THERE has been an outbreak of Spotify in our house, but that doesn’t mean we have been rubbing on ointment.

In fact, it’s proof that we are now up with the latest technology.

I’d like to tell you that I understand it all, but the reality is our 23-year-old son put us on to it, and virtually held our hands while we signed up.

To be quite honest, I still don’t fully understand how Spotify works, but if you think of a gigantic jukebox, up in cyberspace, giving instant access to just about any music you can think of, it’s something like that, only invisible.

Listening to music has now progressed to a new era. We’ve had records, tapes and CDs, which you could hold in your hands with varying degrees of pleasure, and when we started downloading albums, at least they ended up stored on our devices.

But now you don’t actually have to have the music there, because Spotify streams it as you listen, as if you really are plugging into a jukebox, but one with almost unlimited choices and an inexhaustible supply of coins to put in the slot.

Now you might think that being let loose in a boundless music library would have had us acting like the proverbial kids in a sweet shop.

But in no time at all we accidentally stumbled on an album of TV theme tunes and then all thoughts of Mozart, Mantovani and Motorhead were forgotten.

My wife and I spent more than two hours challenging each other to put the names of programmes to the tunes.

All the top shows had memorable theme tunes or music closely associated with them in the good old days, including The Good Old Days.

In most cases, only a note or two were required to trigger memories of programmes we thought we had forgotten. And they came in all styles - rock, jazz, blues, orchestral or just plain weird, like Vision On or Doctor Who – because the music didn’t necessarily reflect the programme or even the genre, yet they went together like… well, Starsky and Hutch.

So last week we sat up late, naming more than a hundred old theme tunes, but when we tried to think of any current programme that had been invented in recent times, we couldn’t think of one that has a distinctive theme tune.

For instance: although we often end up watching Pointless a few times a week, we couldn’t remember how it starts.

It’s as if theme tunes have been deliberately phased out – probably to make more room for yet more adverts and annoyingly loud trailers.

I don’t know what this means for the human race, exactly, or how it affects the quality of our lives, but I do know it’s part of a trend.

If I stop to think about it, it seems to me that it somehow shows us how disconnected and fragmented our lives have become.

We live in a disturbing age where programmes don’t need theme tunes, shoppers don’t need cash, drivers don’t need atlases, and music machines don’t need anything slotted into them to make them work.

But that’s not the scariest new technology we’re into. As well as getting Spotify, we now also have a device that allows us to ‘broadcast’ stuff from the iPad to the telly.

So the telly is now a record player, while games consoles play movies, I listen to the radio on my computer and my phone takes great pictures.

If I pressed all the buttons on the washing machine, I expect one of them would play Down at the Old Bull and Bush.