Playing God with their music.

Growing up, one of the things I always hated about LPs and cassettes was having to sit through a bad song (or, more than often, a bad side in order to hear other songs on the album. Of course, my own laziness often empowered those technologies to possibly makes me more patient with the album format (growers!), but I can easily remember one of the things that I most looked forward to with compact discs was the ability to instantly skip songs. And while CD players routinely came with programmability, it was always too much of a pain in the ass to actually do.

"Playing God With The Verve" reminds me of one of the great aspects of the digital realm: rethinking albums on the fly. Yes, you could do this back in the day by making a mixtape, but the immediate gratification is so much more appealing on iTunes and the like. In that article, Nick Southall talks about re-sequencing the Verve's Urban Hymns and subbing a few b-sides while clearing out the clutter. It's a novel idea, a one-up from simply unchecking the songs on an album that I don't want to hear in iTunes.

Similarly, Nate Patrin goes over some novel ways to use the iTunes smart playlists, taking a large dose of creativity from the creators and giving new life and new context to his library.

It's creativity like these examples that continues to push the old way of doing things out the door. Consumers are responding, the model is shifting, and those who embrace this opportunity will prosper.