I started listening to some old music again. Stuff I listened to when I was a kid, and I realised something. Now I know this horse has been beaten so much that it has already reincarnated thrice, but let me beat it once again. For my satisfaction.

The music listening experience has fundamentally changed.

Back in 2011, my dad bought a used Maruti Suzuki Zen. It was bright red, because his kid loved sports cars and in my mind red equaled sports car. It had a combination music player which took cassettes and CDs both. There was an AUX and USB too, but it was the age of CDs and Flash drives for music were a foreign concept in villages. When he drove it back from the city, he stopped at a highway dhaba and bought a few music CDs, 70s-80s bollywood music. Now these were pirated CDs, so each CD contained 7-8 albums of an era. Some of them were themed on the singer - like evergreen hits of Mukesh, and some of them on actors like Rajesh Khanna hits, although the actor played no role in creation of that music. The thing about CDs was, there was only a limited amount of music you could store on a CD, and only a limited number of CDs you can store in the glove box of the car. So every time we hit the road, there was a fixed amount of music that we could listen to. That didn’t bother us at that time. But what it did was, it enabled us to actually enjoy a song. Listening to it probably hundreds of times during the course of few years made us actually appreciate the sonic and lyrical elements of the song. I still have those songs by heart.

Then came the age of digital music. Keep in mind I was still a poor kid and could not afford to buy music. Hell, I didn’t even know that you had to buy music. To me, music was free for the world. You just go online and search for < song-name>-free download and you would get it. They released it there just for you. So yes, I downloaded new music as soon as I heard it on 9xm or any other Indian music channel and I would play the shit out of that album. I would have a few favourites from an album but I still listened to the whole album. That made me appreciate the artistic vision of the creator.

Now starts the hard part, streaming. I learned about Spotify and discovered streaming. All the music in the world ( allegedly), at your fingertips and there was no one to stop you from listening to it. Like an artist? Find their discography and hit play. This sounds good on paper, but it puts you in a paradox of choice. Eventually, as streaming turned mainstream, I stopped listening to albums and started listening to songs, or rather playlists. Feeling down? Listen to sad hours by tiredboy69420. In the mood for some rap? Rap Hits is curated for you by ✨ t h e a l g o r i t h m ✨. I am not bashing them, it is a great place to discover new music. In fact, some of my favourite music was found by randomly streaming playlists, but the awe of the album is gone. The vision of the artist is diluted. When you listen to creep by Radiohead, you hear a melancholy of someone lost, but if you listen to the whole album you might be able to see a different perspective. The last album I remember listening from end-to-end is My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West and boy was it an experience.

So my point is, we should listen to albums and discographies more. Doesn’t mean you have to listen to everything all the time, but going through it in succession gives you an insight into how the artist got where they are. Streaming has snatched that away. I think it is up to us to bring it back.