Pros & Cons of Listening to Music in Bulk

Normal people: Hmm, this song is pretty good, I need to listen to the best songs by this band/artist.

Me (and some others): Hmm, this song is pretty good, time to listen to the whole discography.

CONS:

"Yo dude, have you heard this *insert band name* song?" a friend asks you. You sweat nervously as you put a song on pause. It's a song of a band you've been listening to for a while. You hope no one ever finds out that 'a while' means the last one month because they have seven studio albums, five EPs, two live albums, four acoustic sessions and fifteen hidden singles. Sometimes you wonder why you bother listening to so many songs from one band when you could just listen to multiple great songs from different bands. After all, your inbox is still littered with suggestions from various people whom you've told you'll 'get around to it'. Little do they know that you weren't really talking about the song suggestion when you uttered that phrase. What is even more irritating is that usually, it's these song suggestions which help you to keep up with the most popular songs of today but you're actually too busy with the 15,000 lesser known songs that clamour for your attention, even though you're well-aware it'll take a ridiculous amount of time to get through them.

That's not the end of it, though. If you've downloaded the music you're listening to, you can practically hear your computer and storage devices screaming that they're running out of space. It doesn't help that every time you right click on a folder or a playlist to delete it, your brain immediately starts lecturing you about the importance of keeping albums and discographies intact and that you 'might like this song later'. You try to argue back, but your brain just shuts your mouth and calls you a beyadob.

Even if you stream stuff instead, it's still a pain because how do you expect to satisfy yourself with casually put together playlists and albums which you find on YouTube or Spotify? Not making the entire album available for streaming is truly something of an offense. There's also that constant fear of "Oh God! What if they remove this song?" God forbid if that happens because breaking the flow of an album is pretty much sacrilege.

PROS:

Stories come in a lot of different forms. You've got the most obvious medium, books. Afterwards, we come to movies, anime, TV series, comic books, etc. Then there are bands which do story-telling through a concept album, and frankly, it gives a sense of contentment that single songs hardly ever give. For example, listening to Steven Wilson's album 'Hand. Cannot. Erase.' from start to finish with no breaks in between is satiating for me. It isn't just that though, an album takes relatively longer to get boring than listening to one song over and over.

Listening to music in bulk makes for a good amount of boasting sometimes because if someone suggests a song from that band you like, you can immediately throw twenty songs back which said person doesn't know about, all the while screaming, "HAH! TAKE THAT, AND THAT, AND THAT AS WELL!" I hope I'm not the only one who derives an inexplicably large amount of joy from this. In addition, those twenty songs often contain rare gems and that adds to your personal joy and makes you feel more exclusive.

It also makes for a great way to enjoy any song by them if you ever happen to go to the band's live shows. The Guthrie Govan concert in February 2017 was all the more satisfying for me because I knew every song and could hence appreciate things even more. It also gives you a good degree of validation when you say something like, "Oh yeah, I'm a HUGE fan of this band," unlike those filthy plebeians who can only name five songs by that band they 'love'; five songs, which, I may add, are extremely mainstream.

Having said all that, I feel like there are a lot more cons than pros regarding listening to music in bulk. It's still your own choice and if that's what makes you happy, listening to single songs just won't be your thing. Anyway, I'm off to re-listen to another Damien Rice album. "O", in case you're wondering which one.

Rasheed Khan is a hug monster making good music but terrible puns and jokes where he's probably the only one laughing. Ask him how to pronounce his name at aarcvard@gmail.com