It’s a Friday afternoon, and you’ve just been paid. The sun is shining and you wander into the record shop on the corner, the kid behind the counter pushing their hair out of their eyes and gives you a nod before returning to their miscellaneous box of vinyls. The smell is all-encompassing – a little bit like an old book, but more woody and dusty. You rifle through the boxes, pretending to consider a whole host of albums you’ve never heard of, until you find it. The new Fontaine’s D.C album, Romance! Or, Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits?
Until a few years ago, the vignette above would have seemed lightyears away from how audiophiles shop around – who listens to vinyls in the 2000s when you’ve got CD’s, your Sony Walkman, or an iPod shuffle? Vinyls are fragile, bulky and require a level of care and attention, so it would make sense that they’ve fallen out of favour.
Only, they haven’t. Vinyl records made up 40% of US album sales in 2023, having increased for the 17th consecutive year. A turntable setup provides a lot in the way of cultural capital for the music lover, solidifying your status as a fan. Liner notes are one of the easiest ways to gain insider information not available to the casual fan, and the posters provide a handy marker of your fan membership for your bedroom wall, too.
Taylor Swift is one artist who astutely recognises the capitalist potential in vinyl records, releasing several editions of essentially the same album in a different design, peppered with a few bonus tracks. And her fans love it. Scrambling for the next installment that will extend their collection, some fans don’t even have a system to play it on! For them, it’s not about the nuanced difference of tracks so much as the tangible nature of the object, the sole ownership of a piece of memorabilia that reinforces their identity as a Swiftie.
While I don’t condone all of T-Swift’s entrepreneurial (or environmental…) practices, I can appreciate the satisfaction to be had in unwrapping a brand spanking new vinyl album, or taking home a special edition hardback of a book I’ve already read and reread. Not to mention the assortment of handbags and pieces of jewellery that I’ve accumulated over the years.
We spend money on what we value, and it reflects our identity. Industry needs money to survive. That is a fact. So while the democratisation of music through streaming services might seem idyllic on the surface, it spells the end of a music industry that can be penetrated by grassroots artists. If we aren’t willing to pay for our music, our art, our literature, then how can artists afford to make it?
Spotify and other streaming apps have ‘handcrafted’ playlists from our listening data and made it so easy to listen to music, that we barely even have to try. Hell, they’ve even created a ‘daylist’ that suggests music based on what you usually listen to at this time, on this day, every week. As I’m writing this, mine is ‘timeless 60s-70s night’, for anyone who’s wondering.
Music consumption has become so ubiquitous it has degenerated into mindlessness. Take for example, Spotify’s AI scandal. In ambient playlists, Spotify was caught replacing titanic artists like Brian Eno in favour of AI generated music, owned by Spotify itself, therefore reducing the amount paid in royalties per stream. It’s only a matter of time before artificially generated music worms its way into playlists of every genre, slowly reducing the platform for living, breathing, rent-paying artists.
Streaming corporations trumpet the so-called creative freedom that their services provide: the freedom for anyone to upload their music and make money from it, and the freedom of choice that the listener continually enjoys. In practice, this leads to what Thomas Hodgson calls creative ambivalence. The vast musical landscape of Spotify paralyses us: the same effect the confectionary aisle has on a 5-year old. Having whatever music we want at our fingertips has made us less adventurous in our music tastes. When was the last time you actively seeked out something new to listen to, rather than just letting Smart Shuffle spew it up?
It also leads us to devalue music. We have 24-hour access to basically every single song there is to be listened to, and we don’t care. Listening to music has gone from being an active, social activity, to a solitary, vacuous one. In years gone by, you picked something, played it, and whoever was in the vicinity would also hear it. Now, we put our headphones on and hit ‘shuffle.’
This devaluation of music can only be rectified in a conscious effort to purchase what is actually important to us. Reducing the breadth of our thoughtless consumption and investing into the artists and genres that we admire will pay us back tenfold in creative autonomy and support for the humble musician, as we all know that the alleged equitable remuneration of artists on streaming services is incomparable to the purchase of an album, merchandise, or concert tickets.
Music is deeply personal. It’s bound up so tightly in how we construct our characters and communicate our values that we often find discussions around musical taste an appraisal of ourselves. The ritual of selecting vinyl, carefully dropping the needle and hearing the crackle and hiss that preempts the first note is enough to transform you into a state of relaxation. While there isn’t much on your mind apart from the action of playing a record, it certainly isn’t mindless. It’s a deliberate act of partaking in musical enjoyment – vinyl demands that you focus on the issue at hand, literally. The tangibility of the record is a degree of ownership more prestigious than streaming, and the reward of a sentimental link with the music is incomparable.
This connection doesn’t have to come from vinyl, or even CDs or cassette tapes. Simply curating your own playlist, from scratch, will immerse you in the act of investing in your music taste and multiplying the joy you get out of listening to it.
Material culture doesn’t just have emotional, ritual or nostalgic value, though. It holds material value too. Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and stumbled into your daily commute, about to plug into your ready-made playlist on when – it’s not there. It might sound far fetched, but the domination of streaming services means we rely on others to keep our music available. We all know the feeling of finding out your favourite film or series has been taken off of Netflix, so why do we think it can’t happen to our music?
Who’d have thought there’s a correlation between bagging that new album with the cool resin design, and having a reinforced underground shelter filled with freeze-dried meal kits.
Removal of content from streaming services happens relatively rarely in the music industry, I’ll admit, but the threat of Spotify closing its doors is enough to make me, and probably other audiophiles, a bit tetchy. Regardless, physical media is the antidote to our fast-paced, convenience-driven, humanity-sapped world. It instills a greater sense of who we are and why we value art, signalling our contribution to the artists we love and facilitating that parasocial relationship to them.
I love my vinyl collection, my book collection, my CD collection and my DVD collection. It’s a glimpse into my personality as it is now, and as it was when I purchased it, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think I have a greater appreciation for art and artists because of it. And I know that if tomorrow the Internet implodes, taking Spotify, Amazon and Netflix with it, that I’ll still have my humanity intact. Will you?