I too agree with the premise of the article but for the life of me can't understand why so many people think that using a streaming service by default entails a very different way of listening.
I use Qobuz, but not too differently at all from the way I play my own music library. I listen to albums, not tracks. About the only real difference is the session typically starts with the use of the Search function, I enter either an artist name, or sometimes the name of particular album.
Once I hit play on that, I rarely do anything but listen all the way through for albums I'm familiar with, or if it's something new that I haven't really heard much of previously, I of course want to give it a chance to see if I like it, I'll only switch to something else if I'm really not enjoying what I'm hearing at all.
In all cases, the actual user interface is set aside once I touch/click what I'm going to listen to, I darken the screen and put down the phone/tablet, and never continue to scroll through or look at other choices for more than about 10 seconds after hitting play, because I want to listen.
I have friends and colleagues who have this ADD-like problem in using a streaming service, but in fact the 1st time I ever noted it was when watching how some of my colleagues couldn't get set on what to listen to on their iPods, now 15 years ago. They wouldn't just select something and put the damn thing away, instead they would nervously click-wheel around the menu continuously, changing their mind after about 30 seconds to 1 minute elapsed of each new song. Blew my mind.
I also really don't get the whole playlist thing either, my idea of keeping it fresh is to not always play the same songs or sequences of tracks. Even if I created a playlist, I wouldn't likely save it for any reason. My idea of a playlist is hitting "random/shuffle", then each next track is a total surprise, almost like a good radio DJ minus the talk time.
I'm perplexed why the use of a streaming service is in many people's mind a license to just endlessly click around, I guess it's just the overall pervasive use of devices in our post-modern society, and the conditioning of one's behavior towards screen time. That isn't all together too surprising for millennials and others who effectively grew up that way, unfortunately thats how their brain is wired.
For everyone else it just takes a little stubbornness, you put on an album and then you listen to it (unless you really don't like what you are hearing) and you forget about/dismiss the "convenience factor" of having that device in your hand on a hair trigger to flip around.
This also reminds me of the days of the 1st CD players not having IR remote controls. The next generation of CD players did have IR remotes, but I rarely knew where mine even was, friends would come over and demand to know where the remote was, and I did not know exactly where it had last been set down, because I rarely used it.
www.theguardian.com
