Tracks of My Tears
I think I've finally lost patience with hidden tracks on CDs. Um, yeah, it was cool back in 1997 when you left a CD playing and then realized--wait a minute--there's another whole song on here that I didn't even know about! That musical artist is so generous for making me think I was getting twelve songs when actually, they're giving me THIRTEEN SONGS! I felt like I got my money's worth with just the twelve, but to throw in a thirteenth song just for free? Unprecedented!!
So now it's 2005. OK. We get it. It's precedented, for crying out loud! A hidden track just isn't that clever anymore. If the song is so darn great, why don't you just include it on the regular track listing with the rest of the songs? And if the song isn't good enough to make it onto the album proper, then leave it off! Or at least save it for your overpriced collection of B-sides that you'll put out in a few years. But please, for the love of Dewey Decimal, stop making us work extra just to listen to your album in its entirety.
I realize that this whole rant is a relic of the album era, which appears to be slipping away. By "album", I'm not just referring to vinyl, I'm including records, cassettes, CDs and all. By "album", I'm referring to a volume of songs represented as a unit. I'm a big fan of albums, as I think that sequencing songs is an art all its own. But lots of my friends now listen to music mostly in MP3 form, which is much more song-oriented than album-oriented. When you have an iPod full of MP3s, the phenomenon of hidden tracks doesn't exist. And the arrangement of songs into albums is something the user can preserve, alter or disregard at their whim. Oh wait, something that just occurred to me is that hidden tracks actually do have an effect on MP3 listeners. When you rip a CD with a hidden track, a lot of times, you end up encoding several minutes of blank silence and wasting storage space. So there.
Anyway, even though I got off track a little bit (pun intended), I think my point is that I'm hereby boycotting all hidden tracks on CDs. Musical artists take note. (pun also intended)
So now it's 2005. OK. We get it. It's precedented, for crying out loud! A hidden track just isn't that clever anymore. If the song is so darn great, why don't you just include it on the regular track listing with the rest of the songs? And if the song isn't good enough to make it onto the album proper, then leave it off! Or at least save it for your overpriced collection of B-sides that you'll put out in a few years. But please, for the love of Dewey Decimal, stop making us work extra just to listen to your album in its entirety.
I realize that this whole rant is a relic of the album era, which appears to be slipping away. By "album", I'm not just referring to vinyl, I'm including records, cassettes, CDs and all. By "album", I'm referring to a volume of songs represented as a unit. I'm a big fan of albums, as I think that sequencing songs is an art all its own. But lots of my friends now listen to music mostly in MP3 form, which is much more song-oriented than album-oriented. When you have an iPod full of MP3s, the phenomenon of hidden tracks doesn't exist. And the arrangement of songs into albums is something the user can preserve, alter or disregard at their whim. Oh wait, something that just occurred to me is that hidden tracks actually do have an effect on MP3 listeners. When you rip a CD with a hidden track, a lot of times, you end up encoding several minutes of blank silence and wasting storage space. So there.
Anyway, even though I got off track a little bit (pun intended), I think my point is that I'm hereby boycotting all hidden tracks on CDs. Musical artists take note. (pun also intended)