Relative to other disruptions associated with the digital revolution, the demise of the B-side song hardly registers. But for analogue-raised generations, there is fondness for songs that were pressed into vinyl service as the lesser support act to hits. Sometimes, these also-run tunes achieved wonders. Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets, a landmark in the popularisation of rock’n’roll, was first issued in 1954 as the B-side to the deservedly forgotten Thirteen Women (And Only One Man in Town).
Sixty four years later, the closest equivalent to the B-side is the unknown song that turns up in a playlist curated by an algorithm. Instead of waiting by the radio each week to hear the charts, listeners have access to tens of millions of new songs at any moment, in any place. The amount of recorded music released last year is estimated to be around seven times greater than was released in 1960. When artists relied on music industry gatekeepers just to get into a studio the business was rife with sexism, racism, corruption and exploitation. Today fans are spoilt for choice – but that glut spoils the pleasure in choosing. It is hard to navigate the sheer volume without reliance on “smart” functions in services such as Spotify and Apple. But there is cause to lament the loss of shared musical revelations – the simultaneous opening of millions of ears to a new sound; the ritual of Thursday nights with Top of the Pops; and of Friday mornings discussing it in the playground. The narrow range of outlets and the smaller volume of releases belonged to an old architecture of common cultural experience. And that, at a granular level, is the stuff of which national identity is made.
Every generation evolves its own sense of participation in a national project through memorable, cultural episodes. Sometimes these are epic historical moments – surviving the blitz, for example. Sometimes they are sporting landmarks – World Cup victory in 1966 and all the subsequent penalty shoot-out calamities. Alongside those big beasts are countless small moments, hardly acknowledged as communal experiences. They bind individual stories into chapters of national history with tiny, identical cultural threads: Morecambe and Wise Christmas specials; Freddie Mercury’s performance at Live Aid; countless No 1 records.
The fragmentation of cultural consumption into a digital labyrinth, with fewer points of shared reference, is not a problem on the same scale as the fragmentation of politics into mutually hostile, polarised tribes. But they are driven by the same technological processes. And they raise analogous questions about the way innovation affects social cohesion at every level. The clock cannot be turned back, nor is there reason to wish that it could be. But it is also wrong to treat the digital culture boom as all A-side, when we have no way to measure the cost of losing the B-side.
