Streaming Music vs the CD Collection

CDs, I tell my younger colleagues, are what’s going to replace streaming music. Because that’s my idea of being funny.

I’ve been using Spotify a lot. It’s awful how much identikit music out there. Whether it’s modern pop or soul, or the pap I put on to fall asleep to, or the endless jazz playlists (The JazzUK one is a goodie though) that re-cycle the same tracks from the 1950’s and 60’s, or those playlists that promise one thing and descend into rap. Just how much rap is there in the world anyway?

Radio was and still is the ‘curated’ streaming medium. That’s what saves it from being a stream of new-age piano pieces with the same old major chords. The DJs and producers have to listen to it and don’t want to have to listen to bland twaddle.

A record collection has the same point is the same as a library or a film / DVD collection: it’s mine. Uniquely so. A friend has a vast number of DVDs, including lots of BBC series and classic British films. No such things (except the Smiley series) are to be found in my DVDs. We both have the French New Wave, and Robert Altman, and Sam Peckinpah. But I have Baise-Moi, Kids and Dogtown and Z-Boys which he would not allow in his house. We will pass over my collection of box sets featuring Eliza Dushku, and in my defence I can honestly say I only have S1 of BtVS (if I even have that).

I have a whole stack of Baroque music CDs, since discovering from reading a couple of histories of music that I like Baroque. And John Digweed. Also Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and obviously Bird and Robert Johnson. The CDs I buy are likely to be music that will stay with me. I’ve lost count of the music I have played out - that moment when suddenly you know exactly where the song is going all the time and it holds no more emotion for you. Unlike Flamenco Sketches which surprises every time.

Spotify has the functionality to build up a list of favourites, and tries to guess at what mine might be. It does as good a job as Amazon’s ‘people who bought this also bought that’ feature. I suppose I could spend a day adding every record and CD I can ever remember buying, but I don’t want to listen to a lot of them now. Anyway, once you list There Goes Concorde Again, aren’t you pretty much done?


Anyway, a list is not a collection, in the same way that a map is not the country. The point of a collection is that it is of things, and the thing-ness matters. Vinyl was more thing-y than CDs are way more thing-y than a Spotify playlist.

I miss 8Tracks. I used to discover music from those playlists. I’d be nodding along and suddenly look up and say what’s this because it had hooked me. This has yet to happen on a Spotify playlist. If anything I use Spotify to find things that I would not buy on CD, starting with Wagner operas. Which isn’t bad. There’s always been that music that falls between must-have-in-the-collection and can’t-remember-it-five-minutes-later. Caravan’s Nine Feet Underground is exactly that.