Like I imagine most other old folk do these days, I mainly hear new music by flicking through the 'fans also like' section on Spotify. At the beginning of each year I start a new playlist and then add songs to it through this exact method, finally ending up with a playlist of about 100 songs for each year. Add into this the new releases from some of the other current favourites and I just about manage to remain vaguely up to date with what's new.

It's not exactly as cutting edge as attending the early Punk nights at the 100 Club back in 1977, or even being super-glued to the NME every Wednesday morning back in the mid-nineties, but it is the modern day digital equivalent. There was nothing more frustrating than having to wait sometimes months for a band's new release, and the ease of access that Spotify offers means we now feel incredibly hard done by if we can't get access to a band's entire back catalogue within seconds of logging on. How things have changed.

On one hand direct access means it is easier to be heard than every before, but also means bands lose that once vital element of mystique that rock n roll used to thrive on; whilst the real tragedy is that the ubiquity of playlists also means that the traditional album is all but dead.

I am sure bands will still be releasing traditional albums for a while yet, but one of the new bands I have been listening to, The Night Cafe, seem to be bucking this trend. How many others are there out there? Now I don't know anything about them other than what I have seen on Spotify, but it seems that they have chosen not to release the standard 11/12 track album, but instead have just put out half a dozen singles in the four years since they have been releasing material. I wonder what the reasoning is here. Perhaps they are saving up all their best material for one mega album, but I suspect that they have just thought that they don't need to, because music these days is consumed in very different ways to how it once was and the typical album does not fit into the music world in the way that it once did.

Luckily for this old foggy there is still a wealth of music behind me that I am exploring and my vinyl collection is starting to look pretty healthy. If not pocket-draining. I am currently in the phase of buying up all the New Order albums and wondering why I never listened to them that much before. Watch this space for more comments about them to come!