Decisions that are prima facie anti-customer are always a source of curiosity for me. I also enjoy getting wrapped up in minutiae. What could be less customer focused than making your product intentionally harder to use? I'm referring, of course, to the "Hidden Track".
The practice of attempting to secret away a portion of an album from fans, usually by including a large amount of dead air before the concealed material, has been going on in the recording world for at least 39 years. The Beetles are generally credited with starting this phenomena by adding some random noise and voices in the run-off of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In recent years everyone from Atmosphere (Seven's Travels) to M83 (Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts) to Everclear (So Much for the Afterglow) has been playing along. The meme that ranks behind only Maxwell's Silver Hammer as JohnPaulRingoGeorge's greatest crime against pop music has been gaining traction. And it has got to stop.
Hidden tracks interfere with enjoyment of music
Hidden tracks are the scourge of iTunes playlists and dorm room make-out sessions everywhere. You can't put any unvetted playlist on random without the threat of five minutes of dead air rearing its ugly head.
You're not fooling anyone
Whereas tracks could be reasonably hidden on a record, the superior level of data provided by iTunes or even old-fashioned CD players makes this impossible. Every time I see a final track check-in at 9:50, I taste bile. What may have been quirky and surprising in the age of vinyl is infuriating today.
Wikipedia, as usual, has a nice entry on the practice, but it fails to seriously address the questions of "Why?" All it can muster is:
Most artists decide to include a hidden track simply to surprise their fans.
The only thing that surprises me about hidden tracks is that something so stupid has so much momentum. Maybe it shouldn't.
