The Digital Years (and beyond?)
Part two of my odyssey as a listener of recorded sound
I came late to digital music - Napster passed me by entirely as I clacked through the old CD racks, but in 2004 I got an iPod and holy crap. Before that, I’d trot off to work with a little CD pouch packed with a dozen or so discs to listen to throughout the day. At night, Hope and I would put on CDs or WFMU. Despite a clunky old Walkman I sometimes brought out to listen to old mix tapes on walks, music was mostly an indoor thing, something bound to home or the office.
But as soon as I got my hand on that thick little slab, with its chrome back and its white front, everything changed. I ripped all of my CDs into my iTunes account, and it was only a matter of time before I gave into entropy in the form of the shuffle button. Allowing all of my musical colors and flavors to blend into each other was like having my own radio station that only played stuff that I requested. Furthermore, I could bring this radio station with me anywhere - especially the subway, where I now had unlimited power to block out all the noise and distraction around me! Heaven had finally descended to earth.
What’s more, the iPod ended up becoming a tremendous creative tool for the theater performances we produced. In 2004, we decided to build a new show from scratch with a handful of actors - we didn’t really know what it was going to be about, but I threw a bunch of songs together on a playlist for the performers to improvise against. Well, with a little bit of tweaking, that playlist ended up being the soundtrack to our show. For the next few years, we developed a series of silent/dance/movement shows that were completely defined by the playlists we crafted - a direct descendant of the mix tapes from a decade earlier, but 100 times more fluid and adaptable.
Over a period of years I slowly transitioned from CDs to buying music through iTunes. It was still fun to look around at the shops for obscurities, but if I wanted to listen to something I’d summon it digitally. What was the point of a physical artifact anymore? It was all going to the same place.
Then, Spotify happened.
I had read about the platform’s success in Europe - a subscription fee for unlimited access to a bottomless library of music old and new. Where could I sign up? When the service finally hit the U.S. in 2011, I was more than happy to pay for the most expensive ad-free tier. I went nuts putting together playlists loaded with songs that I’d pulled from here, there, and everywhere. I went through all my old papers to pull out the various scraps where I’d jotted down the names of albums and artists I was never able to find, an astounding number of which were now available to stream. With such bounty in front of me, I neglected favorite old albums in exclusive pursuit of freshness and novelty.
Over the dozen years since then, I’ve only become greedier. My approach to consuming music on Spotify has shifted from art to science - and this is where Hope tells me I’ve gone insane.
My main base of operations within Spotify is a massive playlist simply titled Ongoing Now. It’s an ever-changing repository for every musical possibility that comes my way. On Friday mornings, when the week’s new albums drop, I comb through Spotify’s Release Radar and music publications like Pitchfork, AV Club, Stereogum looking for leads. I spend a few minutes sampling anything that sounds promising, and, if it passes my gut check, I pull it into the playlist. I also always keep my ears open for rolling recommendations from various email newsletters, media outlets, and friends.
Where this becomes truly insane is in its scope. I figure, I’m paying for unlimited music, so why not listen to unlimited music? Unceasing access to the long tail of available songs has resulted in a form of digital hoarding. As of this writing, my Ongoing Now playlist features 5,263 songs - 325 hours and 51 minutes of music.
So what all is actually on there? It covers a pretty wide range. I’d say about half of it is indie rock/pop, with about a quarter electronic/dance music, and the rest R&B/hip-hop, with a solid smattering of weird/avant garde/uncategorizable stuff. It’s almost entirely music that’s new to me, but that doesn’t mean it’s net-new - I cherish reissues, recommendations, and other opportunities to discover artists and albums that slipped under my radar for many years.
I don’t listen to all of these things sequentially. As with my iPod of yore, I treat it like a radio station, curated with artists and albums that I’ve identified through restless curiosity. What keeps the thing from bursting at the seams is that, after I add each new week’s albums, I go back and remove anything that’s been on the list for more than a year(!). I don’t come anywhere near listening to everything before it’s gone - in fact, I’m generally shocked at how quickly things seem to pass through. But when an album does jump out to me, I’ll pull it aside and listen to it more closely. Otherwise, I keep the playlist on shuffle when I walk the dog, do work around the house, ride the subway, or do anything else that doesn’t require my full conscious attention.
So many albums have passed through my playlist in this fashion that I’ve filled up not one but THREE different archival playlists (covering the years 2011-17, 2018-20, 2020-22, and 2022-present). Most people don’t know that you can max out a Spotify playlist, but yup - generally around 10k songs, or 600 hours. I don’t return to these to listen to them very often - mostly for reference, when I need to look up a song or artist that comes up in discussion with Hope or via random recollection.
I also have other, more specialized playlists. Liked Songs includes the best of the best and is ideal for exercising, road trips, or whenever I need a pick-me-up. I’m not a regular jazz listener - I appreciate it more than I love it - but I have a playlist where I collect artists and albums to dive into when I want that vibe. I have an instrumental electronic playlist that’s good to work to, and various lists for bedtime - though these days, we find that white noise (or rather, the deeper and more textured brown noise option - also available through Spotify) does a better job of short-circuiting conscious thought and helping us pass out quicker.
For all of the hoopla surrounding Spotify Wrapped, I find that it contains very few insights to mine about my tastes. For instance, a popular bedtime/housework/entertaining guests playlist in our household is a series of compilations from the incredibly cool Jazz Is Dead label, which revives neglected or forgotten work from a variety of jazz/funk/fusion artists. Since the label’s cofounders - Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad - are listed on every track, guess who my top artists of the year were? Seeing them on the list reinforced that I use their music for repeated purposes, but doesn’t say much about the eclecticism that I pursue, or even the individual songs that mean the most to me. But overall, I was apparently in the top 2% of Spotify listeners around the freaking globe, which is like, huh.
So is all of this unhealthy, or what? I’ll admit, it gets a bit overwhelming at times, and I occasionally feel like I’m missing something important by letting all the endless options wash over me with so little friction. So, not like I needed it, but over the past few years I’ve discovered a new obsession to distract me from my obsessiveness.
The restless early days of the pandemic provided the perfect excuse to buy a turntable. We had one about 20 years ago, but it was never more than a novelty, though we still lugged around a stack of records from over the years (including some of the discs that originally belonged to my parents), just in case. The ability to interact with a physical artifact was a lovely way to dilute some of the sadness and isolation of those nervous days. Since then, it’s blossomed into a nice way to financially support some of the artists we discover via Spotify - and there are few things more enjoyable than crate digging for long-sought treasures or exciting new discoveries. Considering streaming services can remove our access to their digital content at any time, physical media for meaningful music seems like a pretty sound investment.
Despite all this, I don’t listen to music QUITE as obsessively as I did in the past. The truth is, I have a harder time concentrating than I used to. Music used to fuel my moods and reveries, projecting its inspirational thrum into my inner thoughts. I lived inside many of those songs - they were companions and collaborators during a time when the world still felt like it was over the next hill. But now that I’m older, I sometimes feel like the world is within me, and accompaniment can be a distraction when I’m trying to clear my head and think for myself. This has felt disappointing at times, but I suspect it might also be a reaction to the sinister abundance of Spotify. Maybe access to music has become so devalued that my mind rebels against using it as wallpaper.
For now, though, I still count music as hugely important - I would gladly pay Spotify four times as much if I knew the money would go to artists, but we all know that’ll never happen. Otherwise, unlike other forms of hoarding, I don’t feel that I’m hurting myself or anyone else by binging on digital sound, and the vertiginous illusion of endlessness can be countered by the cozy crackle of my LPs. It’s a real pleasure to once again listen to music by choice, not by default. For a few minutes, I can disengage from my insanity and enjoy a thing for what it is, instead of the potential it promises.