The amount of music that exists is overwhelming. Due to the sheer volume of work that is available for consumption, especially because we now have such ready access to music from different time periods, we have the good, but somewhat paralyzing problem of having an excess of music that interests us.
I have always found myself having more to listen to than I could hold in my brain at once. After starting with handwritten playlists on paper, I started making digital time period playlists, with the songs I was listening to in a span of a month or two. Whenever I wanted to listen to music, I would just press shuffle and repeat the process until I was exceedingly familiar with all of the songs. The playlists themselves were quite effective for capturing snapshots of my life and I still frequently make similar ones, but weren’t conducive to listening to full albums. The playlists got bogged down and oversaturated with certain artists if I added entire albums, so I tended to listen to the few songs I selected for the playlist most of the time. To fix this, I arrived at my current listening system.
I use the recently added page as something of a display case for the albums in my current rotation. I still have my full ‘archive’ of albums in my library, but new albums need to sit on the recently added page for long enough for me to fully digest them before passing them into the archives. I also create playlists in conjunction with this to store single songs that can represent entire albums — this makes it easy to access and browse albums in the library (no longer on the recently added page) by category without digging through all of my albums every single time or using the suspicious and often shocking algorithm classifications.
All of this organizing, extracting, and shuffling makes collecting and listening to music easier, but it also poses the interesting question of how music should be experienced and if the album experience is compromised by pulling songs out of context.
Personally, I believe the listener’s relationship with a piece of music is best divided into two stages: appreciation and integration. In the appreciation stage, the listener plays the album in full to try to understand, appreciate, and fully immerse themselves in the world the artist was trying to create. From there, the listener can trust that they have taken the time to understand the album, so they can then begin to integrate it into their own life, allowing it to take on personal meaning and associations. Not all albums will have both stages, some immediately become integrated into the listener’s life while others are too singular or even uncongenial to move past the appreciation stage. Either way, this is an important distinction between listening for intended album experience and listening for personal experience.
Although I do tend more toward album experience, I also think there is inordinate vilification of listeners who prefer to consume music in playlist form over album form. It creates unnecessary anxiety around discussing music, especially if the listener doesn’t feel qualified to suggest a song without being acquainted with the entire album or even discography. One of the central functions of music is to create a mood, which playlists (both custom and pre-made) often accomplish in a different way than an album, frequently tending to be more uniform and less narrative-focused (even musical narratives in form, tempo, etc.), so those looking for a certain atmosphere cannot be faulted for preferring them.
It all boils down to listening to music in the way you can enjoy it most. Even if I think there is a way that music should be consumed to be given the respect it deserves, the best I can do is to listen that way myself, just as everyone else will tailor their own listening habits to what they prefer.
Regardless of the futility of it, this is a topic I consistently find fascinating and return to whenever a new listening style gains popularity. What are your thoughts on listening methods and/or library organization? Comment below!