From Scarcity to Abundance
There was a time when listening to music meant making a deliberate choice. You picked a CD off the shelf, slotted in a tape, or dropped the needle onto a record. What you owned defined what you could hear, and your listening habits were shaped by those physical limitations. In the age of streaming, that scarcity has been replaced with abundance. Every album you can think of, plus millions more you would never discover on your own, sits behind a search bar. The shift has changed not just what we listen to, but how.
The Illusion of Infinite Choice
Streaming platforms encourage infinite choice, but in practice, listeners are funnelled toward what is most available. Playlists, recommendation engines, and the endless churn of “related artists” push us further down algorithmic rabbit holes. Sometimes those paths lead to unexpected discoveries. Other times, they quietly steer us toward artists whose music is cheaper to license, helping platforms optimise profit margins rather than cultural curiosity. Either way, the music that is not on streaming, whether by accident or design, ends up vanishing from the collective memory.
Forgotten by Convenience
This forgetting does not just affect casual listeners. Journalists, too, are part of the cycle. When magazines and blogs revisit “classic albums,” they tend to focus on what is easily available, conveniently playable with a single Spotify link. Albums left off the platforms end up overlooked, even if they were once touchstones of a scene.
The Icarus Line at Their Peak
Take Penance Soiree, The Icarus Line’s feral and brilliant second album from 2004. Their debut, Mono, made a splash in the MTV2 era with synchronised outfits, raw noise, and the chaotic antics of guitarist Aaron North. Yet it was Penance Soiree that captured the band at their most dangerous and ambitious: jagged guitars drenched in menace, swaggering Stones-like grooves colliding with At The Drive-In’s volatility, and Joe Cardamone spitting venom like his life depended on it.
Critics at the time recognised it. Drowned in Sound declared the first half of the record blew “every so-called rock act polluting our airwaves clean away.” Tiny Mix Tapes praised its continuation of rock’s greatest traditions. Mojo compared its growth from Mono to Penance Soiree with Nirvana’s leap from Bleach to Nevermind. It was a triumph by any measure. And yet it is missing from streaming. So is Mono. What remains on the platforms captures only the band’s later years, not the incendiary peak that made them unmissable in the first place.
Herman Düne Without Their Pinnacle
They are not the only casualty. Herman Düne’s Not On Top suffers a similar fate. For years, the band’s creative core was the two brothers David & André, each tugging the music in different directions. One leaned into folk-pop sweetness, the other toward meandering experimentation. Not On Top was their pinnacle, the tension between the brothers sparking a unique, loose-limbed indie rock record. Soon after, the more eccentric brother left, and the band drifted into something altogether tamer. Without Not On Top to anchor their legacy, anyone encountering Herman Düne today might wonder why they were ever worth the fuss.
Cindy Lee’s Modern Experiment
This is not just about the past. Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee is a recent reminder that streaming is not the whole picture. Released in 2024, it is a sprawling double album that defies genre, veering from spectral ballads to jagged noise-pop to shimmering dreamscapes. Its ambition alone marks it as a modern classic, and critics lined up to say as much. Yet it has never appeared on Spotify, Apple Music, or any other service, intentionally so. Listeners can buy it directly from the artist, but they will not stumble across it in a playlist or algorithm. It is a fascinating live experiment: what happens when one of the most acclaimed albums of the year is deliberately absent from the system everyone relies on? Will it endure as a touchstone despite its inaccessibility, or fade from cultural memory in a way that Penance Soiree once did?
Holes in the Musical Record
Albums vanish from streaming for different reasons. Sometimes it is tangled rights issues with long-defunct labels. Sometimes it is intentional, a protest against a system that funnels billions into the hands of tech companies while artists see pennies in return. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: holes in the musical record.
Remembering Outside the Algorithm
The danger is that we stop remembering these works at all. As listeners, we have grown used to the idea that if we cannot search for it, it does not exist. Yet there is a whole parallel canon of great music missing from the platforms we rely on. Penance Soiree deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as the defining rock records of its time, not erased because it is absent from streaming. Not On Top should still be there to remind us of the strange, joyful brilliance Herman Düne once had. And Diamond Jubilee may prove to be the test case for whether a masterpiece can thrive outside the algorithm in real time.
Streaming has changed how we consume music, but it should not change what we remember. Some albums are too important to be left to the whims of licensing deals, corporate strategies, or the tyranny of convenience. If we want to keep them alive, we will have to do the old-fashioned thing: remember them, write about them, and sometimes even dig the CD off the shelf.
