BUY THREE GET NINE YOU DON’T WANT

It started – the slow realisation – when my wife bought me an iPod for my birthday.

Naturally, I set about doing the obvious thing, transferring my all-time most treasured albums onto the iPod. The definitive statements. Those timeless 12” treasures where every track is worth it’s weight in gold, a mystically perfect blending of words and music and performance and production.

In the paragraphs that follow, I won’t name the albums. That would be too cruel. And here’s why.

It hadn’t really occurred to me before but, you know, there were a lot of them. An awful lot of favourite albums. Well, I rationalised, that must be why we can have books of 1000 Greatest Albums, and supplements in the daily papers of songs we must hear, and special edition magazines devoted to lists of immortal albums.

So I got stuck in. It would be simple, just a matter of copying everything off the CDs straight into iTunes. Except maybe not that track. And, actually, that one’s a bit of a makeweight too. And how in hell did I ever tolerate the lyric on that one?

But you’re way ahead of me, aren’t you? Most of my most cherished albums actually consist of three timelessly great tracks and nine others that vary from pleasant to indifferent to just about tolerable to downright drivel.

About then, I started to reflect on conversations I’d had in the mid-seventies when I was working at CBS/Epic records. Conversations about how much more profitable albums were than singles. Conversations about how the real business of the music business consisted not in finding talented individuals to make enduringly enriching music (although that helped) but in transforming a cheap raw material into an expensive finished product. That’s where the profit lay in those days. Record companies took pennies-worth of cheap vinyl, processed it into shiny flat discs, put them in pretty sleeves, and sold them at a huge profit.

Singles were quite profitable but, once the LP was developed (largely to accommodate complete symphonies or classical suites on one disc) it was realised that they were proportionately more profitable – especially if they could be knocked up by pop and rock and blues performers in an afternoon.

Many early LPs were, indeed, all killer and no filler, because they consisted of a string of hit singles compiled together. On the whole, though, most popular music albums consisted of two well-produced and arranged hits, accompanied by not much else.

The biz got lucky in the mid-60s when Lennon and McCartney proved remarkably prolific. They were capable, at their peak, of producing albums where the vast majority of the songs were well worth hearing, so buying a Beatles album was a reasonable investment.

And so the shift to the more lucrative albums market became almost inevitable, became a goal of the industry, and we, the consumers, conspired to make it possible by assuming that if The Beatles could do it, maybe others could too. The artefact, the LP, became imbued with a cultural significance that it never really earned. How many of us used them as flags? Walk into school with the right album under your arm and you were made. Suddenly you had friends you’d never met before.

Why do I say albums didn’t earn their status? Only because most of them – listened to again now – just don’t bear critical scrutiny. They continued to be produced the same way they had been in the 50s – two or three great tracks and a lot of makeweight.

Another option, of course, was the extended solo. That too was a conveniently cheap way of filling up space on an album where the artist couldn’t actually write enough decent songs. And we swallowed it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying there aren’t a handful of stunning extended tracks out there. I can still listen with delight and wonder to Dark Star by The Grateful Dead, for example. On the whole, though, long tracks were a feeble substitute for decent songs and they wouldn’t have been possible if not for the medium of the album.

I’m also not denying the existence of some great albums out there where every track is magnificent, or where the overall mood of the album adds up to more than the sum of its parts, or where the music nails the essence of popular youth thinking at the time.

I don’t, however, think there are thousands of them.

And my iPod has taught me that, on the whole I love individual songs and specific performances much more than I love albums.

What amazes me is that had the iPod never been invented I might never have come to this liberating conclusion. I might have gone on believing – without ever coherently formulating the idea in my head – that musicians just naturally write songs in groups of twelve and release them like clockwork according to a schedule that suits a five-year five-album deal.

My iPod has taught me that the LP was the music industry equivalent of the giant economy pack. Buy a bigger product and you get “value for money” because track for track you pay less pennies. The big difference is that when you’re buying soap powder, you know that the quality of the product is the same however much you buy.

Now, thankfully, the business isn’t about transforming cheap raw material into expensive finished products. There’s no raw material. The finished product is a string of digits in virtual space which you access and buy (or steal) only the songs you want. So the value for money argument no longer even has the appearance of reality.

It’s an incredibly healthy state of affairs for the consuming public and (although this is a topic for another blog) a fantastic time of opportunity for musicians.

Somewhere in the middle of the process of transferring my collection to my iPod I was speaking to a young music fan who professed to being a huge Bob Dylan fan. I did the natural thing that someone my age would do. I asked which albums he liked best. He didn’t know. He liked Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright and he liked Hurricane and he liked Like A Rolling Stone … he reeled off a bunch of totally disconnected tracks, all of them great tracks, none of them the knock-off stuff we albums aficionados made ourselves suffer through to get to the good bits. “Darkness at the break of noon shadows even the silver spoon”. Yeah, thanks Bob. Smart kid.

I still haven’t transferred all of my favourite albums to my iPod. I’m having more fun filling it up with new music by people I’ve never heard of, and all of it in the form of a couple of individual tracks off an album.

So, thank you iPod and farewell you long-treasured albums. You fooled me for a long time but now you all remind me of the first album by Faust. You’ve only got a couple of great tracks and I can see straight through you.