Now that’s what I call a playlist.

Compilation albums: What were they? Why did they exist? Where are they?

If you’ve ever listened to a little radio show called “The Weekend Warm-Up” on Fridays, 6-8pm on 95.9 Hailsham FM, you may have heard a feature called “Now That’s What Koops Calls Music”. For those unfamiliar, I play three songs chosen from a volume of the iconic series of compilation albums Now That’s What I Call Music (“Now”), and listeners can play along at home by listening to said songs and guessing which Now album they are from. Points are awarded for their efforts, ten points for guessing the “Now number” correctly, five points if they are within three volumes either side of the correct answer, and a further bonus point is given for guessing the year of release correctly too (which isn’t necessarily the same year that the songs themselves were released as singles). These points have no value outside the feature itself, unless you consider my respect valuable… On the surface, this feature merely existing within the context of the show may mean that listeners assume that I have a geek like fandom and/or encyclopaedic knowledge of the “Now” albums… I do not.

Click the image for episodes on the Weekend Warm-Up on Mixcloud

To give you a peek behind the curtain of local radio, and a further peak behind the tarpaulin I use to shield any listeners from any threat of professionalism, this feature is born of my first show back in in 2022. As a lifelong music fan, and as someone that grew up dreaming of being a professional radio presenter, you would think that come my first solo radio show I would be bursting at the seams with music I wanted to play, things to discuss and features for the airwaves, but when it came to prepping that first show… I felt like I didn’t know any music at all. The right music is important in any situation, anyone who has ever made a playlist for a party, taken control of the Bluetooth speaker at a BBQ, or shot gunned the aux for a road trip, will know that you aren’t congratulated, celebrated or appreciated for doing a great job, but you will be judged, and ripped to shreds if you do a bad one… When looking to select my tracks for my very first Weekend Warm-Up, I was feeling that pressure in a whole new way, and in an act of desperation and self-doubt, I turned to a trusted source, Now That’s What I Call Music 34 (1996), or Now 34.

I consider Now 34 to be the best of all the Now albums, but I have to admit that it was also the first Now album I ever had, so I am most probably, if not definitely, biased toward it for that reason. I created “Now That’s What Koops Calls Music” as I realised that having turned to this album in my hour of need, I could combine the use of the compilation series for music ideas, whilst creating a nigh on impossible and a ridiculously specific “game” for the radio show. Over two years later, and the feature still exists, and it means that in my show preparation I am often reviewing and listening to different volumes of the series, and where I have been mulling over thoughts about the music industry in recent months, and streaming in particular, I got thinking about compilation albums as a whole, their history, their glory days, and their place in the world we now live in, or more to the point asking the question, do they still have a place in what is now, the playlist world?

CD copy of Now That’s What I Call Music 34 (1996)

What Wikipedia refers to as “Various artists hit compilations” (hit compilations) have existed since the early 1970’s. These were generally released by budget record labels who discovered that major labels would licence music to them as a way of making secondary income from existing material that had been through the chart cycle already. As a way of these budget labels maximising their profit, these were often crudely manufactured vinyl records that consisted of heavily edited songs (missing intros/ verses / outros / etc) clumsily pressed on to discs with fine grooves to get as much music on as possible, compromising the audio quality and overall listening experience. Unsurprisingly, these were not respected by audiophiles, and I have no doubt that this planted a seed that still haunts the vinyl and music nerd scene today, that manifests itself as a general distain toward compilations of any type.

It was in the early 1980’s that Virgin records developed the idea of a major label various artist hit compilation, recognising that third party labels were profiting from recycling music they owned, they looked to release a compilation of their own and essentially cut out the middleman, and with a budget behind them that meant they wouldn’t have to scrimp on quality in the way that the budget labels were having to. They managed to convince EMI to join them on the venture, and Now That’s What I Call Music (1) was released on 28^th November 1983, and was an instant success going triple platinum. Of course it was soon followed by rival compilation albums series, and hit compilations became so popular that they were taking up so much of the UK Albums Chart that after artists and labels aired their frustrations at being denied number one albums for the sake of compilations, in 1989, a separate UK Compilation Chart was introduced.

This popularity continued to grow through in to the 90’s and 2000’s and with CD’s overtaking vinyl as the predominant music format, production costs went down and capacity and quality of audio went up. For some reason being able to have songs we’ve been hearing on the radio constantly for the last six months on a CD we can play at home was something we wanted! By this point the “Now” series wasn’t standing alone, admittedly in the UK, they were the definitive compilation series, but they had many contemporaries, rivals and rip-offs. Note each of the following X’s refers to a numerical digit to denote a particular year: “Hits XX”, “XXXX In The Mix” “Smash Hits ‘XX”, “The Best of Dance XX”. TV shows released compilation albums like Top Gear and Take Me Out, and Millennials may have a trip down memory lane here when I mention the oft forgotten series “The Best… Album In The World… Ever”, which started with genres, e.g. The Best Dance Album in the World …Ever!, The Best Reggae Album in the World… Ever!, The Best Scottish Album In the World …Ever!, The Best Panpipes Album in the World…Ever!, The Best Gregorian Chant Album in the World …Ever! (these are all real by the way), they would eventually sack off naming the album with a genre at all and listed a bunch of the the bands on it, see “The Best… Blur, Oasis, Supergrass, Pulp, Stone Roses, Elastica, Suede, Primal Scream, Cranberries, New Order, The Smiths, Boo Radley's, Chemical Brothers, Radiohead, Morrissey, Manic St Preachers, Therapy?, Edwin Collins, Inspiral Carpets, Ash, The Shaman, Depeche Mode, Smashing Pumpkins, The Charlatans, Levellers, Future Sound of London, The Prodigy, Mccalmont/Butler.…in the world… ever”. It’s ridiculous that with all of those words, they forgot to include the word album, but there you go.

It’s important here to acknowledge the difference between “Various artists hit compilations” (Now That’s What I Call Music), Various artists theme compilations (Love Songs: The Ultimate Collection, The greatest Movie songs), and Various artists genre compilations (e.g. The Hiphop Collection”). Whilst these compilation album types were all in competition with one another in the charts, there is one thing that differentiates the hit compilation from the other two, and that is the hit compilation’s value as a genuine musical time capsule outweighs that of the others. Genre and theme-based compilations, by their very nature would span a wide time frame often up to and in excess of thirty years (depending on the theme), looking to appeal to the widest audience possible. There are compilations that are retrospectively designed to capture a time period such as the “Now That’s What I Call The 90’s” but they are a bit contrived, a bit… synthetic compared to hit compilations that were actually released at the time that would generally only contain popular tracks of a relatively narrow window, typically four, six months or a year, and this means that they will nearly always have hidden gems compared to those retrospective compilation albums. Songs that you might not have heard for thirty years tucked in between the tracks that we’ve heard countless times since. I bet “Now” are kicking themselves that they didn’t give each volume a subtitle to timestamp it, i.e. Now 34: Summer ’96, Now 71: Winter ’08 or Now 102: Spring ‘19 (typically the Now albums are released on/around March, July and November), as this may have helped them establish a place in what is now in essence (to crudely quote Dua Lipa’s 2020 album) “Future Nostalgia”. I should also give a special mention to one other type of compilation album, the film soundtrack, but as they can be all of the above and more, I think they deserve a post of their own at some point.

In researching this post, I discovered that since Now that’s What I Call Music 100, “Now” have been re-issuing the corresponding Now album from one hundred volumes previous, these often contain alternate mixes of tracks to the original releases and will have some tracks missing, presumably due to licensing issues. The latest reissue was Now 18 on the 26^{th of} July 2024.

Let’s introduce ourselves to the elephant in the room here, playlists. Now at this point it’s clear that playlists have not only overtaken compilation albums, but studio albums too. Playlists are how most people who utilise music streaming services use them, no longer do we think “what album do I want to listen to this morning?” Instead, we instinctively go to “Have a great day”, “Beast Mode” or “Chill Hits”. Playlists are so key to Spotify’s structure, it surprises me that there isn’t a chart for them in the same way that when compilation albums started to become popular the compilation chart was made. You can find a list of the playlists with the most follows here but I am yet to find a chart that reflects the most listened to playlists, which would be a much more fair representation of a real chart .

I promised myself not to go on another anti-Spotify tirade in this post (see How to consume music in 2024 for that), but I will state the following two points in relation to Spotify and the Playlist system.

1. At the time I checked the aforementioned list of most followed playlists, only two out of the top one-hundred most liked playlists are not curated by Spotify themselves. (This doesn’t really represent the democratisation of music the internet and music streaming services shout about, and actually means that music is just as much, if not more gatekept than it was pre-internet, the difference being that it used to be record labels at the gates, now it’s Spotify).

2. Because our listening habits are so habitual and most people tune in to the same playlists every week Spotify are able to essentially decide what is popular, and they have commissioned songwriters and producers to create tracks that Spotify themselves own the songwriting and production credits for. These songs are placed in their own playlists, and we are streaming them, so Spotify are essentially “printing their own money”. If you want to know more about this Here is the article in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Without doubt playlists have monopolised the music listening experience altogether, most users rarely, and some don’t ever, search an album to listen to, and Spotify’s anti-album agenda has been hiding in plain sight since its inception. One of the reasons I still collect Vinyl and CD’s is because Spotify doesn’t allow for a concise album collection, and it is too easy to forget or lose albums you like on the platform. With it being so easy (and free) to add an album to your library, users end up with countless albums saved, albums they are not necessarily invested in or likely to ever repeat listen to, but the convenience of tapping the icon undermines the point of having a concise collection of music you love, and you end up with a sprawling list of music you kind of know of, or have heard once. More evidence of their indifference toward studio albums was when it took Adele kicking up a stink in 2021 to get them to have albums play in the correct order without the user having to change the setting, this was twelve years after the platform launched in the UK!

But I’m not actually holding Spotify to blame alone here, they were just following the trend, the decline in albums has been happening over time since Mp3’s came along, because when Napster and LimeWire were big, most people were downloading songs over albums, and subsequently Apple Music, essentially legitimised songs as currency over albums. Entertainment in general is getting shorter, anyone who uses TikTok or Instagram regularly probably spends more time watching sub 60 second entertainment in a week than they do TV shows or films. I read that 2024 Billboard Women in Music Producer of the Year; Pink Pantheress has said that she doesn’t listen to albums, and in response to her album’s reviews, she was surprised that some of the negative feedback was in relation to track listing. She has undoubtedly copped a lot of flack for saying that, but ultimately, a lot of people do care about track listing. It’s part of what makes an album, an album. This blog is called Long Play for that very reason. That doesn’t mean that anyone is in a position to say that she doesn’t understand or appreciate music (although people have in response to this), much the opposite, what it illustrates to me is how much music has changed, and how playlists have become king. I may not like it, but I can’t criticise an artist for that.

Where compilation albums were curated by tastemakers within labels, now Spotify does it themselves, and whilst users can generate playlists, it’s clear from the statistics I mentioned earlier that user generated playlists aren’t the ones that Spotify promotes, just their own.

To a certain extent I understand this, as rarely do I come across a user generated playlist that doesn’t lose the plot, when was the last time you listened to a user’s playlist that didn’t contain tracks that didn’t meet the criteria or match the title of the playlist? They often start well, “Jazzy afternoon dog walk” will almost certainly contain some jazz that’s fit for strolling with the pooch, but just when you least expect it, you’ll find someone has added The Ramones, Daft Punk or some Drill. Rarely do I find a playlist that at some point doesn’t suddenly skew from what it’s supposed to be and have me shocked near to death by being interrupted by a janky guitar, a screaming synth or someone telling me to suck my mum. They all start off well, the user who made it usually does a good job to begin with. You scroll down the first ten or twenty songs, and they generally meet the mark, but once you get past twenty, you’ll start to notice some odd songs occurring. I don’t know if this is a true accident, and they have tried to “like” a song and accidentally added it, whether they are playing a joke or if they genuinely think that Nirvana constitutes classic Funk.

In the UK we currently have access to the Beta of AI generated playlists, where you can give a prompt and it will create playlists for you based on that prompt, the examples given are “background café music”, this to me is pointless. I searched “background café music” playlists and it came up with 1,000 results (which is the search result limit), and I’m confident in guessing there are at very least a further 4,000 of them. What the AI feature should be able to do is follow prompts like “ten songs under 110bpm in the key of A with saxophone solos”. I tried this and it created a playlist of only four songs, one was in Bb Minor, one was in G minor, one was over 110bpm, and one didn’t have any saxophone in it! Skynet it is not.

So that’s where we are with Playlists, and I’m in no doubt that A.I. will in time master playlists, and further to that will get increasingly better at creating songs for us (but that’s a whole other post), so before I get carried away with that I just want to go back to compilation albums for a moment. I have to admit that their relevance is on the decline, and personally I am sad about that, my very first album on CD was a compilation album. (See From Fisher-Price to Fishy Price - by KOOPANUT for my very first CD, and yes it’s suitably embarrassing). So it seems coincidental and somewhat kismet that following the passing of my mum in early December, (that goes some way to explaining my absence over the last few months here on Long Play) I found myself walking the high street of my hometown and rooting through the CD’s at Records and Retro in Bexhill and it was here that alongside a great haul of albums that are really nostalgic for me including Cher’s “Heart of Stone” (1989), “Come On Over” by Shania Twain (1998), and Celine Dion’s ten year Greatest Hits compilation “A Decade of Song” (1999), I discovered a rather dishevelled copy of a 1993 compilation album called “Ragga Heat Reggae Beat”, and this was the first album I owned on CD. A “Various Artists Genre Compilation” and it featured reggae tracks from as far back as 1970 all the way through to the then present day of 1993, so it spanned just shy of twenty-five years of music. My sister remembers me walking around our flat as a nine year old singing “money in my pocket but I just can’t get no love” from Dennis Brown’s 1979 track “Money In My Pocket”, and I remember accusing Sting of theft the first time I heard “Englishmen in New York”, having heard the Shinehead version “Jamaican In New York” first on this very album, and I still recite the lyrics to Snow’s Informer by rhythmically riffing a load of gobbledygook followed by “A nicky boom boom now”. The case, the cover, the label of the disc, everything about it is nostalgic to me before I’ve even listened to it!

Compilation albums have played as much a part in developing my music taste as singles, albums, radio, and Music Television (by that I don’t just mean MTV, but Top Of The Pops, CD:UK, all the music TV channels). I discovered bands and entire genres of music through the Now series and it’s contemporaries, and I won’t be alone with that. Some compilation albums are classics within a scene, to name one Re-Rewind (2000) was a perfect window into the UK garage scene, mixed by The Artful Dodger themselves, and it allowed suburban kids like me to feel part of a scene that was growing out of the cities, and I still play it today. Many of the tunes found on old compilation CD’s haven’t made it to streaming platforms, sometimes it’s due to legalities, and sometimes it’s because they have been forgotten, and those ones are the best ones to find! (I should also briefly mention you actually get gapless playback on CD’s and vinyl, which you don’t get with streaming, even if it’s a gap of just a fraction of a second, it’s enough to lose the groove, so when it comes to mixed compilation CD’s like Re-rewind, the whole thing plays through as the Dodgers themselves are on the decks for you!)

Considering the music industry as it is now, with the odd exception of vinyl collectors, we are the last generation to have physical things to trigger memories around music in this way, and compilation albums will be the first to go.

Admittedly “NOW MUSIC” are still releasing albums on CD and Vinyl, putting out numerous reissues and compilation compilations (a type of compilation of its very own), to name a few; Now Yearbook, Now Millenium, and Now 80’s Dancefloor. All the while they are up to Now 119 in the main series (although bizarrely, this is only available on CD, and you cannot purchase any other volumes of their main series through their site). Browsing their online store does raise the question, who is buying “Now Presents… The 80’s”, or “Now Presents…12” 80S Part One – 1980-1982, both five LP sets to the tune of £90 before postage. (This being said the five LP set of “Now That’s What I Call Eurovision Song Contest” for under £40 does seem like a bit of a bargain, if a little niche!)

So how long can this continue? It’s clear that Now, has defeated all of its competition when it comes to compilation albums, I don’t see Smash Hits making a return, Now has become the undisputed champion of compilation albums, the last one standing, but let’s be honest, “Now” is not going to David and Goliath playlists is it?

I understand that compilation albums are no longer needed in today’s music scene, but let us not forget the fallen heroes that introduced past generations to artists and genres we would otherwise have never discovered, and let’s not forget that we knew these albums as well and in some cases better than studio releases from the artists themselves! If ever I hear the end of Mysterious Girl by Peter Andre, I am always expecting to hear the organ intro to Dodgy’s Good Enough follow it next thanks to the masterful track order of Now That’s What I Call Music 34. So, when you next see a stack of vinyl or CD’s in a charity shop or a record shop, have a flick through and see what you might remember, and show the compilation some love.

Do you have memories of a favourite or first compilation album?
Did a compilation album put you on to a band or type of music?