I always try and give new albums a minimum of five listens. Anything less feels like I’m doing the artist an injustice (unless it’s absolutely godawful, of course). Many all-time classics – Steely Dan’s Aja, Prince’s Sign O’ The Times – only reveal their true genius with continued attention. For a 50 minute album, that’s just over four hours’ listening time in total. Not exactly a huge commitment in the grand scheme of things. Over the course of the average week, I waste that much time failing to get out of bed. So why does it feel like the five listen rule is getting harder and harder to sustain?

Podcasts may be the answer, given their ever-increasing prominence in my daily life. A five-year relationship with a girlfriend almost entirely uninterested in music. That probably doesn’t help. Maybe it’s just ageing that’s the problem. Ageing makes time fly, and it also appears to dictate that you spend less time doing the things you love and more time fixated upon incredibly mundane household chores.

Alongside the above, convenience is an issue. It’s just too damn easy to get hold of music, which inevitably means that you get hold of more of it, and thus you quickly find yourself overwhelmed by the amount you need to get through. Even if you’re a dinosaur like me who still orders CDs, they turn up near instantaneously via Prime, and you’ve probably used your music service subscription to digitally add them to your library in the meantime. Everything is at our fingertips and there’s more of it than ever before.

Oh, and we have money. That’s the biggest difference between now and then. During my formative musical years, every album purchase required you to part with either your paper round earnings or your lunch money for the week. I generally did both. They were hungry times (Sign O’ The Hungry Times).

I have many concerns about all of this. Nothing new there. The dangers of over-reliance on Spotify curation. The risk that slow burners will never find the audiences they deserve. Most of all though, I lament the loss of friction.

Whether it’s due to Amazon or my own good fortune in life, the reality is that accessing music used to be more difficult, and the resultant prize was all the more rewarding for the effort expended. The release-date anticipation, the cassette tapes full of endless radio recordings trying to capture the new single, the painful process of saving up the cash, and then finally, the bus journey into town after school on a Monday – out of Bury interchange and straight over to Vibes, then over to Our Price to see if the album was any cheaper, then back over to Vibes having remembered that Our Price was shit. There used to be a third music store – Muse – but it closed down when they redeveloped the Shopping Centre and the staff all migrated over to Vibes. If you were feeling courageous, you might ask the good people behind the counter if they’d give you one of the promotional album launch posters to accompany your purchase. And every so often, they’d oblige you.

I’m over-egging this a bit, I know. The Labours of Hercules it ain’t. Nor indeed The Twelve Tasks of Asterix. But it was friction, and at the risk of sounding out of step with the entirety of contemporary culture, friction made things better.

‘Would I seriously consider going back to the old way of doing things?’, I hear you ask. The question is irrelevant. We can never go back.