More thoughts on listening to music

When I was growing up in the late 1970s, music really started to play an important part in my life. The shock of discovering punk rock through the John Peel show was one of the major events of my life. I can remember the excitement with which we discussed at school whatever had stood out from the previous night's show - for instance the Siouxsie and the Banshees session that features "Overground" and early Cure.

Buying music was a really big issue. We had one small record shop in town and they were not especially keen on alternative music. There were several other shops in nearby Coventry that did have a greater variety. Tracks were taped off the radio and swapped between us. Whenever someone bought a new album, it was understood that they would tape it for each of us and that we'd all listen to it and talk about it for days afterwards.

My listening habits first changed as I discovered bootleg recordings in the early 1980s. Over the years I probably acquired around 1,000 recordings of live shows, demos etc. I loved the immediacy of the sound - the punk aspect of this - as opposed to the smoothness of studio albums. These together with my 250 edit tapes of old Peel shows and around 2,000 vinyl albums was the basis of my listening for years.

I often say to people that there has never been a better time to be fanatical about music than now. I used to spend hours trailing round shops trying to track down particular recordings - now anyone is virtually certain to be available somewhere. I discovered the huge online bootleg community six or seven years ago and have acquired loads of stuff that way - so much so that I probably have over 1,000 cds that I have never heard - all downloaded, burnt to disc and pilled up at one end of my study.

Then came sites like epitonic.com and emusic.com through which I discovered artists like Cat Power and Jason Molina (through Songs: Ohia and the Magnolia Electric Company) that have been a strong focus of my listening over the last few years.

Years ago I remember Robert Fripp writing a series of articles for Musician magazine about the future of the music industry. This is such a strange industry - always bleating on about the damage done to it by its customers, locked totally in to a business model based on blockbusters. Totally unaware of how artists could regain control over substantial revenue streams to do with live performances. And so on.

Most recently I have stumbled across some file sharing sites that feature huge discographies of artists that people have put together. The other day I was thinking about listening to some Beatles and there on the site is a 38 cd download in MP3 format - so now I have basically every album they made. The same for Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Cypress Hill, Jonathan Richman, Wire, Jimi Hendrix, Porcupine Tree, and even less well known artists such as Bill Bruford, Obscure Cajun musicians, and so on. Last night saw a 14 cd box set of recordings of Bela Bartok download.

But the downside is that this huge supply downgrades the enjoyment I used to get from the records I saved up to buy after reading NME, Melody Maker, Sounds, Record Mirror, Zigzag, etc. I rarely listen to anything with the intensity that I used to when I was 14. Have I lost something from this? I suspect I have lost something, but the advantages of the huge availability of things far outways it I believe.

As I write this I am listening to a multi-cd collection of Japanese Koto music. Something I definitely would not have been able to hear 20 years ago.