Pet Peeve

What? Two blogs in one day? Yeah, well I had something else to write about, in addition to today's entry in the new series. Wanna know one of my pet peeves? Hidden tracks. Am I the only person that finds them annoying as hell? I feel like in the the digital age, they're pretty obsolete. I like the idea behind them. A nice little surprise or bonus is good sometimes. But I think it causes a slight bump in the road in today's digital age.

Hidden tracks come in various forms. First, there's one of the most common, the "Oops-you-left-the-CD-on" hidden track. Usually, it happens after the last track on the album. The song plays, followed by several minutes of silence, then the hidden track plays. The point of these is usually to surprise fans. It works, and gives a nice bonus to fans who are purchasing the CD. In today's world though...

Many who buy albums buy digital copies through iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, what have you. Those who still buy CDs usually end up importing them to their computer also. What happens then? The music often ends up on iPods and other such mp3 players. A track that is fifteen minutes long, with ten of those minutes being complete silence, is just a pain in that digital setting. Either you can get to the skip button and the hidden track goes unheard, or you have to sit through minutes of silence, which isn't why you shoved those buds in your ears, now is it? Plus, what if you just want the hidden track to play? Nope, sorry. No soup for you! Case in point: "Your House" from Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill or Jagged Little Pill Acoustic.

Another big one is the "We-Swear-You'll-Only-Find-This-One-By-Accident" pre-grap hidden track. Most commonly, this one is found only by putting your CD into a player and manually "rewinding" from the beginning of track one. Pre-gap tracks are often referred to as "Track 0." You have to rewind all the way through the song, to the beginning of the track, where it will play forward from there. Computers can't read these at all, so there's no way to even get them to your computer to move them to your mp3 player. So not only is it a pain to get to these tracks from your album, but you can't get them in any form digitally. Case in point: "Uncle Bobby" from Flyleaf's Memento Mori. It's actually a really good song. Too bad...

This rant has been cooking for a while, but what spurred it? I've been listening to the albums that I'm using for the series, and 10 Years uses 2 instrumental pre-gap tracks on each album. The next one from 30 Seconds to Mars has the dreaded nine minutes of silence before that super-secret hidden track plays...(insert rolling of the eyes here). Come on, guys. I appreciate that you all want to make us work for our hard earned songs, but let's get what the present, shall we?

/rant