digital music habits and selection
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Artist:
lately i've been thinking about how digital music affects the way that we select music to listen to. i have noticed several really strange things since switching to (mostly) digital listening:1. the 'nothing looks appealing' syndrome - i don't know how many times i have scrolled through dozens and dozens of artists in my ipod artist list, and found absolutely nothing that seems appetizing. it's a very odd phenomenon, because it is all music that i like very much, and have carefully selected to be placed on the ipod. however, i usually end up putting it on random, and i then enjoy nearly every song that comes up. i am convinced that this syndrome is due, in part, by the lack of a physical package. if you have a stack of albums, or even CDs, the typical selection involves flipping through them until a piece of album art catches your eye, which triggers impressions, memories, feelings, and other associations that result in an impulse to hear the music associated to that package. 2. accidental alphabetical listening habits - i just listened to the new cursive record. when it finished up, naturally, itunes went to the next alphabetical artist, which happened to be curt kirkwood. i probably would not have chosen to listen to curt kirkwood today, but as soon as the first few seconds kicked in, i fully committed to listening to that record in completion as well. 3. shorter attention span - all this immediate access to tons of music, i feel, makes us less capable of sitting through entire albums. i am an album guy. i like to take in an album as a piece of art, in order, as the artist planned it. i find that it is more difficult to commit to listening to a full album nowadays, or i get anxious to get to something else -- simply because it's all there at the touch of a button. i somehow think that if i had to lift a needle, place an album back into a sleeve and then pull another album out of the stacks and then remove it from its sleeve and then place it on the turntable and then put the needle down, i would not be inclined to change what is on.4. alphabetically weighted artists - i find more and more that bands with names beginning with letters later in the alphabet get less listens than those with names which start with the earlier letters. simply because our ipods and our players sort them by default a-z. we accept this and scroll accordingly until we see something appealing and we click on it. unless of course, you have the 'nothing looks appealing' syndrome, in which you will scroll a-z two to three times without finding anything. i have started scrolling from z lately to counteract this. oh i'm sure there are more things i have noticed, but i don't have the attention span to continue.
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