The joys of analog music
I grew up listening to my dad’s vinyl records and remember buying my first CDs in the early 2000s. I also remember borrowing backpacks full of CDs of jazz and classical music from my local library when I was in high school and ripping them to MP3 so I could keep them with all the music I was getting from Napster.
I’m one of these people who likes to listen to full albums. At one point I had a few thousand ripped as quality MP3. In college there were campus peer-to-peer ways of sharing music and my collection grew a lot.
In grad school, the streaming services came out. The streaming services like Spotify have some major downsides. Sometimes things go unplayable. Stuff is missing. Stuff is changed/censored without warning. The UI is optimized for whatever Spotify wants to show you, not what you want to listen to. I assume it makes sense for Spotify to optimize their costs by suggesting stuff they pay less for. For someone who likes albums, the little annoyances add up.
I recently pulled my dad’s record collection out of his attic. It’s about a thousand LPs from the sixties and seventies. Stuff I like since I grew up listening to it. I’ve spent a few months browsing Discogs and buying bargin-bin vinyl and CDs (lots of scrolling, filters are useless). I’ve bought about five hundred CDs and maybe a hundred vinyl records over several months. The majority of the CDs are $1–2, and the records are mostly under $5. It all comes via Media Mail, shipped for a few bucks. One of the packages came from Brooklyn and had been inspected by USPS to make sure it contained only CDs. One package came from Jamaica and the vinyl sleeves had a bit of fine sand. It’s a cheap, fun hobby.
Now I’ve got a hard copy of just about any album I want to listen to. I like the physicality of taking the CD out of the case and nudging the sliding tray in. My CD player is a 1988 Realistic I found at a music store and it sometimes skips if the disc has deep scratches. I like the unspoken social job of turning the record over. I like that the current CEO of Spotify, and the next CEO, and whatever government wants to, can’t see what I am playing on repeat today.
Since returning to mainly listening to physical media, my experience of listening to music has improved and I enjoy it more than ever. I got home the other day and the internet was out, and I didn’t even notice for an hour since the first thing I do now when I get home is put a record on!