A message recently appeared on our family What Is App group, from The Current Mrs Masher™.
The replies to her question arrived within seconds… possibly the quickest responses that I have seen from the kids.
TCMM: “Who still uses the family Spotify account? It’s gone up in price again and I’m thinking of cancelling it”
Son: “I use it everyday. Please don’t cancel it”
Daughter: “I use it everyday too. Please don’t cancel it”
Masher: “Never used it. Get rid of the damn thing.”
I was outvoted and we still have a family Spotify account that I’ll likely never use. Whenever I want some music on in the house, I’ll just stream it from my collection on the NAS drive, straight onto the Sonos.
But, this got me thinking (dangerous, I know). I’ve made the point before that my kids have never listened to true high fidelity audio. Brought up in the digital age, as they have been, they have never listened to an analogue recording, only digital ones, which, of course, lose some of their fidelity in the digitisation process. To be fair, this isn’t a big deal, as only the most fastidious listener would be able to tell the difference between an analogue recording and a digital one that has been sampled at a decent bitrate.
An mp3 at 320kbps is good enough for 99.9% of listening tastes, I reckon.
But, more than that, I realised that my kids – unlike me and those of my generation – don’t actually own any music recordings. All the songs they listen to are streamed from the likes of Spotify, Google and YouTube. They don’t “own” any of it, they just pay a monthly fee to be able to listen to somebody else’s copy. When I pointed this out to them, they didn’t seem bothered by the fact. I doubt anyone of their generation is.
But, is this the future, I wonder? When we don’t bother owning any CDs or DVDs anymore, we just stream from the likes of Spotify and Netflix?
My own – somewhat eclectic – music collection, is the result of many, many years of record and CD – and yes, even Compact Cassette – purchases, that probably cost me thousands of pounds over the years. And even though it’s now all digitised onto a single hard drive for convenience, I like that I still have the original copy; the physical, tactile item, that comes with a printed sleeve showing the track titles. And of course, some of the album art is a joy to look at. Of course, all my original copies are now stored in the loft for safekeeping and I haven’t actually seen any album art for years.
But it’s nice to know that it’s there.
And it’s mine.
Ahh that reminds me of those heady days in the portakabin at Hemel. Housed in there after our office building suffered damage from the explosion at Buncefield.
Down loading music to our play list kept us amused for ages. I can’t remember the software you deployed but it had Bear in the title.
Any road up, it all started one morning when you arrived and said you’d just enjoyed listening to Charles Trentnet singing Boum. So we downloaded it and that started the ball rolling, we spent a lot of time thinking up tunes, some silly some not, to entertain us.
There was Charlie Drake, Bonzo dog, various bands from our youth and then….Ian Dury F*** off Noddy…..
Heady indeed… especially in the Summer months!
I still have a copy of Boum… somewhere.
And, of course, Fuck Off Noddy.
Good days.
We have a family Spotify account. I am probably the heaviest user. I have tens of thousands of tracks on my NAS. I really should learn how to make it stream to my Sonos One.
That doesn’t surprise me, in the least: heaviest user of Spotify and yet also has the most songs on his NAS.
Classic Bren.
For her 15th birthday yesterday, her uncle, my youngest son ,( late 30s) gave her 10 of his old CDs that he thought she might like to discover. I had to deliver them, and she immediately pulled a little portable CD player from her bag !( we were at a cricket match) I think she has another player at home!
Good for her: embracing the old (“old”?!) technology.
Funnily enough – considering this post – my son came home yesterday, from a week away with his mates down on the coast. He proudly showed off one of his purchases that bought down there: a 12″ album. It’s by a band that I’ve never heard of and he has no way of playing it. He bought it because “I liked the cover”.