I’m not an audiophile, far from it actually. I don’t have expensive Hi-Fi equipment to listen to music, just my good old EarPods and that’s enough for me. Well maybe I could get some headphones but I digress.
I’m not an audiophile but I like music, I like the emotions songs carry, I like to hear and feel the story behind them, I like to discover new genres and artists and above all I like the way music can transport me to my own little world.
I’ve been listening to music on my own since I’m 10 (I’m not taking into account listening to the radio while my parents drove the car around). I remember that the first CD I listened to was AC/DC’s Powerage album and even though I couldn’t understand the lyrics at the time, I’ve always been drawn to the very first track of said album: Rock ‘N’ Roll Damnation. Whether it was the guitar or the voice of Bon Scott that first track always struck a cord within me. After that I started listening to other artists like Michael Jackson and Green Day when I grew up a bit.
I didn’t listen to music on CDs for long, soon came my trusty MP3 player and the dozens of songs I put on it. Fast-forward a few years and the streaming services start to become popular. Like many I made the jump and there I could listen to music from all around the world from the 80s to the latest hits. This plethora of music felt great at first: I could discover new artists every week!
Later came Spotify’s daily mixes and out of simplicity I came to listen almost exclusively to those. Now that I think of it the more I listened to these daily mixes the more I skipped the songs that were different than my usual ones.
The reason behind this is that Spotify uses an algorithm to create songs recommendations based on my listening habits. Hence the same kind of music, same genre in every single one of my daily mixes. That infernal cycle made it quite hard for me to even WANT to listen to other genres or artists.
Never again…
Today I feel that something else is also responsible for degrading my music experience. The fact that millions of songs from any country and from any time can be found in the palm of my hand and that I can easily skip through them by clicking “forward” removed any kind of friction I used to encounter when searching for new songs to listen to.
Friction is what makes finding a song or an album you like rewarding and satisfying. That way you feel more involved in listening to the music and not just listening to « content ».
Today I want to try something. I want this friction back, I want this satisfying feeling of discovering a new artist or album I like to come back. This is reason why I’m trying to get an iPod classic (hopefully I’ll win my current online auction to get it 🤞). I want to start with a clean slate. I want to remember the artists and songs I really like and get the music on my iPod to get the pleasure of listening to music back. I miss the way I would talk about music to my friends or random people on the internet and get recommendation from them.
I don’t want to listen to an algorithm anymore, I want to listen to music.