What the hell happened?

My PlayStation 2 is a wonderful, wonderful thing. The ugly black box may be getting a little long in the tooth now but with it I've been able to pretend to be a world class golfer, take Blackburn Rovers to European glory with myself in attacking midfield and become a criminal kingpin in variations of L.A. and Miami. I've been able to act like a swordfighting prince in ancient times, a bounty hunter in the future and, in a roundabout way, a music-lover from the mid-to-late 20th Century

That last one can't really be credited to Sony though. The reason it's there is that I always listen to music when I play video games, in-game music still being by-and-large dreadful as most games are programme by the famously barmy Japanese, and the only thing that's left working on my stereo is the record player. Therefore in a world marching ever onward into downloads and i-Pods I'm stuck with the snap, crackle and pop of vinyl.

It's a whole new world, albeit a pre-exisitng old one.

I should point out that I'm not going to get into a debate about whether things sound better on a disc of black plastic- that's the sort of debate best left to music lovers who drink beer with soil in it- but what is worth addressing is the amount of work that needs to be put in to listening music this way, rather than with CDs or flashy little boxes that store more songs than even John Peel could ever have been arsed listening to.

For example, if I decide to have a trawl through my collection of 7" singles then every couple of minutes I have to get up, flip to the B-side and set the needle in motion again or, even worse, get the next record out of it's sleeve, put the previous one back in it's home, then get the turntable going again- only to repeat the whole process moments later. Listening to just a few of my turn-of-the-80s post-punk collection whilst playing and pausing a game of Pro Evo 5 can stretch a single match so long that, in the equivalent time, someone listening on a computer could digest a whole album, download the follow-up, and the album after that, listen to them both and still fit in a couple of happy-slapping videos on YouTube to break things up a bit.

Things aren't much easier with albums either. If I fancy hearing Fleetwood Mac committing career hari-kari on 'Tusk' I still have to flip sides every 15 minutes or so and when I move onto record two I have to contend with the double inlay sleeves that won't quite let the disc come out and won't quite let the last one go back in again.

And to be honest, I wouldn't have it any other way. I may be from the last generation to grow up giving a toss about albums and not just alve to download a bunch of dispirate songs of i-Tunes and make finely tuned mood-specific playlists with titles like 'Top Choons' and 'Post-Masturbation Comedown Sessions'. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

Thanks to my current listening situation, I've come to the conclusion that downloads won't kill the album as an artform- because CDs already have. When the world was stuck on vinyl an album had a time limit of around 40 minutes, unless a band made a double but at least that was a clear sign that they'd disappeared up their own arses and you might as well just listen to 'A Hard Day's Night' instead. This was a perfect timescale and an album of 8 or 9 good songs was seen as perfectly adequate if that's all the songwriters could find the time to write- a reasonable attitude to have in a decade in which there was an awful lot of drugs, nudity and being impressed by Peter Cook to get into a day. And you couldn't skip any of the tracks so they had to be listenable, on pain of your fans ripping the needle off and putting something better on instead. Side 2 of The Rolling Stones' 'At Her Satanic Majesty's Request' could feature the greatest music ever recorded by man but no-one's even got past track 3 to find out.

Then the head of R&D at Sony came up with the compact disc and decided it should be able to hold Beethoven's 5th Symphony, all 80 minutes of it, and suddenly musicians had a lot more space to play with without giving the game away that they were even letting the keyboard player write some songs. And every album since, even the very best of the very best, has had at least one track of utter bobbins etched across it.

'Digsy's Dinner', 'Revol', 'The Rolling People', 'Diesel Power', 'Pencil Skirt', 'Don't Tread On Me', 'New Orleans Instrumental No. 1', 'Voyager', 'Piku'- all on great albums, all cobblers. There must have been a law passed insisting on at leat one rubbish song appearing on a CD- how else to explain The Stone Roses' going all backwards with 'Don't Stop' or Radiohead giving it some Steven Hawking on 'Fitter/Happier'?.

Even worse, the last few years have seen a rash of bands so unprepared for an entire CD of their own work that they've gone back to the pre-Beatles attitude of seeing an album as simply some good hit singles surrounded by filler that frankly reeks of a producer on full-time turd polishing duties. Kasabian, Kaiser Chiefs, The Fratellis, Jet, The Twang, Enter Shikari- couple of decent singles then it's "Quick, write some songs- the tea-time slot at Glastonbury's free!". The Kooks haven't even bothered with the decent singles.

Now, with the advent of downloading as the most convenient way to get hold of new music, they can just toss out two good songs every year or so and put them online independently- thereby saving the rest of us from the tune that the drummer came up with on a rainy dinnertime at school and has since added a harmonica solo and some breakbeats to.

And since they won't release any of it on vinyl, I won't have to listen to it either.