music as autobiography
In Phil Gyford’s great blog post “The £10,000 Playlist” he muses on the value of having a personal iTunes library rather than purely relying on cloud-based services like Spotify:
There are differences, that help make my library worth spending on… my library has history, layers, a gradual accumulation over my life. It’s not just a playlist but a timeline that in itself is important.
Exactly. “Date added…” is metadata rich with autobiographical meaning, but because it’s handled by your media player rather than an ID3 tag (admittedly this is sensible) you can’t take it with you. For a good few years I could look through all my music by time of acquisition, from the beginning of the MP3 era (coinciding with my personal “discovery of proper music”, circa 13 years of age) to the present. But then I got a new computer and all that data was lost - but at least for the next couple of years, some new data accumulated. And then last year I switched from my PC and Windows Media Player to OSX and iTunes and it was all gone again. I like to believe I’ll magically be able to date every song I acquire from now on, but the chances are realistically pretty slim.
It’s a shame because music is so evocative of certain points in our life. I believe the crisis-ridden protagonist of High Fidelity at one point tries to distract himself from a break-up by re-ordering his record collection in “autobiographical order.”
I suppose he found the strength to do it all manually, so maybe I should stop moaning. I do remember the first song chronologically in my first Windows Media Player list was “Little Bastard” by the Ass Ponys:
…because it was the theme to The Ben Brown Show, really a proto-version of Ze Frank’s The Show that was way ahead of its time.
In conclusion, it would be nice if there was a standard library format to capture “Date Added…” data, allowing it to be imported and exported across operating systems and media players, so that people could reminisce more easily. Failing that, perhaps some brave hacker-type could find a way to seamlessly move music libraries from computer to computer, metadata intact. Go lazyweb go!
