Music Didn't Get Worse. We Changed the Way We Found It.

Noel Gallagher says something ended in the nineties. He's half right, and the half he's right about is stranger than nostalgia.

By Rafi Mercer

Somebody walks into a record shop for one thing and leaves with another.

That happened constantly. They'd come in for the album they'd read about, and something else would be playing over the speakers, and they'd stand near the racks for a minute pretending to browse while working out whether they were allowed to ask. Most of them asked. You'd point at the sleeve on the wall. Thirty seconds, no ceremony, and occasionally it altered the next ten years of somebody's life.

It sounds ridiculous written down. It happened all the time.

There is a line Noel Gallagher has been circling recently — that something ended in the 1990s. Not Oasis, not Britpop exactly, not guitar music. Something underneath all of it.

The obvious version of that argument doesn't hold up. Great music did not stop being made in 1998. There have been extraordinary records every year since, made by better musicians on better equipment, by more people in more places than at any point in history. So it isn't that.

What ended was the way music arrived.

By the mid-nineties the machinery around music was probably at its most powerful, and its power came from being small. There were maybe six routes in and everybody used the same six. The evening shows on Radio 1. The weekly press, which mattered because it was weekly — the papers landed on the same day and the whole argument moved forward once a week, in public, with a beat to it. Thursday for the television. Sunday for the chart. Saturday for the shop. You found things in a small number of places, and so did everyone else, and so a hundred thousand people arriving at the same record inside the same fortnight felt like weather.

That was the real power of Britpop. Not that Oasis and Blur and Pulp and Suede were making records. That everyone knew about them, and — this is the part that has gone — everyone knew that everyone else knew. You didn't have to like any of it to take part. You could hate it. That still counted. The argument was shared. When two singles were released against each other it became news, not music news, and a country that had no particular stake in either band found itself holding an opinion.

Where I'd push back on Noel is here. Plenty has landed since. Grime landed. Drill landed. Afrobeats landed. They landed hard, with the people they were for, and anyone claiming otherwise is describing the limits of their own listening. What stopped happening is a movement landing on people standing outside it — your mum knowing who Oasis were, the thing turning up on the six o'clock news. That's the monoculture going, not music going.

And there's a simpler explanation sitting underneath the whole complaint, which is that the last movement you were young for tends to feel like the last movement there was. That's true of everybody. It doesn't make him wrong. It means the feeling and the diagnosis are two different things, and worth separating before you build anything on top of them.

The technological story usually gets told as vinyl to CD to MP3 to streaming, which misses the more interesting shift. We moved from seeking music to receiving it.

Music now arrives while you're cooking, driving, answering emails, walking through an airport. Something chooses it because it resembles something you already liked. This is a genuine achievement — nearly every piece of recorded music is sitting a few centimetres from your hand, and the problem of access is solved. Completely. Possibly too completely, because none of us noticed how much value was hidden inside the difficulty.

Because music was hard to get, once you had it you stayed with it. You'd spent twelve pounds you didn't have and taken the bus home, so when the record didn't catch you on the first play, you gave it another. Then another. Sometimes the record changed. More often you did. That's the thing abundance quietly removed, and it isn't quality or taste. It's commitment.

The shops and the DJs and the magazines and the clubs weren't distribution. They were filters, and human ones. Somebody stood between you and everything and said: listen to this. Human beings are wonderfully unreliable at that job. They have obsessions, blind spots, prejudices, enthusiasms. They make mistakes. An algorithm is trying to understand you. A good curator occasionally misunderstands you completely, and hands you something you don't yet know you need.

The album did similar work. Forty minutes. Side one, side two. Artwork, credits, a producer, a studio, a year, a place. You entered it. The song now arrives detached from all of that, between two other songs, while you're doing something else. The record hasn't disappeared, but its authority has. Music became easier to hear and easier not to listen to, and those are not the same improvement.

Place did the third job. Manchester sounded like Manchester. Detroit sounded like Detroit. Bristol sounded like Bristol, and still does, which is worth noticing — the cities that built a sound tend to be the same ones now building rooms to listen in. New York could change across a few streets. Those sounds existed because people were physically near each other — same clubs, same shops, same rehearsal rooms, same promoters, arguing in the same bars, borrowing each other's equipment. Proximity created pressure. Pressure created scenes. The internet released music from geography, which has been genuinely liberating, and a teenager anywhere can now make something influenced by everywhere. But when everything comes from everywhere, somewhere becomes harder to hear.

And then there was waiting. For the single, the album, the shop to open, the post, the programme, the friend who'd had your record for three weeks. Anticipation used to be part of listening. The thing you were waiting for occupied your imagination before you'd heard a note of it — you wondered, you talked about it, you read about it, and then the day came and everybody listened at once.

That's the part worth being precise about, because it's the part that can be rebuilt. We took the gates down without noticing they were doing two jobs. They restricted access, which was bad, and they made everyone's attention land in the same place at the same time, which turned out to be the entire mechanism by which music felt like it mattered. Abundance solved the first and dismantled the second, and we're still using the vocabulary of the first to describe the loss of the second. That's why the conversation keeps sounding like nostalgia when it's actually a design problem.

So if access has been solved, what's left to build?

Not another way of delivering music. There are enough of those. What's missing is the architecture around it. Places worth going to. People worth listening to. Records worth sitting with, whole. Rooms where the phone stays in a pocket. Some anticipation, some uncertainty, and a time agreed in advance so that a group of people hear the same thing at the same moment and know that the others are hearing it too.

Which is a long way of describing a record shop on a Saturday.

Somebody comes in for one thing. Something else is playing. They stand there a minute working out whether they're allowed to ask.

Did music really get worse after Britpop?

No. More music is being made, by more people, in more places, and the recording is better than it has ever been. What changed was how it reaches us — and specifically whether it reaches large numbers of us at the same time.

Why do listening bars play records all the way through?Because the running order was part of the work. A record built for two sides has a shape that a shuffled playlist can't reproduce, and forty uninterrupted minutes asks something of a listener that three minutes never will.

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