Is Spotify Killing the Mixtape?

Or has it already killed it? Because I'm a kind-hearted soul, I'm currently in the process of making a mix CD for, well, for anyone who took up my offer of a mix CD of tracks from my favourite albums of 2010. It's a fun process, making a mix, trying to make sure all the tracks flow into each other, that there's some kind of natural progression. I like to group all my mix CDs into halves, essentially, and the halves into another, less well marked half. And there's a lot of fun you can have with it, messing around with the format, or just feeling smug when you unwittingly create an amazing link between two tracks.

"I'm a Mac. I'm a PC. We look like a pair of total spods." (Please, please come up with a better caption than that. I'm begging you.)

Before I go any further, it's worth pointing around that I'm aware that I'm coming at this from a rather...neologistic perspective. The fact that I've used “mixtape” and then switched to “mix CD”. Yeah, I am aware that it was the casette that really first allowed normal music fan plebs like me to start messing around with all their music. In High Fidelity, Rob creates tapes for girls, and it's that very organic, very labour-intensive process that's part of his rather oddball charm. He sits in front of a tapedeck for several hours, we can just imagine how it is. We get a snippet of it in the film, but you can imagine him doing that for all his crushes, throughout his life. These days, the process is a bit simpler, arrange the tracks in WMP or iTunes or something, then press “Burn”. It's not quite the same thing, and certainly isn't so romantic. There's probably a whole heap of subtext you can read into that, foremost in my mind that of whether the lack of effort we put into things is killing...well, something. But that's for another blogpost.

You could suggest that I should've asked whether Spotify's merely delivering the coup de grace to a rather diminished pastime, but you're being pedantic, and seeing as I'm already in paragraph 3 and haven't started answering, it's time to get started. As I mentioned earlier, the process of burning a mix CD is pretty simple, all told. But you've still got to do the tiny bits of work, y'know, writing the tracklist, actually buying the CDs, CD cases, doing the artwork if you're so inclined. And if you're an awkward gawky teen, nervously hand it over to woman of your dreams, either suggesting that “hope you like some of it”, or promising the Velvet Underground will change their life or something. Generally while your zits are in danger of reaching critical mass.

Spotify just takes all that away, and more. With this programme, you can connect to tens of other friends and with just a click or twenty, you've shared a playlist with a heck of a lot of other people. There's absolutely nothing personal about it, and moreso much less thought and internal conflict involved in the whole process. Despite myself, I enjoy trimming that Beach House track I thought I couldn't do without, or that Neil Young song I'd take a gamble on them having heard already. It's a horrible process, but no pleasure without pain etc etc. But hey, with Spotify, you don't need to worry about time limits, you can put anything on. And you do. You get indiscriminate, and the whole thing numbers 40 or 50 songs. Not in any order, either, because with that many what'd be the point, it's best put on random and just played whatever. No-one tries to put that many songs on an album, except maybe Stephen Merritt. And I really really hate Stephen Merritt.

But...is it killing mixtaping/mixCDing? Or am I just getting old. Heck, when I was younger I was said gawky teen, making mixCDs (and yes, it was CDs) for all the girls I had designs on, and it never failed to get me completely and utterly nowhere. In any case, be it because of paucity of success or because these days I seem to know a lot more people already into similar music to myself (because as a teenager you're convinced that it'll be the thrill of discovery that you gets you there – discovering amazing music being tied to you and thus, er, getting you into dreamgirl's knickers. Or in my case, not), but I haven't made a mixCD with the implict intention of getting a snog for ages. And this is the first one I've made for friends in ages, too. I'll check the list of people who want it, but I'm fairly sure I don't want to snog any of them. Actually, that might not be true, but I'm fairly sure I won't be snogging any of them. Stop talking about snogging you loser.

I think maybe I'm answering my own initial question with a “no”, here. I like Spotify, it's hell of useful, and bigger playlists, like the one my friend made prior to Belle & Sebastian's ATP are useful as anything. I use it to discover lots of new music, and listen to odd tracks I don't own elsewhere. I don't know whether teenagers are using it to impress the opposite sex (or maybe same sex, let's not discriminate here), but I'd like to think not, if only because there's something heartening in knowing that future generations will repeat your mistakes (so long as your mistakes weren't like, starting a land war in Asia) and learn from them. Or not learn from them.

The mixCD's got much to recommend it. And I think it's the personal touch, especially in an area when no-one really owns casette players, which really does it for me. I'll admit I was taken aback that people wanted to listen to a CD I'd compiled of stuff from last year, and I took it as a massive compliment that so many people (double figures!) expressed an interest. Hopefully, I'll be making them a good selection, full of stuff they've not heard that they take an instant liking to. I'm definitely hoping for a goosebump or two.

Of course, I'll write a piece on the CD when it's done, and hey, if you want, I can send you a copy too. Unless you'd rather wait for the Spotify playlist.

The Disposability Of Music & How I Learned To Love The Album Again

The music industry’s never-ending quest to provide more convenient media has, it can be argued, made music more disposable, more forgettable. Think about it. In the days of vinyl, you sat through a record all the way through. Partly, it must be said, due to the fact that changing the track (with all the faff of lifting the needle and putting it back down in the wrong place without scratching the surface of the LP) was such effort. It almost meant you had to buy the singles when they came out, and pray that your favourite songs off an album got released as a single.

The cassette tape, in commercial pre-recorded guise at least, as bad if not worse. How many of you wrecked your tapes by spending afternoons furiously fast-forwarding and rewinding them to hear favourite songs? I did, countless times. However, the advent of blank cassettes meant people could suddenly make mixtapes off their vinyl collections. Don’t want to sit through records to hear your favourite tracks? Easy! Make a personal greatest hits collection instead. When twin deck tape players and recorders came along you could even do it off your cassette collections. Winner. If you were really cheap (as I was at the turn of the millennium), you could spend Sunday afternoons listening to the top 40 and recording your favourite songs off that. Getting it just right so you didn’t get any talking at the start or end of the song, while not missing a note either, was an art form. I failed dismally. I ended up with as much of Marc Goodier’s voice on mine as I did the music. It could be argued that cassettes were really the start of the whole piracy issue that’s dogged the industry ever since, but that’s not an issue for here and now. Back to the history.

The CD was a godsend for the impatient music buyer and listener. You could skip tracks with the push of a button, and when CD burners came down in price you could make digital equivalents of mixtapes, or merely even burn the tracks you wanted onto your computer. It was the precursor to the current ‘pick ‘n’ mix’ culture that seems to be prevalent amongst the download only brigade.

The danger in all of this is between that and scan listening on streaming services such as Spotify is that it’s all to easy to live your life in shuffle mode. I know, I’ve been there. Now, I’m no downloader, so you might be wondering how this is so. Well, when my old CD player broke, I didn’t replace it because, as I reasoned, all I ever did was put it on the MP3 player and put the CD on the shelf and that was that. So I relied on Spotify, Windows Media Player (which I always cherry picked tracks on, never listening to full albums), and my MP3 player (which for reasons I don’t really understand, ALWAYS gets left on shuffle, unless I’m on a train). The concept of an album, therefore, appeared to be dead to me. Given my propensity for buying CD albums, this seemed a ridiculous situation. So, I finally got round to buying a new player. I then set aside 2 days to re-discover my love for the album, and got down to celebrating being able to listen to physical formats again.

I accept that maybe 18 albums was probably a bit much in such a short space of time. Cambridge University did research suggesting that the brain can only compute and engage fully in any one activity for an hour before it needs to be stimulated via other methods. This probably applied here too – towards the end of my ‘experiment’ I was pretty much waiting for albums to finish. However, it did open my eyes to the joys of listening to an album again. The way it lets you see the ideas and thoughts of an artist in that one period of time. The way that some albums are autobiographical, and let you see the artists’ mindset or experiences. Plus, with a physical format you can kick back and read the sleeve-notes and ogle the artwork while the album is playing. Sometimes this can be just as exciting as the record itself (see The Ramones’ Sire re-issues, or the Undertones or Echo & the Bunnymen equivalents for great examples of absorbing, enlightening sleevenotes). I also found that listening to full albums meant I could catch up with other things (mainly reading), which the constant stop/start of living on shuffle, and the constant track changing, rendered all but impossible in the past. I’ve also enjoyed the level of thought involved in deciding on an album to fit a particular mood or activity, rather than choosing a song or two to fit the moment and (metaphorically) sticking them on repeat.

Don’t get me wrong, though. This isn’t me preaching from some gargantuan ivory tower about the perils of listening to individual tracks or downloading or whatever else you could misjudge this piece to be about. Differences are to be celebrated, and if you prefer to listen to individual tracks over albums, then who am I to judge. This is really nothing more than a document of one man and his rediscovery of the concept of the album (and a rather verbose and highly edited history of how music has in my opinion become so disposable). Though I will say this: in the day where the album is increasingly being seen as an obsolete format, perhaps it’s time to give it a re-appraisal. Give it a whirl, you might enjoy the journey. I know I have.


During my ‘experiment’ I listened to:

Jamie T: Kings & Queens
The Clash: Give Them Enough Rope
Television Personalities: Don’t The Kids Just Love It
Camera Obscura: Let’s Get Out of This Country
Noah & The Whale: The First Days Of Spring
Billy Bragg: Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs Spy and Slow Club: Christmas Thanks For Nothing EP (As these were both mini albums each totalling under 15mins I classed them as one entry)
The Pains of Being Pure Of Heart: S/T
The Manhattan Love Suicides: S/T
The Undertones: S/T
The Jesus And Mary Chain: Darklands
Richard Hawley: Lady’s Bridge
REM: Reckoning
The Pogues: If I Should Fall From Grace With God
Beach House: Devotion
The Field Mice: Snowball
Eels: Hombre Lobo
The Vapors: New Clear Days
Bruce Springsteen: Nebraska