Hard Reset
I want to change my relationship with music. I love music, and am almost always listening to something. I take pride in my eclectic taste. But lately, I've become aware of how my listening habits have changed over time. Largely, a lot of my listening has gone from active to passive. Gone are the days I would sit with an album, listening from front to back before starting again. Now, I open Spotify and hit "shuffle," or load up a playlist on YouTube. It's not quite background music—I still care about what's being played—but my attention has been diverted off of it more. I'm surprised when I learn even bands I like put out new albums, and even worse are the times when I realize I've missed a few releases.
Spotify does not exist to challenge you.
I remember being so excited when Spotify was first coming out by the prospect of having everything I wanted to listen to at my fingertips. But, hadn't that already been the case? The iPod allowed me to carry around 20,000 songs, and I spent many an afternoon ripping CDs I'd borrowed from the library, building out my own music collection. Spotify did come out, and for a while, things were great. There was nothing to manage, no fumbling with file formats or syncing; music was just there. But like everything, with some new technology or paradigm, something else is lost. The dreaded algorithm made its appearance. I think, talk, and write a lot about how the systems we interact with inflect not only our choices, but our way of thinking, too. Spotify does not exist to challenge you. It wants to serve you music you already like, even if that means serving you the same music again and again. It leans away from albums and into playlists, singles. I've been a big hip-hop fan since high school, but I've leaned even further in that direction over the years, as it feels extremely suited to Spotify.
Of course, these issues are not exclusive to Spotify; for example, Netflix's goal is to build a compelling catalogue of video content, not make a movie that gets you to buy a ticket—but still something I want to be more aware of.
A few months ago, I decided to rebuild my own music library for the first time in years. At some point in the past, I had a harddrive failure, and simply decided not to put it back together; until now. It took some doing to find a list of the folders, each containing music by a different artist, but I managed to piece it together from backups and other sources. Even harder was getting everything organized. Deciding what format to use, what folder structure to adhere to, and how to manage metadata all took more doing than I expected. Let alone piecing it together into a media player app (MusicBee, in my case). I already had a little MP3 player, but I decided to rebuild my old iPod, too—which should probably get its own post.
I'm only about a week into this new structure, but I can feel myself easing into it again. I'm a lot more conscious about what I choose to listen to, and have already listening to more complete albums over the past week than I have in the past year. It's a seismic shift in my thought process. Rather than everything being obfuscated through playlists and algorithmically sorted screens, most of the time I simply look at a list of artists I curated, and pick what I want to play. I've listened to a lot of albums front to back while walking my dog around lunch time, which is a really pleasant experience. And even the folder management is borderline fun, in a quaint sort of way. If your music library is as big as mine, it can be a little annoying making broad changes (I still have to update the genre tags across the library) but there's something undeniably satisfying about getting everything just how you want it.
I've still got a few kinks to work out, a few quibbles I wish I could solve. When I do need to sync new music, it's a little annoying to wait for the 5mb/s transfer speeds. Charging is also quite slow, and works a lot better plugged into a computer than into the wall. I'm looking for some new methods of tracking my listening a bit better; I'd like to write some small notes to help contextualize things a bit for myself. I want to rebuild some of the playlists I made in this new format. I'm running an open-source software on my iPod to get around the default OS's database limits, though it too has a few issues. I need to update my infrastructure somehow as well; I don't have an easy way to play music over a speaker while cooking, at the moment. But it's one of those scenarios where so far almost all the friction seems good. It's done exactly what I wanted it to, which is make me a lot more intentional about my music listening. I decide what I want to add to my collection, what I want to play. It's not quite the same as owning a bunch of CDs or vinyls, but even just this collection of files on my harddrive (backed up better this time!) feels a lot more bespoke in a world that wants you to own nothing.
