The Editors apart from the one about smokers outside a hospital door, and I hadn’t listened to a National album all the way through. The music was there, but it just wasn’t present in my life with the immediacy and detail it was when I was younger.
Ah well, thought I. Just getting older perhaps. This is why old men shout at clouds. But I found it went a bit deeper than that.
The return of “slow music” to my life
Since I was a teen my favourite band has been Depeche Mode. I was thrilled to find that their latest album “Memento Mori” is a thing of rare beauty, with gossamer-fine production and warm, instantly-likeable songs mixed up with ambitious experimentation.
When I received confirmation that I’d got a new job I really wanted I bought it digitally as a treat.
Still, something felt a bit “off” though. I wanted a “trophy”, something I could hold in my hand. I went off to HMV and instead of picking up the CD, something nudged me to buy it on vinyl.
And then, dear reader, I bought a record player.
Before I knew it, I was down a rabbit hole of digging out old LPs and cleaning them up. Some weren’t even mine: I found REM’s “Automatic for the People” in my box for example and I have no idea where that came from. I remember a guy called Craig gave me a load of stuff before he moved to Hong Kong. Maybe it was one of his. Anyway, I sat on the floor of my living room gently wiping off dust and playing through a few of them. They were all in pretty good, not-warped condition despite having been kept in a box for 20+ years.
My first play? “Ocean Rain” by Echo and the Bunnymen, one of the most beautiful albums ever recorded.
I have several record shops nearby: Venus Music just round the corner, Soundclash, and an HMV in the city centre. Soundclash has a great Jazz collection, and also had “Selected Ambient Works” by the Aphex Twin so I bought that, Brubeck’s “Time Out”, some Mingus, some Coltrane and a record bag.
Sitting and listening
The first thing I became aware of was how I would now sit and listen to music, rather than just have it on in the background. I found myself noticing all kinds of little details in the productions and arrangements of songs: a bit of reverb here, some instrumentation there, a little beep somewhere else. The music seemed “fuller” somehow, and more interesting.
Now, I have a fast internet connection, and streaming comes through at a very high resolution from Spotify and Deezer, so I don’t think it was a bitrate issue. I also have some music on lossless-FLAC on my NAS drive, listen on good headphones (Audio Technica ATH M50s), so I don’t think there was anything physical in the lack of detail I was experiencing. Instead I suspected it was something to do with intention and attention on my part.
My player isn’t automatic. Playing an LP involves a tiny bit of time and effort: I have to fetch the album, carefully remove it from the sleeve, place the disc on the platter, move the arm to the edge of the disc, start the turntable, lower the arm and carefully put the lid down.
This is a very small bit of work, but it is enough for me to commit to listening to a whole side at least of an LP. I’m not skipping forward, backwards or shuffling either between albums, tracks and genres. Instead I’ve put the thing on, and I’m going to listen to it.
Maybe a kind of “Sunk Cost Fallacy” is at work here, I’m not sure.
Caring and emotional investment
Vinyl is a delicate thing. It can warp, scratch and if you spill coffee on it, well, removing it can be a bother to say the least.
My old vinyl collection dates back to the 1990s. I spent a happy afternoon cleaning those old albums, and found I could remember where I was when I bought them, and had a number of other vivid memories of listening to them in student residence rooms and when friends came round. Some albums were rather dog-eared and filthy, but a bit of a wipe and they all played rather well. I even managed to mostly remove a solidified sticker off of Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures”. Going through them all and giving them a good clean was very satisfying.
With streaming, there’s no need to care for an MP3 or OGG file on someone else’s server. It’s just impersonal numbers. There are no creases on the sleeves from where you accidentally sat on the thing or tiny scratch where you dropped it accidentally and watched it bounce off the corner of the table shouting “nooo!”.
When I did teacher-training, we talked about a book by Anne Fine called “Flour Babies” – I don’t know if caring for vinyl elicits the same kinds of attachment and self-discovery as Fine describes in that book, but the connection is definitely more personal than with a streamed file.
Buying and owning
I find that actually paying money specifically for something means I tend to value it more, while if I’m getting something for free I tend to value it less. I don’t make the most of it or generally forget about it. This McGuffin was free, it was fun for a while, now it’s in the back of the cupboard. That McOtherthing was £45, I’ve paid good money for it, I’ll milk it for all its worth.
If I’m paying £10 per month for Spotify, I’m getting the Spotify service. I’m not actually paying for individual albums or songs. And there’s a flood of different bands, albums and tracks to choose from. David Bowie predicted that music would become a utility, much like water or electricity, a prediction that largely turned out to be true.
But I found I was paying for a background service, a bit like the TV licence (for the benefit of overseas readers, advertising does not fund the BBC, we all chip in for it via the TV Licence paying about £150 per year). Each month I paid Spotify £10-ish, I may or may not use it, but like the BBC it’s there and available.
Psychologists sometimes refer to “The Endowment Effect“, a cognitive bias where we tend to value things we own more than things we don’t, or the “Mere Ownership Effect” (which is related). I felt little emotional or material investment, and certainly no sense of “ownership” towards anything that was on Spotify. None of it was “mine”, and so I found I generally cared less and paid less attention. To me, music had become like wallpaper rather than an event and an artifact in its own right.
Immersion and imagery
One of the things I love about Jazz and Blues LPs is the way they have sleeve notes. For example, on my copy of “Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus”, Nat Hendoff has provided a good 1000 words about the album, individual songs and Charles Mingus himself.
Depeche Mode albums typically have wonderful photography by Anton Corbijn. I’ve often felt that Anton Corbijn’s photography and videomaking was just as much of the whole “experience” of Depeche Mode as the sounds and textures they use in their synths. Likewise the abstraction and design in Warp Records’ albums has always stirred me. And as a child I used to love the weird, fantastical artwork by Gerald Scarfe in Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”.
I find these visual and textual elements of an album provide a wonderful, world-building context for the music within. Music that itself has been carefully arranged track-by-track to provide an emotional journey.
I have missed the way that a CD or LP provides a physical artifact that adds layers of context and meaning to the music. I find it somehow “grounds” the compositions and performances in something tangible, and in the process giving us another way to relate to the work.
This kind of tangible artifact is missing from streaming services. You can see the album art, but you can’t hold it, and you almost never get inlay art, lyrics or cover notes.
The paralysis of choice
When faced with a vast, impersonal collection of millions of songs, I find everything feels diffuse, impersonal. I feel lost in a vast sea of digital data.
I find it hard to visualise a million. If I take some 2mm graph paper and make a 2m x 2m square out of it I will have a million tiny squares. Eighty of these will give me 80 million squares, the number of songs on Spotify.
Spotify does not lay out all of its songs visibly (this would be difficult given the sheer number!). I have to search through or find them via algorithms that suggest related artists. Spotify is a black box with a tiny window and esoteric mechanisms inside. Whatever I choose, there may be something better or more suitable. My choice of music will always come with a nagging awareness that I’ve limited myself. I may be missing out on something better, why don’t I check out that other thing over there?
I feel a similar thing with Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Video. Paradoxically I feel that in the face of so many options no matter what I choose I will always be shortchanged. I can’t possibly see everything, and therefore all kinds of things are hidden from me.
And so I roam the search functions like a hungry ghost, skipping songs, quitting shows half-way through, forever seeking some kind of fulfilment but unable to remain still, forever unsatisfied.
By contrast, my vinyl collection is about 50 LPs, and sits in a homemade pine crate. I can see everything in my collection, it’s limited and small (at the moment), but when I choose to listen to something from my personally curate collection I feel I’m making an informed decision, and I know what I’m not listening to. Choosing what to listen to is painless, intuitive and I feel I can settle back and enjoy a whole album without feeling an itchy urge to try something else.
Clicks, creases, dogears and pops
There may be clicks and pops on the vinyl, but they’re my clicks and pops. They make my albums unique, and somehow encode my experiences with the album. There’s a little “pop!” just before Will Sergeant’s guitar kicks in on Echo and the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon”, and for me that’s somehow part of “my” version of the track.
Life seems a tiny bit calmer and more personal now I’ve gone back to having my own, personally-curated, uniquely-scuffed, physical musical collection. It has a charm about it, a warmth and humanity. A couple of cubic feet of “me” sitting in the corner of my living room. Yeah, I could get into this.