Musical alphabet soup

[This post was written back in June 2013 - now less topical, but still relevant]

Comparing this year’s Glastonbury line-up with that of Barcelona’s Primavera festival, I notice an interesting difference. 

Glastonbury categorises the bands by the stage they’ll be playing on (therefore implicitly by genre), and within that, arranges them in order of presumed fame / importance.  Primavera on the other hand just list the whole lot in alphabetical order.

What’s the meaning of these two systems of categorisation / promotion?  And what do they say about the way we’ve started to listen to music in recent years? 

Festivals listing bands in alphabetical order is a relatively new phenomenon.  The first time I encountered it was about four years ago in the Field Day festival, which takes place in East London’s Victoria Park every May.   Until then, festivals had followed the traditional ‘Glastonbury’ approach. 

This was born of the pre-internet era, when people found out about new music through a small number of sources, mainly controlled by a handful of wealthy media barons and music industry big-wigs.  Accessibility of music was also dependent on what was in stock in record shops, so the most easily available records became the most widely heard.

This meant that the size and demographic of a band’s audience was fairly predictably connected to the extent and type of exposure they were afforded by this industry/media partnership. 

It also meant we searched for music not by using search engines, but with magazines and TV shows.  The format of these media is inherently geared to reinforcing hierarchies of fame, with the most prominent bands gracing the front pages of magazines, or the suspenseful finale of the weekly Top 40. 

(Who knows or cares about what’s in the top 40 these days?  Is it even still a thing?  The last time I heard the phrase ‘Number 1 In The Charts’ was when a pub quizmaster bemoaned how difficult it was to set music trivia questions for the last decade, due to the absence of quantifiably ubiquitous songs.)

These days, it’s far easier to find out about new music through peer groups online, and access almost any song in history (for free) on Youtube etc, as recommendations for similar artists.  We also search directly (and actively) for specific songs / artists, instead of waiting to the end of the chart show to be told who’s Number 1 that week.  (Of course there’s still a huge music industry pushing a few major artists on TV, online, in print, etc.  But the context is very different.)

We’re also now accustomed to personalised and self-selected content across many platforms, rather than ‘one-size-fits-all’:  Twitter timelines, Facebook feeds, RSS feeds, Last.fm scrobbling, Tesco Clubcard points for selected items, BBC iplayer, ‘build-your-own’ student prosptectuses and corporate reports – the list goes on.

In this landscape – notwithstanding  the fact that events organisers obviously make curatorial decisions about which bands are playing in the first place – why would it still make sense for them to choose for us which bands individual audience members will want to see?  Why would it still make sense to assume that the organiser has a better idea than the audience of who’s more famous within specific subcultures?  Or how that fame would translate in desirability?  It feels kinda quaint to be addressed in this way.    

Conversely, Primavera’s alphabetised line-up is the closest a poster can get to Google, in terms of how we seek information in the modern age.  So perhaps it’s also fitting that Primavera’s line-up poster is all sexy minimalism – sans serif, black & white, clean backgrounds – while Glastonbury’s graphic design has yet to emerge from the early 1990s.

Democracy 2.0?

However, I think it would be a mistake to view this shift in music consumption as a move towards the democratisation of music. 

Alphabetisation and equal font sizes appear to create a level playing field for artists, and recognise heterogeneity in audience tastes.  They may even indicate a move away from centralised industry control.  However, I wonder if this conflation of myriad artists and styles onto a single continuum also goes hand in hand with the flattening of music into an amorphous mush of commodity. 

The information age has widened accessibility, so everyone has the opportunity to be connoisseur.  However, it’s also enabled the exact opposite: a generation of people with no need or interest in cultural discernment.  In fact, we’re often (myself included) not only undiscerning about what we listen to, but don’t even know what we’re listening to at any given moment, nor would it occur to us to have any desire to do so.   

We have huge swathes of musical material with no barriers to accessing or selecting it.  We can build infinite playlists without taking action in between to change records, and we don’t have a radio DJ between tracks telling us what was just playing, or what they think of it.  (Though we have kept onto the tradition of being sold stuff in between songs.)

The ‘shuffle’ function blends all of our music collection into a morass of ‘stuff’.  Instead of selecting a song we want, we simply listen to ‘some music’.  The Schrodinger-esque iPod Shuffle takes this one step further, by allowing us to listen to a load of shuffled songs without even displaying what’s playing – so you can quite easily own and listen to a whole load of music without ever knowing what it is.  We’ve moved from a Newtonian musical age to one where our tastes are probabilistically distributed along a Gaussian bell-curve of Heisenbergian uncertainty.  (Physics fans:  yes, I know this is a crap analogy.)

The phrase ‘one-hit wonder’ used to be a derogatory phrase applying to bands with only one famous song, rather than a whole well-known body of work.  But nowadays it wouldn’t even make sense to deploy such a term, let alone as an insult (“You had a hit?  Well done, you’re famous and talented!”), because we recognise the complex and arbitrary way that information, fame and memes spread, and how short our attention spans our.  (On a related note:  music is still written and distributed in the album form, but rarely listened to in the same format – when is the mode of music production and distribution going to change to reflect this?) 

This isn’t an old-person call for a return to the days of John Peel and Melody Maker.  But I do think that the connotations of the alphabetised playlist has some liberatory potential, whilst also conversely embodying the commodification and homogenisation of culture in late modernity.