For a long time, music was something I didn’t just listen to. I lived with it.

I knew the exact moment when a scratch on one of our LPs would line up with the music. I could hear it approaching like a tiny, familiar glitch in the timeline. I made mixtapes on cassette, waiting with absurd patience for a song to come on the radio so I could catch it without the host talking over the intro. I knew precisely when to flip the tape in my walkman so I could replay my favourite song without rewinding and draining the batteries. Later, with my discman, I could predict whether a bump on the bus would be within the tolerance of the prebuffered stream or if it would choke. I had a growing CD collection, then a growing mp3 collection. I scrobbled everything compulsively to last.fm. On long car rides I’d get goosebumps from the tracks that were playing.

Somewhere along the way, that relationship got diluted.

Streaming and the quiet erosion of attention

I’m not anti-technology. I love good tools. But the shift to streaming did something subtle to my connection with music. With “everything” available at all times, it became very easy to listen to “something”. I stopped tending to a library and started just consuming a feed. Music moved from being a carefully chosen companion to becoming background radiation. Playlists appeared out of nowhere. Algorithms tried to guess what I wanted. The friction almost completely disappeared. In theory, that should be great. In practice, it made my relationship to music feel less personal. I rarely listened to an album from start to finish. I didn’t know which track was number 3 anymore, or where the emotional high point of an album lived. I wasn’t building anything; I was just tapping “next”. And I missed that older version of myself: the one who would happily spend an entire evening fine-tuning a mixtape for someone, or sit on a bed with a stack of CDs, deciding which seven could come on a trip.

What I want back

I’d like to reintroduce a slower kind of discovery.

I want to stumble onto new music that feels like a golden nugget. Something that makes me move or smile or go quiet for a bit. Something I want to listen to on repeat for days or weeks, then forget, then rediscover later and get hit by the whole package again: the sound plus the memories plus the person I was when I first heard it. I don’t need a perfectly complete or objectively good music collection. I want a personal one again. A library that looks like a strange, accurate map of my life at different points in time.

LPs, rituals and limits

A few years ago, I tried to fix this by going back to vinyl. LPs did help in some ways. Putting a record on is automatically a ritual: choosing it, taking it out of the sleeve, placing the needle, committing to listening to a whole side. I still enjoy this, and I’d like to keep that as a special thing. But LPs are expensive, take up physical space, and for me they are tied to being at home and having time and energy for the ritual. That combination makes it less accessible than I'd like to. Also, discovery through LPs alone is too limited for me. I’m not going to casually buy five random LPs just to see if one of them sticks. So LPs stayed in the “beautiful, occasional ritual” category, not the “everyday music companion” one. Whenever I attend a live concert, I try to get my hands on an LP to have a memory capsule of the experience.

Bandcamp and ripping the old shelves

My next iteration was Bandcamp plus local downloads. Bandcamp is a good compromise: it supports artists directly, I can actually own the music, and I can download high-quality files. Discovery is manual and scattered, but at least I’m picking things with intention. I’m paying attention to album art, labels, tags, and recommendations from people whose taste I find similar. Lately I’ve started going backwards in time: I’m ripping my old CDs. Not all of them. Just a few selected pieces at a time – the albums that were once important enough to buy and keep, even when money and shelf space were both limited. I’m using iTunes (or Music.app, or whatever the name is this year) and ripping them to lossless, which turns out to be pleasantly straightforward. There’s something nice about the slowness of this process. Taking a CD out of its case after years, noticing the tiny scratches and fingerprints, remembering the weird local shop where I bought it. Dropping it into the drive. Hearing it spin. Watching the track titles appear, or not appear, and then having to fix them (for tagging I use MusicBrainz Picard, which is somewhat less fiddly than it sounds,and my current choice for music playback at home is Swinsian).

A tiny player with real buttons

The other key piece was getting a dedicated music player again.

I bought a Snowsky Echo Mini and bumped its storage with a 256 GB microSD card. Fifteen years after my last iPod shuffle retired, I have a small object in my hand that is just for playing music. No notifications, no messages, no browsers. Just files and buttons. I can press play in my pocket. I can skip. I can pause. I don’t have to unlock anything or look at a glowing rectangle. It feels oddly freeing and very nostalgic at the same time. I copy over the albums, the few carefully chosen things. It’s not “everything”. It’s my current small universe.

Yes, it takes more effort

Is this more work than opening Spotify and tapping on a personalised playlist? Absolutely. Ripping CDs, organising folders, tagging files with Picard one by one, hunting down missing covers. All of that takes time. Finding new music that actually catches my attention takes multiple tries. But that album that did catch my attention, now means something again. Because I touched it. I decided to include it. I know which folder it lives in, which track feels like the core, and where I first listened to it. The friction makes me care again. Do I feel more connected to the music I listen to now? Hell yes!

This isn’t a manifesto against streaming. I’ll probably still use it for certain things: quick checks, background playlists, sharing links. But next to that, I want to slowly re-grow a small, dense, personal music library that I handle with my own hands. Something I can carry in my pocket, not because it contains all the music in the world, but because it contains just enough of the right music for me, right now.