There was a time when you relied on the album cover for any info/photos of an artists, or were lucky enough to find a scrap of an interview, or maybe even just a photo of a band in a magazine or in a record store. Artists were mysterious, out of reach. You spent time with the cover art and liner notes (still do to this day) trying to get more info on them.

Nowadays, you jump online and can get all of the info/photos you want, see their tweets, interviews, videos, freely download their 'songs'. Shit, you can even speak to them in many cases.

Has music lost the mystery? This was massively important to me, and still is in many ways. Does it feel less important to you now?

I think in some ways, it has lost what made many of these artists so great. Not being able to reach out to them, and having them be this monumental 'experience', not just another play in iTunes.

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but listening back to the Black Sabbath albums brought this out.

definitely has killed the mystery

I think it absolutely has. And in more ways than one. Not only do you know more about the bands these days but the music is just so easily available it changes the game dramatically, especially if you're talking about less than popular bands.

I was actually having a conversation the other day with someone about how there was a time it was hard to even find music by lots of bands and how that could make the little slivers you got so much more important to you. Like I could hear one song on a compilation and that was it...nothing in a couple local shops, no other way to find it...mail order if you were lucky but often not that because either it wasn't available there or I was young and broke and couldn't afford to have something shipped. You could build up some band you listened to one song by and be completely convinced they were amazing...from one song...nothing else, ever. Now, you hear one song and if you like it you go hear everything else they released the next day if you want. Maybe the rest is crap. Maybe that special band you loved from one song is really kinda shitty and just got lucky once. Sometimes it's better not to know.

Instant availability of everything is great in a lot of ways, but it does change the way we consume things and not always for the better in my mind.

Killed the mystery, but expanded the possibilities.

Unfortunately, the "possiblities" continue to suck more as time goes on, imo.

The connection to purchasing music in the past not only involved undiscovered mystery, but craved familiarity. I can still vividly remember the smell emited when you first opened a newly purchased cassette. The being completely pissed when the extent of the artwork for the cd that you just bought was a one-sheet album cover with a blank back. The joy of beating my younger brother when he bumped my turntable and caused my 45 of The Bee Gees "Tragedy" to skip and scratch. As much as I love music, all of these sensual experiences and more are permanently gone now. And, like it or not, all that left is the "sound" of music.

We've definitely lost something, but we've gained something in the process. From my perspective, there's more great music being produced now than ever before, and it's all available to hear and own with the click of a link.

I'm absolutely grateful that I'll never again have to pay $36.00 for that rare import CD/LP, only to find out that the "review" that praised it was written by a know-nothing sack of shit armed with a thesaurus that's never been opened past the word "angular".

I'm going to sound like the NRA but the internet didn't kill the mystery, people did.

<---- still buys alot of cds that I haven't heard a lick from and don't know all that much about.

yeah, if anything I think word-of-mouth, reviews, and hearing the songs are what lured my into buying the albums. I think if anything, album covers have more impact on me now than ever, which is why I still haven't heard a lick of MGMT.

The death of liner notes is sad, but then again I spend more time reading band thank yous or songwriting credits than anything. The art of liner notes petered out for me in the mid 90s with Pavement (we love cut n' paste!) and Pulp ("please do not read the lyrics while listening to the record").

This. Also, bands can still be mysterious. You don't have to have a Twitter account. You don't have to post pics of your recording sessions on Facebook. Do fans want that kind of stuff? Sure, but what they really want is good fucking music.

I LOVED reading liner notes but now I love reading Wikipedia pages of old albums with little tidbits, stories and outright lies.

Fuckin' Gore.

why would the Internet kill any mystery? I mean there are metal bands for example where the musicians have only some pseudonyms and you don't know nothing about them. Dale, take 'ascension'. we know they are from Germany, and they were headliners at this Hell's pleasure festival but nobody really knows who they are. even 'ghost' was quite a mystery for a while.

the thing is, most of the bands go on tour and I can see a lot of them on stage because almost every band plays in Berlin sooner or later. that's pretty okay for me to know about them. I'm not really interested in the personal life of these guys.

I think you can generate mystery through the Internet really good if you want to.

Artists can maintain anonymity if they really want to, but most of them don't. The internet provides a more direct forum than ever for them to shower the world with every little brain fart they have, and many of them do just that.

It's pretty easy to ignore for the most part, though.

Being able to look up additional info about recordings and the people who made them is one of my favorite things about the internet, though. Knowing more about who did what and when they did it has been really helpful in the discovery of new music for me. I don't miss the days of having to rely solely on liner notes, magazine articles, and press releases.

Agree with these sentiments wholeheartedly. I kind of like interacting with some artists on Facebook, catching an idea of what they're listening to etc. However, there are still those moments where you can discover some new band that are off the radar, and then you're trying to find out everything you can about them. Of course these are usual those Swedish bands and if it wasn't for the internet (and this messageboard) I'd never have heard of them in the first place. Moneybrother was a good example.

Dylan, Bowie, The Beatles and The Stones still have a magical quality despite the fact that their histories have been exhaustively ploughed over. The quality those guys had was just pure artistic genius. The mythology, the mystery, came from the music, nowhere else.

There is no mystery in keeping a low profile, or not doing interviews. The mystery is "Why the hell is this piece of music having this effect on me?" and that is ultimately unexplainable and always will be because those sensations exist outside of any empirical framework.

If there is no mystery in music any more, I'd suggest it's because there are no geniuses making music that can take us to another plane.

i suppose the mystery is gone, but i think we've gained a greater connection/honesty than we had before.

like, i used to write letters A LOT back in the mid-90s. if you lacked pictures, info, etc. many, many, many bands had fan clubs that you could get into for free by sending a SASE or by signing up at a show. i used to have a whole shoe box (and still might) of that stuff - some form letters, some real responses, postcards, fun merch, advertisements, etc. when i got back a real letter it felt awesome.

nowadays it just happens on a more modern level. i suppose it comes with the territory of liking very small, niche music scenes, but i've gotten to know the people in the bands i like. many of them are very, very cool. i much prefer it that way than to a mystery. i'm not just a fan or a head to be counted at a show. and bands aren't just entertainers who should play and get out. we're all people (duuude). the internet helps reveal that, albeit in a weird, technological global village kinda way.

This. If the mystery is so important to you, then DON'T google the shit out of every artist that catches your attention. Nobody's forcing you to scratch that itch.

That's a pretty ridiculous answer. The difference is [limited] access vs. all access anytime. Ignoring it like some sort of blue balls technique is just some form of denial or something.

No it's not. It seems to me that some people act like buying a cd requires the same amount of due diligence as buying a house or allocating your retirement savings. Most cds can be had for $10-15 which is about what a cocktail costs in a good bar in LA and many can be found used for much less. If I'm not interested enough to spend that, I'm frankly not all that interested in spending 40 minutes of my time giving it a preview listen and 10-20 minutes more searching for interviews, reviews, samples, etc.

What I need is some minimal reliable filter...the same thing I always needed. No more, no less.

Everyone doesn't have to be the same. If a lot of you guys want a preview listen first, and to read up a lot more, more power to you. Just don't complain about the lack of mystery though. It's your choice.

I'm sure I have a ton more information on the Tsetse Fly at my fingertips than I ever did in the past. Doesn't mean I'm going to read it though....Know what i mean?

Yes, a choice. I am only saying that at one time that choice of access was not available or done easily. Do what you will, of course. The mystery in search or tying in sound engineers, producers, players et al across albums is more readily found than used to be. I like it, but those days of, for example, realizing a producer was on more than one album that you liked tying in your tastes for a certain sound over a number of different artists are now on the fly rather than the discovery through liner notes or rags. Not a complaint so much as an observation of the state of things and a whiff of nostalgia.

I remember in high school writing to a bunch of indie labels and requesting catalogs. This was all right before we went on a two week vacation so by the time I got back a bunch of catalogs had arrived. Sure it's easier to just look it up online now, but it was fun to wait and get things in the mail.

The internet has made it even more inexcusable to listen to really crappy music. And really, I think any mystery lost is counterbalanced by the ease in which so much music can be obtained, if one so chooses.

Isn't this Kurt Cobain's "I don't want to be famous... My influences made better music than me, but nobody knows who they are" rap mixed up with Sir Charles's "I ain't a role model" trip?

It's an "aw, I'm just a guy, anyone can do it" pose -- clearly, not everyone can be/will be a recorded musician, with original material; hell, not just anybody will play in the orchestra (another kind of professional musician, of longer, much longer, standing than rock/pop/hip-hop) -- meant to diminish expectations so it's harder to disappoint.

I think Pavement made a career of this.

NB: I like Pavement. A lot. So, it's not a slap, just an observation.

Yeah, but I also remember in the Chatzy days you going on buying jags based around one or two guys who were tangential pieces of different records. You didn't get that information from a "minimal reliable filter".

i was just thinking the other day that i can't remember the last time i bought a record without having at least read something about the band. and that's not necessarily a problem. but, for me, the mystery aspect has transferred almost entirely to shows. i try not to miss openers anymore because any band can be the greatest in the world on any given night. for instance, last weekend i went to a loft party where 2 bands who played weren't even on the flyers. that's sort of mysterious. and one of them was actually really good.