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

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.

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

― comedy is unnatural and abhorrent (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, 3 October 2012 16:38 (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is all very well - I have had similar experiences, but I still think it's kind of sad that all this has to happen over the web. I get your points, but it's kind of indicative of how far we've come when I'm gettin ribbed for saying "the other day we sat around and listened to a record" as though I represent some sort of anachronistic spluttering colonel or fictional Hollywood character from the 1960s, while everyone else says "I don't know what the fuss is about, my internet friends are much more fun and enlightening than my IRL friends, what's the problem?".

Y'all might disagree with me, but music for me isn't just about sound coming from a speaker or the loves and lives of the artists producing it. I love discussing music and talking about it online, but I also believe that there's more to music than this. It's the same reason I enjoy a pint of beer but find the majority of town hall beer festivals in the UK miss the point - here we have a big room with 1000 beers to try out, but no other form of entertainment - not even chairs to sit down in in many cases. So rather than using beer as a social lubricant, something to be supped in conversation or whilst dancing to music or watching a show of some sort, it is to be quaffed in a sort of standing hubbub. The ulterior joy of beer has been placed front-and-centre with all other stimulus removed. When people discuss music online, they are doing one thing. They are individually sitting at their computers talking about music, and I'm not convinced this should be the only way to go about things, or even the preferred way.

The complete annihilation of the shop-purchasable physical format won't happen until those people are dead or have changed their buying habits.

Record shops close down every day. In Last Shop Standing there was a statistic that said something like five years ago 2,800 independent record shops existed in the UK and this number has dwindled to 800. The HMV chain is in constant jeopardy and if it closes down, there'll be very little impetus for the music industry to continue producing physical formats in any major way.

Biggest digital-music-head I know is 43 and always emailing us about whatever foul-mouthed metal album he's got off emusic.

This is all very well - I have had similar experiences, but I still think it's kind of sad that all this has to happen over the web. I get your points, but it's kind of indicative of how far we've come when I'm gettin ribbed for saying "the other day we sat around and listened to a record" as though I represent some sort of anachronistic spluttering colonel or fictional Hollywood character from the 1960s, while everyone else says "I don't know what the fuss is about, my internet friends are much more fun and enlightening than my IRL friends, what's the problem?".

you're getting ribbed for extrapolating a theory which denigrates wide swathes modern culture from a highly specific personal and anecdotal instance.

nobody is disagreeing with fact that there were nice things about physical music's era.

i'm not even going to unpick the beer thing because it's heaping yet more insane confusion into this thread.

When people discuss music online, they are doing one thing. They are individually sitting at their computers talking about music

I like to think there are many many more people doing this now than were going into record shops on a regular basis 20 years ago.

Like others here I do doubt that online discussion reduces IRL discussion and indeed is more likely to facilitate it further.

So rather than using beer as a social lubricant, something to be supped in conversation or whilst dancing to music or watching a show of some sort, it is to be quaffed in a sort of standing hubbub

oh go on i'll bite, earlier in the thread you complained about "musical wallpaper", now you complain that people on the net are "only doing one thing" when they listen to music.

please just stop hurling illogical tumbleweed into the cosmos, you're actually hurting fairies.

Also surely the #1 method of music discovery... actually hearing it around. Pubs, clubs, shops, radio, anywhere. Things like Shazam are popular for a reason.

Like Anal Corpse Annihilation or whatever. Said the most moving song he'd ever heard was that piano cover of One Big Family by Embrace from the KFC add today. He's lovely but slightly crackers.

dog latin, I think you missed the part earlier where I said I've sat with friends and streamed an album to my stereo and talked about it with friends. With the cover art showing on my television, sometimes. No computers involved.

the idea that online music discussion somehow is done at the expense of offline music discussion, has no basis or theory behind it whatsoever. none, at least none yet offered here.

they don't even happen at the same times. is ilm full of uk posters on a saturday night or something? it's the most crazy "the net is stopping us from spending real time together" kneejerk shit you can get.

Had a great time fooling some very stoned guy into briefly thinking that I was RiFF RAFF whilst playing COD the other week.

I think we're trying to tell you to get new friends

is ilm full of uk posters on a saturday night or something?

actually don't answer that. let's discuss other sites.

Xpost I think I'm telling you Guys to maybe make some friends outside of your twitter feeds.

Well, that is a little harsh, but I think that what I mean is that your friends are possibly not in a part of their lives where they're discussing music, or they're discussing boring music and your picks aren't it?

xpost (sorry just rising to the snark)

I think the next time you're over, you should put an actual record on that's newer and see if they discuss it? We need a double-blind experiment, here.

Does it even need to be pointed out that you don't need to be "sitting at a computer" in order to consume or browse music over the internet in 2012? And millions of people aren't?

dl, without wanting to Ronan you, it seems like your mourning your teenage / early 20s lifestyle. You get older, people have less time, more responsibilities, you don't just hang out at mates houses in your 30s and skin up - I've literally not done that in 11 years, since finishing university. I barely ever see my friends from uni or per uni because we live in different places and have different interests. For ages I got all my music interaction online, and it's great, but yes, it leaves a whole.

But then we started this! http://devonrecordclub.wordpress.com/ with some like-minded buddies, and it's fucking wicked. I love it. I can't wait for the next meeting. Emma mocked us initially - "why don't you just go to your mates house and listen to music, whys it got to be a club with rules and a blog?" but two of us have kids, we live miles apart and need to drive, etc etc, so making it a "club" or wtf gives us a bit of a kick up the arse and impetus.

Xposts i'm on my phone now And this discussion is getting quite confusing, especially since ronan's choosing to ignore a whole bunch of things i've explained in numerous ways already and which I can't be fucked to go over again, but here goes.

I have plenty of friends who I know listen to good music and are very passionate about it. My key point is that I feel music appreciation is becoming an increasingly marginalised, personalised, insular pastime as a massive part of it now hinges on having to be at a computer or plugged into an ipod which usually takes place alone. Without physical formats to display and swap and get interested in, and without music outlets in which to browse and possibly bond in, many passionate music fans end up having better discussions with online strangers than they would their close friends. Music taste is now shown through one's online profile, reduced to a homogenous list of names and usually not that indicative of the user's true tastes anyway. So yeah, disagree with me if you like, but I can only state from my experiences. Again, ymmv.

I feel music appreciation is becoming an increasingly marginalised, personalised, insular pastime

for YOU maybe but if this is meant as a ~social observation~ you aren't backing it up at all

a massive part of it now hinges on having to be at a computer or plugged into an ipod which usually takes place alone

a) it doesn't because music in public spaces still exists b) computers and ipods aren't really solitary devices as anyone who's plugged an ipod into a system at a house party can testify c) the way in which digital listening facilitates sharing, on platforms where casual and obsessive music fans rub up against each other no less, makes music listening LESS marginalised and solitary

Without physical formats to display and swap and get interested in

like casual fans ever did this

many passionate music fans end up having better discussions with online strangers than they would their close friends

you can't talk to your close friends online? i feel sorry 4 u

oh god i can't even be bothered any more

No neither can I until you bother to read the rest I the thread

Loads of thirty and forty somethings talk about formative musical experiences listening to records or John Peel in their bedrooms. It's not like solitary listening is a new thing.

^^^

I bet loads of 60-somethings talk about playing Beatles singles on their own in their bedroom, too.

Thanks for your incite on this one. I never knew that.

I mean c'mon where did I say people never used to listen to music on their own?

Neither am I really saying that people don't listen to music together any more, which is what a lot of people ITT seem to think I am saying.

i dunno how you would accumulate numbers on this, but i suspect that being able to get any kind of music whenever you want has increased the kind of communal audience for any number of prickly and unpopular genres that was supposedly being facilitated by physical media trading, though i will get on board the idea that being able to filter for just the music you want contributes to a kind of unhealthy balkanization.

You do seem to be insinuating that there was some kind of pre-web golden time when listening to music, discovering music, was a predominantly communal thing. Maybe we're just inferring that and communication lines are crossed, but people are (mostly in a very civil style) countering your examples with other examples which disprove yours, and, as I said, this makes it seem as if you're mourning your own past rather than a shared history.

xpost.

That's cool mouthy, I'm not discount ing the fact that age plays a big part in this. (love your Devon record club btw - great idea). I'm not here to bemoan anything though, nor am I here to rose spec my twenties. I still see the majority of my mates from back then anyway, tis the way of small town life I guess. I know they listen to lots of music, but yeah it just feels like I have less of a handle on what they're listening to unless I look at their last.fm playlists. It's not as easy to swap music face to face as it used to be, and that could be part of the prob. If someone plays a track and I like it, I can't just ask to borrow the cd. And with no physical album to pore over, I'll generally forget to go seek it online when I get home. I find iPods to be practical, but I don't believe they're that good in a social setting and I don't have a big music streaming tv to stare at either (hate the idea of staring at a screen while listening to music too, especially in a social context).

But anyway, i'm on my phone right now so I'm gonna leave this discussion for now.

When someone plays a track I like, I sometimes just pull out my phone and buy it on the spot

Must admit I've never thought to buy music on my phone. Dumb question but can you transfer it back to your computer after that?

Yup. With iTunes it'll automatically download it, if you want it to.

Aye, I've done that with stuff on the radio, stuff people have mentioned irl or on here, a song from the Olympic opening ceremony. I may be a CD fan but I'm not a freak.

I wouldn't trust iTunes with anything tbh. Does it download in mp3 or rubbish m4a?

haha

m4a, which is actually a significantly better codec than mp3 and sold without any drm whatsoever?

well, it's a container, I mean aac encoding

Does that play on non-Apple devices though?

M4a is no good for me as it's incompatible with the version of acid pro I use to make mixes, and that's a really important factor for me.

Sure. It's actually the default format for PS3 and a bunch of other platforms. afaik after the drm removal a few years ago, the iTunes store files should play on about anything.

AAC is actually the industry standard replacement for mp3, which is pretty long in the tooth.

You'd think Sony would have had aac support in Acid Pro for years, what with their own hardware using it as the standard for a long time

I think mine's an old version. Actually maybe since I upgraded to acid 7 I may not have tried m4a on it yet

!!!!

ACID Pro 7 software offers increased format support, allowing for more options with media and hardware devices including the PSP®, iPod®, and iPhone®. ACID Pro 7 software also includes the Dolby Digital AC-3 Studio plug-in to export mixes in surround format.

!!!!

this discussion is getting quite confusing, especially since ronan's choosing to ignore a whole bunch of things i've explained in numerous ways already and which I can't be fucked to go over again, but here goes.

if I am then prove it by making one cogent reply that isn't whining because people point out the gaping holes in your swiss cheese theory.

I have plenty of friends who I know listen to good music and are very passionate about it. My key point is that I feel music appreciation is becoming an increasingly marginalised, personalised, insular pastime as a massive part of it now hinges on having to be at a computer or plugged into an ipod which usually takes place alone.

how does an ipod differ from a walkman in this regard? how does a computer differ from a stereo?

Without physical formats to display and swap and get interested in, and without music outlets in which to browse and possibly bond in, many passionate music fans end up having better discussions with online strangers than they would their close friends.

yes, this is your theory, but you have yet to even make one point to prove it or even suggest why the internet would damage people's ability to talk to their friends about music.

Music taste is now shown through one's online profile, reduced to a homogenous list of names and usually not that indicative of the user's true tastes anyway. So yeah, disagree with me if you like, but I can only state from my experiences

why a "homogenous" list? what's "homogenous" about it? please give me some factual answers as to why an online profile contains "homogenous" information as opposed to say, a given individual's opinions or thoughts being likely to be "homogenous".

also how is music taste shown only through online profiles? i can't talk to people about music IRL anymore?

people have already responded to you to say they do discuss music IRL all the time.

this is all total fucking bunkum and you're the one not reading or engaging with responses.

also no more whining about "snark" like some beleaguered child - if you want to throw down some mega theory placing yourself as the visionary that sees the homogeneity in the tastes of the masses then take your medicine.

Don't mean to put words in his mouth but I think he means simply that the titles, artists, etc, are rendered in a homogenous font/format. Hard to argue with that.

sharing on social media includes the art and frequently the record too, and the album and 5 more albums if it's via spotify, it's hardly just lists of the names of artists unless you're on friendster in 2001 or something.

a face to face conversation has more potential for homogenous listing of the names of artists, minus the art, and minus the music.

Depends if they’ve got the record(s) in question to hand but overall, skimming through the above debate, I’d say Ronan is OTM. And yes I’m biased; without the internet I might never have been inspired to start a blog or write about music in any way, and given the way I was ten years ago it’s no understatement to say that music as experienced and felt through the internet probably saved my life. I wrote CoM, I got married again and got my old life back (only better, learning from previous mistakes etc.) – and none of this would have happened with just my physical “collection” of music at home and my general fucked-up widower state. It’s a medium, just as records etc. before them were a medium, and like any medium it’s as social as the individual listener wishes it to be.

My preferences, answering the original question, are thusly:

CDs: still my main way of getting and listening to music for very simple reasons; I am middle-aged and like the old-fashioned notion of record as tangible artefact and also like having lots of them (spines, etc.) but I’m under no illusion that that’s just the way I like it. Also probably the least fiddly non-online way of finding and playing music.

Vinyl: only really get vinyl if I can’t find the record in any other format, e.g. particularly elusive Then Play Long entries. I don’t have a “fetish” for vinyl as such but neither am I blindly going to knock it (considering the stupid crazy amount of the stuff I actually have); I acknowledge that something like Far Side Virtual is a concept which really could only have worked as a vinyl record.

Online: basically YouTube, MySpace and suchlike. Don’t “rip” CDs and for whatever reason Spotify doesn’t talk to Internet Explorer so I can’t get at it. Yes, iTunes, but I wish actual physical singles hadn’t gone the way of the Sinclair C5 (i.e. now only fetishable “limited edition” 7-inches for £9.99). I like the jumpy nature of random play iTunes though.