How Shuffle has Changed Music

These days, it seems shuffle is all the rage. Driving in our cars, out jogging, at work, whatever the situation, it seems a great many of us provide music for the occasion by simply putting our media players on shuffle. Some people use it less, while others I know rarely listen to music in any other way. But either way, it's here and we use it.

Shuffle is a pretty new thing. It appeared in significant fashion only once large libraries of music became easily accessible and portable, essentially developing alongside the popularization of spacious computer hard drives and especially portable media players, most notably the now ubiquitous iPod.

As recent as 10-15 years ago, if you wanted to listen to music, you popped a CD into your CD player and hit the play button. Sure, computer media players existed, but hard drives were quite small compared to the amount of space music files occupied. Computers were mainly used for downloading music and burning it to CD or burning replica or mix CDs. If you wanted to shuffle music, the options available were scant: shuffle a single CD(or maybe several if you had a big expensive multi-CD machine), take the time to make a specific mix CD, or constantly rifle through your collection and switch CDs all the time. Go back to the pre-compact disc era and even shuffling a single album becomes difficult. You had to manually find tracks with a record needle or on magnetic tape. Now, anyone can walk around with 80 gigabytes of music in their pocket and randomize all or any subset of it on demand.

This seemingly simple development is huge and has clear ramifications on the manner in which music is experienced and even created. Pre-shuffle, if someone bought a CD, the most likely and obvious manner in which they would listen to it was in order, maybe all the way through if it was good. Now, some people don't even listen to their new music until it comes up in a general shuffle of a much larger playlist.

As a creator of music, knowing the likely way in which the audience will listen to a set of discrete tracks allows one to structure them in an intentional manner. The most obvious example of this would be programmatic albums, but even aside from this, there are a myriad of albums for which it seems pretty clear the order of the tracks was carefully chosen. Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" is a great example in my mind. The tracks aren't expressing an explicit sequence, but the album creates lulls, contrasts, thematicism, and intrigue with the track ordering. The frenetic and tense nature of "On the Run" gives way to the ominous quiet and ticking of clocks in "Time," creating a very noticeable atmosphere, for example. Listening to the two tracks out of context or order creates a vastly different experience of them.

Shuffle changes this dynamic from both the sides of the composer and the audience. The composer no longer has any reason to use album organization as part of the artistic idea of an album if listeners cannot reasonable be expected to listen to albums in a manner that keeps album ordering reasonably intact. On the other hand, listeners will listen to albums that do place importance on track order(most albums don't explicitly claim the importance of listening to them in order, but that doesn't mean that it isn't there) out of order and change that part of the experience from the artist's original intent.

From personal experience, I have actually had people tell me about listening to excerpts from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" on shuffle, and that this is an explicitly programmatic work is no secret. Musically, the tracks were not designed as singles and possess an incredible amount of interrelation. In my opinion, this is one of the biggest draws of the album: its intricacy. Regardless of whether one considers it positive or negative, it's a huge part of the experience. Listening to "The Wall" in fragmented and disordered form is what led an acquaintance of mine to describe the album to me as "'Comfortably Numb' and a bunch of bad songs."

That's the power of shuffle.