in his medieval phase

Music I'm trusting you Mr Spotify.

In the ongoing battle with the stuff virus that threatens to consume my whole room and me with it, I've sorted through and had a clear out of my cassettes. I was quite late in buying a cd player, so well into the nineties spool-to-spool was still my primary source of music, but eventually shiny-disc took over and most of them were consigned to a crate under the bed where they've sat unloved for too long.

Time to send them to the charity shop. What surprised me was how easy it was to sort through. I'd expected sentimentality and memories but I felt nothing as I put some of these slightly worn sacred objects into the carrier bag. If the sixteen year old version of me had known that I'd be getting rid of that copy of Debbie Gibson's Anything Is Possible, he would have made two copies and put the original in a bank vault.

Now I have the cd (!). Rule one. If I have the cd, it's gone. Rule two: if it's on Spotify, it's gone. I know this means I'm trusting third parties to have this music available to listen to when I'd like, but I've not listened to most of it from tape in years anyway so if its not there, I'm not sure it's too much of a loss. If anything it's made me want to go and listen to it again. I'd forgotten about Voice of the Beehive, Coldcut, The Lilys.

In Spotify related news, they've added a label search. It looks like this:

label:"virgin"

or whoever.

It's as bog-standard as the genre search in that it spews out an unedifying, horrifyingly random list of tracks, but this is another useful way of discovering music if you have the patience to load the whole updated list into view and go random. I'm listen to Virgin at the moment and it's an odd mix or Roxy Music, classical music and Kelis. The most popular track is The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony. Do we know where that royalty money is going to these days?

I've also discovered that despite what the record company itself says (and I have emailed and asked) Deutsche Grammophon do have a presence on Spotify to the tune of just under a thousand tracks, mostly Bach, Bryn Terfel, Elvis Costello and Sting in his Medieval phase. Still, it's a start.