How much physical music (CDs, vinyl, minidiscs, cases ingles, whatever) have you bought so far this year?

That's definitely a thread in its own right. I'm assuming it'll be old Peel and Maida Vale sessions and so forth, rather than going head-to-head with Spotify.

No it isn't, it's because MUSIC is selling less, you're conflating the issues again.

Yeah, I should've put 'music' there, not CDs; in terms of fiscal remuneration, I don't care what format people buy stuff on, just that they buy it so that musicians can get paid and keep on making music - CD just happens to be my preferred medium for various reasons and interchanging the terms isn't helping.

Serious question, do you listen to non-album based music, or make much of an effort to seek it out? Would you, for example, have heard the material on Four Tet's Pink had it not been released in a handy album-shaped format? I'm saying this because you seem to genuinely enjoy electronic music and yet at least 80% of the best stuff doesn't appear in this format, maybe isn't even written about or talked about, but it does appear on mixes, that's how individual tracks get sold.

Yes, but not masses, and not much of an effort; for a start I like albums qua albums as a convenient unit via which to consume music, as boring and staid as that may be (hence such an effort to get Pink, though I had about half the material already downloaded), and secondly I simply don't have the time I had a few years ago to chase individual tracks or take in everything that people get excited about; dayjob is more demanding and other hobbies are taking up my time.

why is an album more convenient than a mix?

1) I remember when "Home taping is killing music" was a big issue ...

I remember reading this on my dad's album sleeves and trying really hard not to tap my feet because somehow that would ruin the music.

I don't listen to enough mixes. Part of the problem is that I rarely have time to listen to a whole one all the way through as much of my listening is done in short bursts. If the mix is cut up into individual tracks I tend to shy away from putting it on my iPhone because a lot of the time, if I'm just rushing to work, I'll stick the whole library on shuffle and I hate mixed tracks just bursting in mid-sync with the last few notes of the last track fading out. Lame I know. If it's one long mix I'm actually more likely to listen to it, but again I don't feel as though I often have the time to listen to the whole thing in one sitting, and coming back to a mix halfway through feels kind of wrong to me, like stopping a film halfway through. This is highly irrational, I know.

Another annoying thing is I've never worked out how to get a mix or compilation to appear on my iPhone library without it scattering all over the place. I tried to get Immer onto my phone the other day, but it's arranged everything so that rather than being grouped under Michael Mayer, it's all the individual artists in alphabetical order. Fucked if I'm going to sort that mess out.

why is an album more convenient than a mix?

I didn't say it was, I just said that I liked albums. Mixes are mad convenient, but it's not really a culture that I've ever got that involved with so it's not a format / medium I've got used to. Maybe I should change this approach, and perhaps I will, but I'm pretty happy with the avenues for music discovery that I'm using at the moment, in terms of them giving me enough stuff that I like listening to. If that changes, ill find explore new avenues.

I've bought maybe 15 CDs this year, a similar number of digital releases (mostly 12"s and singles) and I think 0 vinyl. Definitely less than pre-Spotify (I peaked around 50 CDs a few years ago when I finally got a real job). These days I mostly buy physical albums that aren't on Spotify and aren't available noticeably cheaper as Boomkat/Amazon mp3s. If there's an album I really love I'll buy it even if it is on Spotify (recently: Julia Holter and Josephine Foster), both to "thank" the artists and for after the apocalypse when there's no Internet and just a communal CD player that tells dirty jokes and washes the dishes.

Another annoying thing is I've never worked out how to get a mix or compilation to appear on my iPhone library without it scattering all over the place. I tried to get Immer onto my phone the other day, but it's arranged everything so that rather than being grouped under Michael Mayer, it's all the individual artists in alphabetical order. Fucked if I'm going to sort that mess out.

best way is to make a playlist and add in the tracks in order.

have to say the vast bulk of my new music listening is mixes. then i listen to older things (about 50 per cent of my listening) and albums via spotify.

i listen to mixes a lot while running but also at work i find they are a good way to shut out the office. albums and jazz and stuff like that i generally listen to in the evenings at home.

Mixes tend to be commute music for me, as they're usually the right length and largely instrumental so therefore good for blocking out other people's conversations while I'm reading.

best way is to make a playlist and add in the tracks in order.

or select all the tracks from the album and mark them as a compilation.

my listening is delineated between spotify (generally older things, some exceptions) and mp3s on my ipod (mostly newer stuff with some exceptions) xpost

My commute is only about 10 minutes these days and in the car with my wife, so we just listen to news radio; if I walk it's about 30 minutes and I'll listen to msuic, but 30 minutes is an odd length so I generally play a playlist of recent faviourite individual tracks, or else part of a new album I've just got.

Office is shared space so we either listen to 6music or else I'll make big, socially-acceptable playlists. I don't listen to music when I'm cycling as these days I'm on roads 99% of the time rather than cyclepaths, and I've stopped running cos I play football much more these days.

Home listening is largely governed by shared taste with Emma; luckily we do share a lot of our tastes but not everything - that probably cuts down on really overt electronic / pure dance music to some extent, actually. I'm petrified of going out dancing given my dodgy knees, despite recent positive physiotherapy.

I wish I had a job that allowed me to listen to music, I never have though.

best way is to make a playlist and add in the tracks in order.

I guess so. It's pretty tedious though, especially if you don't know what order the tracks are supposed to appear. I dunno, I never understood iTunes as a system - the whole idea of adding music to an iTunes library confounds me - why would I want to do this as opposed to adding tracks manually to my iPhone (drag'n'drop)? Why does it insist on copying existing files to another part of your hard drive? This seems incredibly wasteful.

Portable listening always seemed more logical with my Creative Zen player - you just plugged it in, dragged files over and most of the time they appeared in the right order. And if they weren't, you could edit it easily. With iPhone, if artist or album information is missing or incorrect it completely bollixes everything up. One of the main problems is that if I beatmap anything in Acid Pro, it does something to the file information on the MP3. So if I import that track to iPhone, despite all the ID3 tag info being in place, it will appear unlisted on the iPhone meaning that the best tracks off of albums get left out of the artist/album playlist.

To make matters worse there seems to be a problem with the Apple software so that even if I try to edit track information from iTunes, it doesn't update on the phone any more.

That faff is the biggest thing that puts me off digital music, and I don't actually mind iTunes as a system that much (not having used anything else extensively probbaly contributes to that).

Portable listening always seemed more logical with my Creative Zen player - you just plugged it in, dragged files over and most of the time they appeared in the right order. And if they weren't, you could edit it easily. With iPhone, if artist or album information is missing or incorrect it completely bollixes everything up. One of the main problems is that if I beatmap anything in Acid Pro, it does something to the file information on the MP3. So if I import that track to iPhone, despite all the ID3 tag info being in place, it will appear unlisted on the iPhone meaning that the best tracks off of albums get left out of the artist/album playlist.

even nostalgia for the previous mp3 player.

Can't think. I still look through cd sales etc and look through reviews a lot. Could easily buy a lot more stuff I'm aware of if I had the wherewithall. Have normally had longish lists of things I want to get hold of.
Don't have unlimited physical space though or unlimited funds.
Oh to be a millionaire with the ability to split oneself into several multitasking selves.
There's still a massive list of music I want to hear before too long. Also that I would like to become somewhat familiar with.
I guess you need to learn what can be ignored without fearing you've missed the greatest thing you could possibly ever hear.
& god, there's more music being made all the time. How do people cope?

for a while it was nice buying e.g. DJ Kicks mixes and being able to rip them as one single file to then listen to - because you couldn't get it in that format otherwise. now any commercial mix should really be available both track-by-track and as a single file.

Portable listening always seemed more logical with my Creative Zen player - you just plugged it in, dragged files over and most of the time they appeared in the right order. And if they weren't, you could edit it easily. With iPhone, if artist or album information is missing or incorrect it completely bollixes everything up. One of the main problems is that if I beatmap anything in Acid Pro, it does something to the file information on the MP3. So if I import that track to iPhone, despite all the ID3 tag info being in place, it will appear unlisted on the iPhone meaning that the best tracks off of albums get left out of the artist/album playlist.

even nostalgia for the previous mp3 player.

― Know how Roo feel (LocalGarda), Wednesday, 3 October 2012 12:32 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This stock snarkiness is starting to get as tiresome as the whole "first world problems" thing people do.

I guess you need to learn what can be ignored without fearing you've missed the greatest thing you could possibly ever hear.

This, as sadly pragmatic as it seems, is pretty key for me lately. I can't, and don't want, to keep up with everything: I've tried it before and it made me miserable and left piss-all time for anything else.

100+ new and second hand vinyl

There is something to be said for things like the "slow listening" movement some people attempt to do, but this feels incredibly straitjacketed and rule-imposed and therefore not fun. I like to be able to hear a lot of different music, but catching up with it all is impossible and like Mouthy says, it can lead to misery. What I'm more concerned about is perfectly good albums which I might assign to the "listen later" pile and never get round to reassessing because of the constant influx of new things. That said, if something grabs my attention it's likely I will give it a good innings. Listening to lots of music and having a sprawling collection is a real wheat-chaff affair. Whereas when I used to buy physical releases on a smaller scale, I'd take more time over them than if I download a whole bwun of albums, put them on shuffle and pick out maybe one or two that I particularly like.

In short, there's not enough time in the day and really I need to find a way to crowbar more listening into my waking hours.

saying someone is being nostalgic is not snarkiness.

It comes across as such when you're continually picking on the person in question, dude. nagl.

if anything i said is untrue or inaccurate then please respond in kind.

i'm not being facetious, i actually think dog latin feels nostalgic about his previous mp3 player.

seriously, tho, being nostalgic for two controllers with a game system with no online multiplayer system?

2-6 albums, but mostly obscure stuff that i either had to import from abroad or out of print stuff not available for purchase (or download) anywhere online

seriously, tho, being nostalgic for two controllers with a game system with no online multiplayer system?

plus it's not actually true that most games only have online multiplayer.

Gaming experiences (communal or not) probably lead to music chat and discoveries more now by virtue of the games often featuring songs (e.g. GTA, FIFA). This is another means of revenue for artists that's exploded post-web too.

ime people in games tend to chat more about how you are a fag and they fucking shot you, fag

sitting in friends bedrooms 20+ years ago playing alex kidd on the master system i'm sure we also touched on such subjects.

i think the digitisation of music and music consumption has led to far MORE opportunities for communal, IRL musical experiences tbh. even just in terms of connecting with people who share your taste - dog latin's strawgeneration of teenagers shut in their bedrooms staring at their screens reminds me more of growing up in a pre-digital age, shut in my bedroom listening to björk because everyone i knew IRL thought she was weird. since i got online, discovering and sharing music has been facilitated in an inherently social way.

I realised years ago that there's no way to hear everything I might ever like, let alone give all of it multiple listens and a fair chance to sink in, it doesn't worry me so much anymore. I find Spotify a great tool for listening to things I'm curious about and yeah, a lot of things I might only listen to once but I still manage to find plenty that I come back to - dog latin is right about the wheat/chaff ratio but I'd estimate maybe 1 in 15 things I hear I end up buying in some format. I really don't yearn for the days where I'd buy three or four albums a week on spec from the mid-price racks - I definitely heard some great stuff that way but I'm sure I would've found most of it by now anyway and I must've spent hundreds of pounds on fairly mediocre CDs.

i'm always seeing well-liked youtube comments from ppl namechecking http://gta.wikia.com/Fresh_FM, http://gta.wikia.com/Radio_Los_Santos, http://gta.wikia.com/Playback_FM etc. xp to nash

there are contemporary stations as wel of course, but those youtubes get a lot of comments anyway

feel like a lot of ppl are counting used records for the OP btw, despite
Let's not count used purchases - as this was inspired by musician's income that seems counter-productive.

― comedy is unnatural and abhorrent (Scik Mouthy), Tuesday, 2 October 2012

i can honestly say spotify had a life-changing effect on the music i listen to.

It's been a good year for me - I've bought close to 100 CDs, including 8 or so box sets and 10 2CD sets of 50s rockabilly.

I'm in the old-guy-with-thousands-of-CDs club. I have one room whose walls are covered with racks and it's a joy to just look at the collage of spines. I, too, have one small rack set aside for this calendar year's purchases (Billy Bragg also does this and calls it his 'nursery' rack) and also file them into the main racks on New Years day. On that day, I also take the opportunity to week things out and put them in the sell bag.

I've never liked vinyl (though I understand the sonic benefits) and I rip everything as it comes in. I keep the past 12 months of new acquisitions on my phone so I can easily focus on new stuff while mixing in old favorites or research & development listening (usually via Spotify).

I love having the liner notes as they're often useful for reference purposes when trying to figure out track version, musicians, years, etc. I admit I don't need this information often but when I do, I'm really glad I have it. I'm considering ditching all my jewel cases and putting things in a giant CanAm cabinet but we'll see.

I buy digital downloads when no CD is available (cf the new Savages release) but it's quite aggravating when AmazonUK sells something but I can't buy it in America! Shut up and take my money, damnit! If you don't give me an easy purchase option, I'll go find it somewhere else. I almost always buy domestic CDs from my local store (Newbury Comics) and try hard to order imports directly from the artist or label. Amazon fills in the rest - most used CDs are available stupidly cheap via their market.

My challenge is my thinking is still stuck in my bachelor days, when I would have unlimited listening time, time to hear music at work, went out to one or two gigs a week and generally focused on music to a ridiculous extent. Now, with 3 kids and a wife, the schedule is packed, I can't sit in front of the computer and listen to Spotify and I have to squeeze in listening while doing any number of things like making breakfast, building Lego's or when the Mrs watches crap TV. I find myself resentful that I haven't gotten around to checking something out or the new Malka Spigel album is still in the shrinkwrap after a week. On the plus side, the modern world means that great music I miss when it comes out will always be there waiting for me.

It's gratifying readying this thread, it makes me feel slightly less crazy.

I forgot to mention that ripping my own CDs means I'm in charge of the quality of my digital library. I've heard glitches in downloads and streaming services. Similarly, my digital copy is definitive for me as I'll fix things that might have been messed up on the CD itself (drop-outs, wrong version, etc).

sorry for the tangent:

dog latin, you have to mark mixes as a compilation (select all the files, click on the "Options" tab on the track info editor, and select "Part of a compilation"). It also helps if you put an album artist in -- if you put Michael Mayer in there, then the album will show up under his name.

ime people in games tend to chat more about how you are a fag and they fucking shot you, fag

― Know how Roo feel (LocalGarda), Wednesday, October 3, 2012 8:12 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hahaha, I don't know why any rational human would subject themselves to live chat on a shooter with strangers, shit makes youtube comments look like that party owen wilson goes to in midnight in paris

so true, i only did when i first got an xbox. people used to just shout racial abuse terms over and over and over.

it could be sort of funny to join in (the game, not the racism) and say completely crazy shit if you had a friend with you. eg put on the weirdest irish accent of all time and have the room round on you.

i think the digitisation of music and music consumption has led to far MORE opportunities for communal, IRL musical experiences tbh. even just in terms of connecting with people who share your taste - dog latin's strawgeneration of teenagers shut in their bedrooms staring at their screens reminds me more of growing up in a pre-digital age, shut in my bedroom listening to björk because everyone i knew IRL thought she was weird. since i got online, discovering and sharing music has been facilitated in an inherently social way.

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 3 October 2012 14:20 (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

:-) this is an interesting counter-example. my experiences of discovering new music pre-web 2.0, pre-music geek phase, were almost entirely based on face-to-face and word-of-mouth recommendation, save for the odd magazine review - YMMV of course. A huge part of the way I and my friends got turned on to new sounds was by going round each other's houses and listening to each other's CDs, swapping tapes, lending albums, trips to the record shop after school etc. My feelings today are that I don't actually know what kind of music most of my friends are even listening to. I know they do - they all have iPods and Spotify etc, but other than in the case of a select few friends this aspect of their lives remains under the radar, confined to their hard drives and web personae. I'm more in tune with the music tastes of people online than IRL. And yeah, I could go and look up my friends' Like lists on FB, their Spotify and Last.FM playlists etc, but this feels like a terribly remote and joyless way of going about things.

I maintain that while Spotify, YouTube, Facebook, online articles and blogs (which are analogous to print media) are all great gateways into discovering new music, they represent a very different approach to browsing in record shops, borrowing CDs off friends, the visual draw of a particularly appealing album cover etc...

For people (like we Ilxors) who already make a point of reading music blogs and sites, it makes very little personal difference how we come to discover new music - the roadmap is already laid out for us; we know the methods and how to approach them and these have proved extremely useful as they open up myriad opportunities for online sharing and discussion. I'm speaking as someone who grew up in a small town but for whom running an online community for electronic musicians was a lifeline in the early 2000s when very few people I knew IRL shared my enthusiasm.

So it's easy for us to say "The information is out there - it's all over the web", which is true. But the web isn't like real life - it isn't as prone to happy accidents or chance encounters. Overhearing something amazing over a record shop tannoy or an impulse buy based on a particularly striking album cover, or a particular stand-out track on a mixtape made for you by a friend isn't the same thing as checking something out on Spotify because you read a review about it on TinyMixTapes.

We discuss music day-in day-out on this board and I can safely say it's my main source of new music recommendations. Elsewhere online I'm marketed to through PR mailers and irritating ads on Spotify, Youtube and Facebook which I will NEVER check out unless by some phenomenal fluke of force. I probably know about three-four people IRL who read Pitchfork and other music sites on any regular basis. I hear older generations decrying the current music scene as being "just Simon Cowell and X Factor" because that's pretty much the only music they ever encounter on TV and on supermarket shelves (the only place you can buy a physical format within several miles of my home is in the Top 20 rack in Sainsbury's).

So what's my point here? I guess I'm just slightly concerned that the shift from physical formats and face-to-face recommendation towards digital consumption and online sharing appeals to only a certain type of music fan. They have to be reasonably internet savvy for a start, have the patience to get online and start trawling through YouTube videos or review sites, maybe start reading blogs and messageboards etc. They have to be comfortable with the idea of downloading music, either from iTunes or a P2P network. They have to be cool with the idea that the music they consume is THEIR music, the emphasis on "i" in "iTunes" - only to leave their digital collection in the form of packets sent over the net.

In essence, the digital format is in danger of eluding the casual, more passive music listeners out there. When you think about the number of records and CDs that have been sold purely on the basis of impulse, that's a huge part of the music market. I wonder, were I the same age now as I was when I first starting getting into music, if the same passions could be instilled in me given that a lot of the IRL social pathways are slowly being moved to online, which by nature requires an active yet solitary approach to music seeking.

dog latin, you have to mark mixes as a compilation (select all the files, click on the "Options" tab on the track info editor, and select "Part of a compilation"). It also helps if you put an album artist in -- if you put Michael Mayer in there, then the album will show up under his name.

Cheers. I think I tried that and it didn't work. I'm assuming it's an error on Apple's part though.

the fact that your friends apparently never talk about music IRL is not the basis for a theory.

ILM and twitter have pretty neatly replaced my Pearl Jam loving friends.

personally there are many of my friends with whom I discuss music all the time, and it's true for almost all of my close friends. the fact that we can see what we're all listening to via Spotify shared on Facebook (or thisismyjam, or just by sending each other stuff at work by email, happens all the time.) guarantees a there'll always be some buzz about whatever the thing people are into at a given moment is.

there really is nothing inherent to the current climate that stops discussion, nothing whatsoever. it's a totally crazy theory apparently extrapolated from the behaviour of one person's peers.

i can think of groups of friends of mine who don't really discuss music, but it's because they aren't as interested in it as the ones that do, generally, or just sort of "know what they like" and there's no shared interests.

again, it's totally untied to format or technology, and the persistent arguments to the contrary presume far too much about how other people listen to music.

I wonder, were I the same age now as I was when I first starting getting into music, if the same passions could be instilled in me given that a lot of the IRL social pathways are slowly being moved to online, which by nature requires an active yet solitary approach to music seeking.

See, I've had the complete opposite reaction. I learned about some music from friends in high school, but once I started spending (way too much) time on the internet I ended up making some friends who would trade music with me. It was slow as hell, but we'd upload an album or two to a shared ftp site the friend had and go back and forth trading music picks. With things like the spotify social feature, last.fm, and people sharing music I've picked up on as many things as I ever did from friends previously.

For some reason I keep picturing dog latin's friends listening to records as some sort of movie scene where a character says "You have to really check out this record!", holds it up, puts it on the turntable, and the movie goes into some sort of reflective character montage.

Sorry dog latin, you might live in a Nick Hornby novel.

the fact that your friends apparently never talk about music IRL is not the basis for a theory.

― Know how Roo feel (LocalGarda), Wednesday, 3 October 2012 16:32 (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I could argue that it does, as today's music media make it harder for such discussions to arise. As I said upthread, the last time I can recall my casual-music-fan friends getting into a passionate conversation about music was when a vinyl record was put on, and I have reason to believe this was largely down to the medium, its tangibility and the overall accessibility of this format. But then I'm 32 years old on Friday, so I'm open to being proved that this conception among me and my friends is simply down to age. That said, there are a lot of people in this world who are older and less digital-savvy than me, so the complete annihilation of the shop-purchasable physical format would greatly affect them.

haha xpost

I could argue that it does, as today's music media make it harder for such discussions to arise.

point is can't prove the former simply cos your friends don't talk about music.

stories are nice.