Commodification

When I was in the sixth form we were allowed to go into Kingston at lunchtime. If I wasn't seeing my girlfriend, then more often than not, I'd visit at least one of the following establishments: The Record Shop; Beggars Banquet; Our Price; Books, Bits and Bobs; and the record stall in the Apple Market. You'll have guessed that these were all shops that sold records.

Sometimes, if I had the money and found something I liked, I'd return to school carrying one of the square plastic bags that, even at a distance, demonstrated you'd bought an album. While there were a couple of people at school with similar musical tastes to me, there were plenty of others with whom I didn't see eye to eye musically but they'd all give me a nod when they saw my record bag. I'd say that out of sixth form of a couple of hundred boys, there were perhaps two dozen music lovers, and it was that love that bound us, albeit loosely. 

Of course, most people had a few records but it was a fairly binary situation: you either had a few albums or ten times that amount. And, naturally enough, as you got older, that number only increased. Years later, when I met my first wife, I guess I had maybe two or three hundred albums and twelve inch singles but the binary situation persisted. In fact, I remember going to her friend Rob's flat one day and seeing that he owned fifty albums. I was genuinely perplexed by this; it was a really odd number of albums to own, falling between the two camps.  

It was around this time, the late eighties, that CD players became the 'must have' consumer desirable and sold in their thousands. Tens of thousands, maybe. But, of course, you needed something to play on them, much to the benefit of artists such as Dire Straits ('Brothers In Arms') and George Michael ('Faith'). 

I don't mean to grumble or be a snob about it but I found it was a little galling to see the Athena approach to art now applied to music. After a while, I managed to let go of my irrational irritation, though, just as a few years previously I'd had to accept that other people unarguably loved my favourite artists and albums just as much as I did*. 

But the commodification of music had an inevitable downside and the exploitation of the market by record companies that cared more about profits than the product they were selling had some inevitable consequences. At least two (possibly three) of those consequences were apparent today in Asda, when I saw this rack of 'Now That's What I Call...' albums. 

Don't get me wrong, I used by some of those NTWICM compilation albums for my daughters many years ago and they loved them, but it made me sad to see all these songs mixed and matched, and stacked up high, two for £15.

*I don't actually believe this.