Image: Touchstone Pictures

I’m not sure when we stopped listening to albums.

I suspect it was somewhere between the emergence of Napster and the legitimising of music downloads on iTunes. I started thinking about this recently when I complimented someone on their playlist. I thought about it a little further and considered that it might have been a kind of dumb thing to say because since when should someone get credit for arbitrarily selecting some songs to play? I think what I really meant to say was ‘I’m into this band and I love that you have at least one of their songs’. Chances are it was probably on shuffle anyway and there wasn’t even any ‘craft’ in creating the playlist. Continue reading →