Fear Of A Bot Planet

It seems to me that the digital age is both a blessing and a curse for any avid music enthusiast. It may well be true that you now have access to numerous rare tracks and demos and all sorts of mp3 paraphernalia but the cost is ultimately the soul of music..

With the ability to hand pick the tracks you want from any given album, gone are the days of the album track, the interlude between songs, the simple eccentricities and experiments that define an album as a collection of individual musical pieces. You can take your favourite tracks from a record and then simply not bother with the 'filler'.

This may be simple nostalgia from someone who still buys vinyl on a regular basis but was it not better when you made the effort to buy a physical copy of a record and sit down and listen to it from cover to cover? Albums were made, and continue to be made, for the sake of their concept as a whole, just because one song may have more appeal on an instant pop hook level it does not mean that other tracks, on repeated listens, may not reveal themselves to be carefully constructed pieces of art that the band wanted you to hear.

I won't lie to you, there are albums out there that certainly are a mixed bag (...Modest Mouse - Good News For People Who Love Bad News... you know it to be true) but this is not an excuse to at least give these records the time of day. Artists and musicians sink their soul into creating music to be heard and to express themselves, if you deny them that then you can lie to yourself but you do not deserve them.

So in short, clichéd arguments aside on the ills of the internet age and the mp3, by all means take advantage of the internet and it's power for spreading music and introducing you to new artists. Heck, why not scour all those elitist indie blogs for that rare b-side, outtake, demo, generic Bright Eyes cover or whatever but please, please do not forget about the art of the album, some things are just meant to be left together and not hacked up into an ugly corpse of merciless and cold digital technology.