Two sides to every story

I said I would come back to talk about sides later. Well, here I am...
In the days before CDs, albums were released either on vinyl or on cassette. Neither of the latter two formats were capable in length of holding a full album's content on one side. What do I mean? Well I mean that in comparison to a CD where you can put it on and hear the full album from start to finish, with vinyl or cassette you had to turn over to the other side approximately halfway through to hear the second half of the album.
Thus, in the days before CDs, more effort was put into engaging the listener with the entire album, well I think so anyway.
According to wikipedia - "The first Compact Disc for commercial release rolled off the assembly line on August 17, 1982, at a Philips factory in Langenhagen, near Hanover, Germany. The first title released was ABBA's The Visitors (1981)".
However, CDs didn't really become big sellers until 1985 when "Brothers in Arms" by Dire Straits became the first CD million seller. But CDs only became the market leader in 1993.
Ok, stay with me here, If you look at albums pre-CD and post-CD you will find that the layout of tracks on albums has changed a lot. When recording artists laid out tracks for vinyl or cassette, they thought of the album in terms of sides. Each side had to stand on it's own merit. If you had listened to side 1 all of the way through and were now switching over to side 2 then it had better be worth listening to. This was more true for cassettes than vinyl. With vinyl you could very easily lift the needle and return it to play the same side again or indeed pick out your favourite track. However, the necessity to fast forward/rewind on cassettes meant that artists really needed to have strong tracks on both sides.
In my opinion, cassettes were the ultimate way to listen to and get to love an album. Because of the mechanics of their operation, you ended up listening to albums over and over without skipping tracks. There was no easy way to skip tracks on a cassette. Sure, you could fast forward through a song but it was usually more trouble than it was worth, as you might end up in the middle of the next track and thus ruin the atmosphere that had been created thus far. When you reached the end of side
1, you usually took out the tape and turned it over to play side 2. It was either that or wait an eternity to to rewind side 1 to play it again. If you were listening on a walkman then you definitely didn't want to be doing a lot of winding as the it really chewed up battery time.
So, in a way, you were forced to listen to the entire album the whole way through. The weaker songs that you didn't really like during the first couple of listens often became the stronger songs over time as you listened to them in equal proportion to the ones you liked more immediately. When CD came along it became too easy to skip through tracks that you didn't have the patience to listen to. I believe that the introduction of the CD started a slippery slope that has steadily decreased the patience that music listeners have for music. Because of the ease with which listeners can skip between tracks on CDs and ipods, albums are now mostly released with a couple of key tracks and lots of filler. Ok, i am generalising a bit here, but the quality of albums has definitely gone down.
Music listening nowadays has become more about quantity than quality with music fans having vast collections of mp3s on their laptops and ipods but only really listening to a small proportion of their collections. I, myself have been very guilty of this sin. I have just checked my itunes library, and there are 11,946 tracks in there!
With this amount of music, it is hard to see the forest for the trees. I recently sold my 60GB ipod. Ok, i'm not being an absolute martyr here as i got an 8GB iphone instead. Anyway, the point i'm making is that i bought this huge 60GB ipod because I thought that the idea of having my entire music collection in my pocket would be the best thing ever. How great it would be, I imagined, to perhaps randomly play through my collection, dipping into forgotten albums and tracks - how satisfied it would make me feel - what a great music lover I would be! At the drop of a hat I could display my entire collection to any passer-by or unsuspecting bystander.
I used to commute to work and listen to my ipod on the journey. Now i drive a short distance and don't really listen to an ipod at all. I am returning to listening to actual albums, whether they be on cd, vinyl or tape.
I seem to have digressed a bit her from the sides topic - more anon.