Presenting a new (old) way to solve the "album problem" when streaming music
The "album problem" is, of course, the fact that our music listening habits have changed over the past decade and the value of a well-thought-out album is not nearly what it once was. This is in large part due to the fact that it's easy for people to create playlists with a billion different songs to choose from, recommendation algorithms, "Discovery Weekly" playlists, and whatever else the streaming services can throw at us.
I may not speak for all of us, but I've personally not been able to fully consume a new album for quite a while now, finding that I gravitate toward a few songs/singles that get dumped into a separate playlist. I don't like this and I miss the days that I would discover deep cuts in the back of an album that I listened to ad nauseum.
I present to you the "Six Disc Changer" playlist. The rules are simple:
- Create a new playlist in Spotify, Tidal, or your chosen platform. Call it "Six Disc Changer"
- Add six FULL albums to the playlist
- Force yourself to listen to the playlist -- maybe not exclusively -- but a fair amount. Imagine you're driving around in your 2002 Honda Civic and the only music available to you is what you've got in your CD changer.
- Any time you want to add a new album, you must remove an old album. You should only have six CDs loaded up at any time.
If you want to take the concept a few steps further...
- Any time you remove a CD, add it to a separate playlist called "CD Catalogue".
- Any time you want to add a new CD to the catalogue, you must "purchase" it with an "allowance" of your choosing. I'm going with 1 new album per week. You can swap out albums from your Catalogue playlist freely, but new albums must be "purchased." This will simulate scarcity, which was a large part of what drove us to listen to albums over and over again.
But... why?
My goal is to get back to listening to full albums and truly taking them in. The best way I can think of to do that is to simulate the way things used to be. By using a streaming service instead of, say, just going back to CDs or records, you get the benefits of convenience, Last.fm, easy Bluetooth, etc.
As for what's in my CD changer right now, I've got:
- Sufjan Stevens - Javelin
- The Antlers - Need Nothing
- Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues
- Refused - The Shape of Punk to Come
- George Harrison - Living in the Material World
- Bob Moses - Battle Lines
Is it dumb? Probably. It's been fun so far and my music listening experience has been much more focused.
I mostly listen to full albums, but I do use the various discovery playlists to get inspiration and if a specific song is interesting, I will jump to give the full album a try. That of course requires some conscious manual intervention.
I personally prefer to stop after an album instead of having some auto queue adding more stuff. If you truly want to emulate the old CD/Vinyl experience, then it would be a bit wrong to have a full playlist with one album after each other. But the players probably don't support a "stop after album"-feature.
I don't have a problem with album listening, but I also tie myself to similar constraints. Back when Google Play had 1000 song limits for playlists, I had to really heavily curate them - including my "ultimate shuffle" playlist that I'd default to while I played games or did classwork. So I had playlists consisting of albums I wanted to listen to, then I'd go through and curate the stuff I liked out of there, and repeat that until I filled up a playlist... I'd listen to that playlist for a bit, then make a copy of my ultimate shuffle playlist, trim it, take the best of the best, and listen to that. When I got a hankering for new music I'd start the cycle over. It's nice because I've got this kind of tree ring aspect to my music library, where all my playlists mark different times in my life and what I wanted to listen to. YouTube Music doesn't have the constraint anymore, but I still structure my music like this.
Don't feel like you have to force yourself to listen to something, though? I give an album like 3 skips before I let yourself jump to whatever's next. Taste in art feels like, uh, a big Metroidvania sometimes - a piece of music might make you "get" something else down the road, and until you get to that point it might be better to just leave it than bash your head against it. I've made peace with not liking any of the Grimes or Poppy albums I've tried. (Except when they collab. Then they sound sick.)
On the topic of the "relevance" of albums, though, I don't think much has changed. Just the technology - the radio and singles were the free and paid ways to dominate everyone's fix of individual songs back when, and mixtapes and CD burners let people do what we do now with playlists on a smaller basis. Even though the proliferation of rapid-fire content sorta threatens albums, it's also easier than ever to publish music and there's an explosion of every which kind of niche genre due to the internet. Someone likes some particular sound and they could end up in a k-hole list of shoegaze albums on RYM or the YouTube algorithm or whatever. But I do think you're onto the right idea that the medium shapes how we consider consuming it.
Albums themselves are still relevant in how music interacts with meme culture, too - Everywhere at the End of Time, the Mouth albums, Super Ghostbusters... And every popular song in a meme video is an in for someone to explore that artist. The rest of Satin Panthers has dozens of views! Dozens!
FWIW, I guess my 6 CD changer right now would be:
Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison
Candy Claws - Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time
Little Sims - Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
yeule - Softscars
Snail's House - L'été
Clowncore - Van
Very much stuck on Clowncore.