I can do you one better here. I have a massive music collection, and I've recently been listening to them all as albums - ordered alphabetically by album name.

It's been very instructive. I'm doing it as I'm working, though this is work I can choose to do or not, and that's good, because I can sit and listen, or work and have it in the background, or skip the album altogether.

In particular, I realized quite early that any album that starts with At is a live one; that I have too many albums whose name starts with Best; that I have so many tracks from Essential Bach (amazing!) and Essential Sibelius (a snooze fest) that I had to skip ahead.

You know, when I was a kid, we basically had to listen to albums in their entirety. (I have a huge collection of LPs, but I haven't played them in over twenty years...) There are a lot of "bad" songs on good albums that I know as well as as the "good" songs, and that's a good thing.

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One more thing. If you have the chance, sit down and watch Monterey Pop. It's not just for the performances, which are stunning - it's watching the audiences actually watching and listening to the music. Most concert recordings show random crowd reactions that are cut from anywhere in the show, but in this case, all the reaction shots are people actually listening to the music.

The level of concentration is awe-inspiring. My wife and I were literally in tears. At the end, you watch a young woman who's watching Ravi Shankar/Ali Akbar Khan/Alla Rakha play, coming to the end of their set, and you see her react, with her eyes widening or even laughing for each brilliancy from the musicians, and as they suddenly stop, she and most of the audience leaps out of their seats and starts applauding madly.

Would that audiences today had such a level of concentration. But the internet has been bad for us...