To use the Yorkshire vernacular, when I were a lad – listening to music was a whole lot different than it appears to be today.

Back then, and to be fair it was many, many years ago, we had the radio on in the background, in the car, in the workplace but actually listening to music was ‘a thing’ we’d do. We’d put a record on and sit and listen to it. I mean we’d really just sit and listen to it. We weren’t doing anything else, we were just listening to the music.

At concerts we’d listen to the music. Record shops like Virgin in Leeds had a room filled with beanbags and you could lounge and listen on headphones to any album. We would even go round to a friend’s house and just listen to music. Imagine that…..

These days we have access to more music than ever before. Streaming services like Spotify and Apple give us access to pretty much the entire music catalogue. And we’re collectively adding around 100,000 tracks a day to that catalogue.

But it seems to me that we actually listen to less music than we’ve done for generations. When was the last time you put an album on any media and just listened to it, not as a background but as a thing to do?

I posted a while ago that people seem to talk incessantly throughout concerts and film everything on their phones as if the only way they knew they were at the concert was if they had a recording of it.

We’ve never had it so good and yet we seem to be ignoring what’s right in front of us. When I were a lad we listened to music, I’m not so sure we do anymore.