Various: Now Hear This! Issue 73

Once again I rely on Last.fm, rather than ears and brain, to tell me whether I've listened to this CD before. Yes, once, on 6 April last year. Apart from the tracks by Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Ane Brun, Oumou Sangare and a couple of others, which I played again in May.

How would it feel if I had scrobbled all my listening from the age of thirteen. Who would dominate? Probably Neil Young, because I've been listening to his stuff pretty solidly for nearly 30 years. But much more salutary would be the long tail: the list of albums that I've listened to three times or less. Would it be 10% of my collection? 25%? What if I found that half of the collection had been listened to less than five times? How many times do you have to play an album to justify its purchase — or its continued 'rent' of space in the house?

The tracks I like — again those by Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Ane Brun, Oumou Sangare — are the ones I heard most through Radio 3, either on Late Junction or World on 3.

Rate Your Music entry for this album

Comments

[Fred Stagg]

The question of how much music would be the body and just how long is the tail, is most interesting. This oddly, is something I too have pondered on occasion. Thanks to the miricle of modern electrics (itunes and a computer), I think, in my case anyway, the tail could actually be as much as half of the collection. Now this is predicated on the notion that my listening habits are the same as they have always been. Thanks to things like "shuffle" I know they are not. The practice of putting on an album and listening through was as much about listening "protocol" as it was the technology. These days the shear abundance of on demand music sources was beyond imagination when I first heard and embraced the term audiophile. I digress. If you don't already know of it, here is a link to a vault full of live music. I hope it works for you in the U.K. It's from the CBC and it's called Concerts on Demand. http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/cod/

[David]

It kind of depends where you think the body ends and the tail begins. The tail could be more than half my collection... As Chris Anderson says in The Long Tail, we're getting beyond the old 80/20 rule: it could be that 10% of my collection receives 90% of the plays. Or at least that might be the case had I not embarked on a five-year (so far) project to listen to everything at least once...

And, yes, the CBC site seems to cross the Atlantic OK - crossing the Windows-Mac chasm was a further challenge (I think they're Windows Media streams?), but seemed to manage that, just.