The Dictates of the Format

Whether you realize it or not, the way that you listen to music is dictated by the way it’s sold to you.

The “record album” was crippled and marched to extinction by a file-sharing website called Napster. Once users could cherry-pick the songs they desired for free, there was no longer any reason to package them together, or design art for them. Ipods were created once Apple saw the fortune to be reaped from people wanting a computer just to fill with audio files. Because there was no more incentive to craft a suite of tunes, or a concept album, everything went back to short pop music again. Because the convenience had redeemed it profitable.

I don’t like to lash out and spread negativity, but I truly hope the kid who created Napster sucks cocks in hell for eternity. It’s all that punk-ass’s fault.

For most of the 1900s, music was distributed on record albums; flat, grooved discs that were played with a stylus on a gramophone, or turntable. Because there was no digital interference, the sound was directly amplified from the needle reading textures inside the grooves. With the right speakers, this produced a “pure fidelity sound”. Buzzwords from the vinyl experience became ingrained in the national lexicon: groovy, disc jockey, in the cut, spin, platter. Jazz took to the format like a hand in a velvet glove; who could imagine discovering jazz without the warmth of wax? Certainly there’d be a crackle or two, but in good measure, this only seasoned the sound.

The physicality of the vinyl record required protection, which came in the form of a glossy square cardboard sleeve. This was more accurately a canvas, a tabula rasa for recording artists. (Soon the papery inner sleeve would get in on the action as well.) The cover could be anything; photographs good and bad, paintings, cartoons, visual gags, spank material, wall art. Double albums unfolded like pop-up books; sometimes a band would go berserk and throw in a zipper (Sticky Fingers) or a rotating dial (Led Zeppelin III). Collecting records was like having a movable museum. It goes without saying that an interesting and varied collection of records was crucial in the courtship of a mate.

The funny thing is that records came with their own set of limitations. Usually, groups were contractually obligated by a label to provide fifteen minutes of material per side; that was it. There could be more, but it wasn’t required. This is why so many albums from the music industry boom of the 1970s are so brief, and when the jump to compact discs came, they were usually paired up as “double albums” (which of course they were not).

The first three cuts of an album were the most important, being the listener’s introduction to the band and what they can do. For a while it was a novelty to keep going on side A after three songs, and no one cared what was on side B; it was the other side of the record, after all. You had to flip the thing over to hear that stuff, which required an additional level of physical skill to replace it on the spindle.

Albums were the next step after a recording artist or group had sold a single. Single songs were sold as smaller records, called “45s” after the speed the player should be set on to hear it properly. Everyone’s older sister had a box of them with a handle, and a portable turntable. It was big trouble if you touched it with your grubby little fingers while attempting to play records at the wrong speed.

If a single sold really well, a producer would fatten it into a long-playing (LP) album. Most musicians had at least a show’s worth of tunes to throw in, but some couldn’t cut the mustard, and advanced production techniques were utilized to ensure returns on the label’s investment. If this meant riding an artist into the ground, hiring strangers to the work, or forcing unnecessary creative control, so be it. Thanks to the overhead involved in the birthing of an album, the stakes grew even higher. Ironically, this is the period known for the most lavishly rendered covers. An artist could forge a healthy career on album illustration alone.

Then, slowly, convenience began to take over.

It started with 8-track cartridges. Here, at last, was a way to hear your favorite music in your car, instead of listening to the damn radio (which required extendible automotive antennas that bent and broke 100% of the time, and were more typically used as weapons in road-rage scenarios). They were big and chunky as Nintendo games, and for much of the 1970s they were a frequent sight on the floorboards of pickup trucks. My fascination with 8-track came from the fact that I had a robot that played them.

The designers of the toy had taken advantage of the medium’s ability to switch tracks, and created quiz cartridges with trivia about Happy Days and the solar system. Simple but fun stuff for a kid, and while it waited for you to reply, it would play terrific old sci-fi audio loops to indicate “processing”. It would also tell bad jokes, and backpedal by claiming that robots find them funny.

The conversion of non-trivia-robot material to 8-track cartridge was a rockier one. All album art was reduced to a single-image decal stuck onto the plastic. The text was almost always the same Impact-like typeface. The tapes were certainly durable (the stickers not so much), but the 8-track format came with an egregious price: what was once 2 sides was now 4 tracks.

Sometimes this wasn’t an issue, thanks to the inherent brevity and modularity of the pop song. But if you enjoyed a band known for lengthier interludes, you had to suffer through the sound of music being brutally guillotined.

If the side had to be split in the middle of a ballad, oh well. That was the price of convenience. It wasn’t a clean edit, either- the audio would distort and fade outKCHUNKand then fade back in after the cartridge switched tracks. If you suffer from the ohrwurm as I do, the sound of the splice would etch into your memory forever after a single listen. It was absolutely no substitute for the performance of the home turntable.

But convenience and control continued to win. People not only wanted to enjoy their music in their vehicles, they wanted to mix it. So it was that cheapness was commoditized, and the cassette tape was born. The excess of the previous medium was so monstrous, that cassettes were heralded as a “streamlined” alternative. They were preferable for re-releases because they contained a shrunk-down, folded version of the album cover, but it came in a flimsy plastic case that only spawned future shards and garbage.

This was around the time consumers began to associate music with waste. Cassette tapes were not built to last- the sight of them in 2015 means they were never played to begin with. A collection of cassettes looks chintzy and awful, regardless of its content. People only display cassettes if they can’t hide them. It always resembles a shelf in a Stuckey’s.

However, if you had a cassette recorder, and you covered the square holes on the spine of a cassette with masking tape, you could record over it. No matter what it was. I don’t think I have to tell you the power a kid could wield with that knowledge. I myself plied a lucrative piracy trade for years, subsisting solely on tapes I dubbed albums over after my church had thrown them out.

Cassettes were already hurting when I was a record store clerk in the mid-1990s. The only reason they stuck it out as long as they did was the overdubbing factor, which vinyl and compact discs lacked (recording onto CDs is really a 21st-century deal). Singles on cassette existed purely as shoplifter bait; they even had perforated cardboard sleeves, like Hot Pockets. It seemed obnoxious to charge anything for them. Regular cassettes had to be shackled into foot-long plastic anti-theft sleeves to keep them from getting pocketed. The things were designed to be stashed in a pocket, for crying out loud. The record industry introduced a convenience and summarily punished everyone who embraced it.

As soon as compact disc players became portable, it was all over for cassettes. Car CD players snuck right in, and became indispensable. A fat black book of discs replaced the clatter of cassette cases underfoot. The convenience of CDs came to inform design, with accoutrements like a sun-visor attachment that held ten discs. And ten compact discs is a lot, so you don’t need as many- each disc holds 70 minutes. 

When I first started recording, this made me delirious. 70 minutes! Why not throw everything in? There’s more than enough room! Make a bloated concept album! Run wild! There’s no “sides” to hold you back; you could even do the whole nut as a live performance!

I wasn’t nearly alone in this sentiment. Zillions of bands and musicians indulged their egos and turned out gigantic rafts of diskage. If over an hour of space and time is avaliable in amber for you, the tendency is to fill it up to the last millisecond. Why waste it?

And then Napster happened. In the age of the broadband modem, shorter songs made for easier downloads. Longer ones lost favor until high-speed internet became more commonplace. Meanwhile, Apple tossed in their little MP3 player like a catcher’s mitt, and poof- everyone was listening to iPods.

I grant you, it’s not all digital dust. Clearly efforts are made to archive the visual aspects of record albums, but that doesn’t change the fact that iTunes cannot exist without electricity and internet access. Sacrifices have to be made for the sake of ecology, but records take up far less space compared to carts, and they have one advantage that no other format has.

Originally, all you had to do to hear a record was turn a crank. You didn’t even have to plug it in.

Think about how much control has been taken away from you regarding your music. How do you listen to it? Do you have to endure advertisements to hear it? Did you have to join a group or buy a service? Did you have to sign an end-user license agreement you didn’t read?

If we enjoy so much convenience, how come you can’t hear what you want when you want to?

Maybe because art and convenience don’t even know one another.

The best ammunition that anti-capitalists have is how Americans consume music. The longview of the 20th century reveals a record industry built on lies, shilling toxic chunks of plastic to the world, not a thought of the implications of loosing such a shitting, exploitational demon. Now, users buy downloads, literally paying for nothing. And every single aspect of the transaction is monitored and controlled. Why do you deserve this kind of treatment? You just wanted to hear your favorite music.

Thirty years ago, all you had to do was press play.