Life as a music fan

There was a time in the not too distant past when life as a music fan was easy to keep up with. You'd discover a new band. They'd release a single that would get a bit of radio play and you'd get used to hearing it quite a bit. You'd buy the CD single and it'd have a couple of B-sides tacked on. They weren't bad but you'd probably only listen to them once. The single would make its way into the charts and then about three months later, once the fuss had died down, they'd release another. A few weeks later, an album would follow. You were getting into them now; they might even become one of your favourite bands. They'd release a couple more singles, another three months apart, probably go on to tour the album and that would be it. Potentially, if the record company wanted to make a bit more money out of them, they'd reissue the album a year later with a few additional tracks that they originally decided weren't good enough for the album and they'd call it a "deluxe edition". It'd annoy you but you'd consider buying it. When the download era started, it didn't annoy you so much because even if you'd bought the original album, you could just download the extra tracks. Then, over time, you'd stop listening to the album so much. There's a chance you'd discover an EP that they released before they got a mainstream record contract and its mixture of demo versions of songs you already knew and other tracks that weren't quite good enough would satisfy you for now. A couple of years would go by and just before you forgot about your new favourite band, you'd hear their new single on the radio. It's brilliant! You forgot how good they were. So you start listening to the debut album again. It gets you excited for the follow-up. You hear the new single a few more times and a few weeks later, they release a second, followed by a new album a week after that. And the whole process starts again. This happened with a handful of bands. You only followed a handful because you didn't have the money to buy loads of CDs and the radio only played stuff they deemed mainstream.

Now, you've stopped buying CDs because you've got a subscription to Spotify. When you first signed up, it was a revelation! All of a sudden, you could listen to those bands that inspired your favourites or listen to whole back catalogues when you'd previously only heard a band's greatest hit on Top of the Pops that one time. So your list of favourite bands grows. Not just bands either; genres too. Suddenly you're into acid jazz, 70s disco and Indonesian hip hop. So you look at your Release Radar playlist every week. It often includes songs by bands you like but you're confused. Sometimes there's a new single; sometimes you think there's a new single but it's an album track and you're not sure if you've heard it before. Half the tracks seem to be remixes, live versions, re-imaginings. Just because you've put the latest Lewis Capaldi song on one of your playlists does not mean that you need to be notified on a weekly basis when an alternative vocal arrangement has been released. And you're really getting into some old stuff too. You've been listening to Dire Straits a lot recently and one week, your Release Radar contains one of their songs you've not heard before. They can't have reformed, can they? Wouldn't there have been more press? Well, you wouldn't know though, would you? Because why listen to the radio when the entirety of recorded history sits behind a green circle on your phone? So you Google it and you find out it's a B-side from 1987 and the record company is just adding some back catalogue stuff to online streaming services. It's not new. Why is Spotify getting you all excited like this? Or rather, why are you getting yourself so worked up?

So you follow all these new (and old) bands you've discovered which you could just about keep up with if they stuck to the established single-single-album-single way of doing things with a few weeks between releases. But now the record companies want more: more fans, more airplay, more money. And that band you discovered when you bought the first album on CD has popped up on your Release Radar. You've Googled it; it's a genuine new single. Awesome! You add it to a playlist and listen to it a couple of times in the first week. Then, the next week, your Release Radar has another one. What? You've only just got into the first one. You haven't even learnt the words to the chorus yet, never mind Googled the guitar chords. So you listen to the second single; it's alright. You start to think, maybe a few years ago, this would have been the B-side to the first. And then a couple of weeks later, there's another. You can't keep up. Someone at work says to you, "have you heard the new Vampire Weekend single" and you reply "which one?". Then the album drops. Fine. None of the rest of the stuff matters now. You'll just listen to the album; it's easier that way. It doesn't actually matter which ones the singles are because the radio now just plays Dua Lipa and Drake, and that's only because their record companies get them on the high-profile Spotify playlists. So you get into the new album. You love it; it's brilliant. But then a few weeks later, a new track appears in your Release Radar. You think you'll have heard it already but you don't recognise the title. You check and it's not on the album. What is this one now? Are they releasing a new album already? A couple of weeks later, the band drops an EP. An EP? EPs used to be things that bands recorded when they were on the way up, now they're things that record companies make them release within six months of an album because they can't wait another couple of years for a full follow-up. So you just go back to the album again and you find Spotify has replaced the original version with a new deluxe edition that not only contains those tracks that should've stayed on the cutting room floor, but also endless remixes and live versions. You start to think, "listen, I like this band but I just can't keep up. I want new music but I just need some time to enjoy it". And because you now like so many more bands, you can't listen to everything they release. It used to be that if Foals didn't release an album one year, it was fine because Biffy Clyro did so you still had something to get obsessed about. Now, they're all releasing two in quick succession and you don't need to think about whether or not you can afford the new album, but instead you have to consider if you actually have the time to listen to it.

So instead, you just stick on that Earth, Wind & Fire track again for the 1500th time and think "ah, I love Spotify".