Here Goes Nothing

The as-yet-unnamed author of what I consider to be the best new Twitter persona of 2010 explains why discographies are the new unit-of-measure for people’s exposure to musicians (emphasis mine):

It’s become a cliché that nowadays the dominant mode of music consumption is not the album but the song. And maybe that’s true if you’re still in the business of trying to sell people songs. But I’d argue that for a lot of people the dominant mode of music consumption is neither the album or the song but the discography. In 2011, if you’re 15 years old and you want to hear the Beatles, there’s no need to agonize over whether or not you should buy Sgt. Pepper or Abbey Road first because you’re just going to type “beatles” and “discography” into Google and five minutes later you’ll have every note the group ever recorded on your hard drive. (Is that legal? No. Is that reality? Yes.)

Since we’re now at a point where it costs virtually nothing to acquire and store someone’s life work the one truly valuable commodity that still surrounds music consumption is the expenditure of time necessary to hear all the stuff you’ve downloaded. If our hypothetical 15 year old has just BitTorrented Neil Young’s entire corpus of work onto her computer, she’ll probably be a lot happier if the first album she plays isn’t Old Ways, but who’s going to tell her that? That’s where I see @Discographies as having real utility above and beyond whatever entertainment value it may possess. If I can steer just one person away from This Note’s For You and towards Tonight’s The Night, it will all have been worthwhile.

From this interview with Rob Tannenbaum of The Village Voice, which just named @Discographies “Music Critic of the Year.” I think it was a good call.