I’m well aware that we live in a time where playlists are still the dominant way of discovering music outside of album releases. Even to this day, I see some strange aversion to compilation CDs as if they’re somehow ‘invalid’ or ‘redundant’ when compared to an artist’s studio albums. This is simply not true, a completely misguided view on the medium perpetrated by modern music reviewing practices. Your typical youtube music reviewer tends to overlook the past entirely, and internet-age music critics aren’t going to put any of these records on ‘best of’ lists. These CDs aren’t going to appear in any historical retellings of the past, which has been retuned to largely focus on studio albums and specific songs. In doing so, music discovery becomes far more difficult for us listeners, leaving it to AI algo-shit to do most of the heavy lifting for anything that isn’t already popular.
