Listen to music like it’s 2005

I have a music library that I’ve been dutifully collecting and curating for 30 years. From buying CDs at the mall in the 90s, downloading MP3s on Hotline, then Napster, Audiogalaxy, gnutella, LimeWire, more CDs from merch tables, and now mostly purchasing digital downloads from Bandcamp. This music collection spans my lifetime.

For the last eight years or so, I’ve also had a Spotify account. It was pretty convenient, but since rediscovering my own music collection this year, I now consider these lost years. My conclusion in hindsight is that convenient and limitless music was sucking away my love for my music, and replacing it with a sort of optimized workflow for music consumption. Bleh.

In the paradigm that Spotify encourages, the goals are clear:

Quickly and effortlessly get some music playing that can act as a backdrop for your real activity such as working, driving, cooking, hosting friends, etc. Keep it rolling indefinitely. The particular songs don’t matter much. They are fungible as long as the general mood stays consistent.
“Discover” new music by statistical means based on your average tastes.
Provide the ostensible ability to find any song (although due to the paralysis of choice, you are unlikely to use this ability very often)

This is a fantastic service if you’re not that interested in music and are just looking for the aural version of mediocre Ikea artwork to cover the bare walls of your day. That’s fine. But let me try to convince you that you will get much more satisfaction from your music if you just insist on having less. Less convenience, less automation, fewer new songs, occasional silence.

Here are four examples of my deoptimized music habits that I’ve come to appreciate:

Rather than continuing to play random songs after my chosen album finishes, just stop. Make me choose what’s next. If that means there’s some dead air, fine. Why so hungry for the next thing? Let that previous album sink in before moving on to the next.
I don’t want such effortless music “Discovery”. Instead I can discover music through happenstance and personal recommendations. It will be slower, and I will surely miss some good stuff, but that’s kind of the point. The new music I acquire will be more unique to me and my activities and circumstances.
Albums over singles. I like to experience music in a ~45min chunk made up of a sequence of songs as chosen by the artist, rather than a single three-minute individual song taken out of context and slammed up against something completely different. It’s unfortunate that many artists are now releasing only singles in order to cater to the Spotify regime.
It takes some work to curate my library. In the same way it takes effort to organize and care for a physical CD or record collection. I find myself doing chores like hunting down a missing track from an album I downloaded 20 years ago, or correcting the metadata, or even culling albums from my collection. Curation chores still bring me closer to my collection and help me rediscover old favourites. It makes my collection more mine.

So. How to put this into practice?

I have a few ideas. Maybe something here will resonate with you.

If you’re roughly my age, maybe you still have an iPod from 2005. If you do, it’s undoubtedly still loaded with whatever you were listening to back then. Hook that up and start listening. I know several people who’ve found plenty of joy with this One Simple Trick.

Do you have a folder of music on your old computer? Does your car stereo accept a USB drive? Put 10 albums on the USB stick and listen to that for a while. After a few weeks, swap some of those albums out for different ones from your collection. Congratulations, you’re now simulating 1999 when you would have just a handful of CDs (or tapes) in your car at a time.

I’ve done both of those and they’ve been fun, but most recently I’ve found a first class home for my collection. I exported everything from Apple Music.app (née iTunes), play counts and all, and put it into Navidrome. This is a self-hosted music server which hosts my music collection and lets me play it on my laptop and phone and in the car. I’ve been enjoying it every day.

I usually use Navidrome’s random album view, which presents me with a dozen albums from my collection, one of which usually suits my listening mood at the time. I get a small joy each time I rediscover the album from my past and all the accompanying memories.

I’ve come to reject that music appreciation should be so optimized. The experience of listening to a music recording improves and deepens with multiple listens over time. That’s how we attach emotional associations with life events. It’s what makes the music in our collection the music in our collection.

What this all comes down to is a philosophy that less is more, constraints are helpful, and unlimited of anything is paralysing. This is certainly true in many facets of creating or appreciating art, and probably in most aspects of life generally.

Addendum

Since writing this, I found this validating excerpt from a recent article on The Verge.

Music recommendation algorithms were supposed to help us cut through the noise, but they just served us up slop.

Spotify leadership didn’t see themselves as a music company, but as a time filler. The employee explained that, “the vast majority of music listeners, they’re not really interested in listening to music per se. They just need a soundtrack to a moment in their day.”

Simply providing a soundtrack to your day might seem innocent enough, but it informs how Spotify’s algorithm works. Its goal isn’t to help you discover new music, its goal is simply to keep you listening for as long as possible. It serves up the safest songs possible to keep you from pressing stop.

(via JWZ)