A bit of history
I started using my parents old russian vinyl player when I was a bit older than 3 years old (or so I was told). We had a few tens of vinyls, most of them ‘classics’ like Harry Belafonte, Elton John, Roxette, Abba and a bunch of children stories recorded for the radio, sometime in the ’60s or ’70s.
You could guess which were my favorites at that time, I knew them by heart and a day wouldn’t pass without the player ‘booming’ with children stories. A couple of months ago, I found accidentally on YouTube my favorite story from those vinyls and without being able to move a muscle I listened mesmerized to those ‘gods’ voices, while memories were flowing before my eyes.
The truth is that after playing one vinyl a few times, I was able to easily jump to the parts that I liked just by lifting the player’s arm and placing the head were I wanted. It started with the stories, but while I got older I savaged the music discs without mercy and I guess that is where my weakness for the 80s music comes from, but this is not subject of this post.
More or less
It won’t be much of a surprise for you what I’m going to say next, but here it goes! In the age of Spotify and YouTube, I realize that content is less memorable. If you ask me to mumble a song that I liked in the last 2 years, it will be quite hard and it’s not because there weren’t any good songs out there. At the same time, I can reproduce most of Harry Belafonte’s “Matilda” easily, even though I didn’t listen to it in the last 15 years.
There are (at least) 2 factors at work here:
- Abundance. There’s too much content we can get our hands on instantly and that’s good but it’s also bad, ‘cause less sticks with you.
- Format. The current format of distribution for music is not helping your memory. The only trigger is the actual content.
I know it’s not feasible to return to the vinyl era and I also know that this is just another less is more post, but I felt the need to just say it as well.