Music Libraries, A Rant

I wrote this a long time ago, but I finally have a place to post it now.

I started listening to music by ripping it off YouTube, like so many others my age. Looking back at my music library, I remember an odd collection of incorrectly named songs and albums, yet the memory of these disorganized music folders fill me up with nostalgia. Let me try and explain this weird nostalgic feeling of mine. To start at the beginning, the effort required to acquire every song and album. It wasn’t a lot, but it was just enough to prevent you from every shiny new song or album to your library. So, on account of my laziness, I would only put in the effort to download music if I felt completely engaged with it. There used to be a software (A SOFTWARE, not a website) to download songs from YouTube. I have no idea if it’s still around. But all you had to do was copy-paste the link, select MP3 in the drop-down, and hit download. Fifteen minutes later, you would have the song on your PC, to listen to as many times as you wanted, without relying on the fickle dial-up BSNL connection you had. Of course, the quality was atrocious. But how did it matter? The song was yours now. With the effort of downloading the song, there was an accompanying feeling of accomplishment. It belonged to your music library now, and it fits in a spot, like a jigsaw piece in the puzzle of your musical identity.

With albums, it was different. Many of the albums I listened to were complete experiences, with the songs intended to be listened to together in continuity. A more daunting commitment than listening to singles, I would read about an album before listening to it because I didn’t want to waste my time. As a result, I’d go into an album already having understood a little about what it would try to say. Downloading an album was a trek through dense torrent websites and one had to be wary of the scary singles in the area whose husbands had recently died. If what I was listening to was obscure enough, I would return from my journey empty-handed and resort to my trusty YouTube MP3 downloader.

After a few years of this, my disorganized music library became a second digital home for me. It would survive me finally ditching my MP3 player, survive computer upgrades, and several phone resets too. When viewed on my computer, the shape of the titles took on a familiar pattern, with the newer titles standing out but over time slowly merging with the others. It was like watching my music taste grow before my own eyes. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I would feel a little satisfaction whenever I opened that folder.

Fast forward to the year I finally get Spotify. If you’re someone who likes listening to a lot of music, the convenience streaming offers trumps the benefits of maintaining your own library. The quality is great unless you’re an extreme audiophile, in which case you need to find a better use for your money. Streaming services have most artists in their catalogue except some obscure Bandcamp artists and others who (rightfully) believe streaming services are bad for artists. But streaming offers such benefits that it’s hard to go back once you’ve experienced it. Any song or album you want, you can add it to your library instantly. Personalized recommendations, for who better knows your taste than an algorithm? (Why need friends if you have an algorithm?) In a way, it’s social too. It’s fun to listen to something your friend is playing, and then have a conversation with them about it. Another useful feature of Spotify is the ability to link to your Last.fm account. It’s quite fun to track your listening habits and the recommendations on Last.fm are always a great fit for your tastes.

While it’s possible to use Last.fm with your own music library, it’s a tiresome process. You need to manually add tags to each song to get Last.fm scrobbler to recognize their names. It’s possible to use apps for this, but they need a lot of tinkering to work correctly. I undertook this for a few months, obsessively renaming songs and downloading the right album art. But after Spotify, I just didn’t see the point in putting in so much effort.

Now, after a couple of years with Spotify, I’m starting to feel myself growing further away from the music I’m listening to. Streaming took away a lot of the effort that I had to put in, and with this, I lost some of the sense of closeness I felt with the music. Since I add every album I find even a little interesting (because why not? I’ll get to it someday), my library is filled with albums that I’ve listened to only once or twice, only vaguely remembering what I felt about them. More recently, I’m finding myself just listening to the songs from my Liked Songs or from playlists. I feel a sort of laziness when it comes to full albums. Now, I’ve thought of two explanations for this. Maybe I’m growing out of listening to full albums (which isn’t really true, I’m listening to more albums than I did before). The explanation that I favour is that I don’t feel as much of a connection with each album as I did back when I read about every album before trying it out.

Spotify has helped me find new music faster than ever before. But the convenience takes away some of the effort that I believe made the music feel more personal. The ease enables me to listen to a large number of albums, but at a lower quality of listening as each new album has to compete for my attention as I find more and more albums. Despite my attempts to listen to a wide variety of music, it’s getting hard to find albums that make me feel as music used to. However, it’s entirely possible that I feel this way because the albums I compare the new ones with are the ones that have defined my taste. ‘Set your standards too high, and you’re on the road to disappointment’ and all that.

The thing is, some of my top albums took serious effort to get into. I wouldn’t have liked it much at first, but after multiple listens, I would notice all the details that would make the album one of my favourites. A great example is ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’. I loved the first song and decided to check out the rest of the album. After my first few listens, I thought the lyrics were a bit… emo (yes, really) and I stopped listening. Something made me go back to it, and I think it was the fact that I just didn’t have many albums in my library that I hadn’t listened to too many times already. Now, I think that that album is one of the GOATs. How many amazing albums must I have missed out on because I didn’t put in enough listens? Spotify makes it too easy for you to be lazy and move on if you’re bored.

Another gripe I have with Spotify is the missing feeling of ownership over your own music library. You might have playlists and saved albums, but out of the blue, something might disappear and never come back (looking at you, My Bloody Valentine). With an offline collection, you know for sure that you can always listen to what you like, regardless of record company lawsuits and whatnot. As long as you make backups, your library is yours forever. The lost sense of ownership is not replaced by the satisfaction of paying the artists, because Spotify pays only a tiny amount for each listen. A T-shirt purchase will give more money to the artist than a lifetime of Spotify revenue from your listens.

You might be thinking this is going to end with a rant about how we should go back to the good old days of pirating music. But I still stand with what I said earlier. It’s just not practical. The only thing left is for me to change my listening habits. Instead of adding every new album to my list, I could only add them once I’ve listened to them enough to ‘get’ it. Maybe I could use playlists to track albums that I want to listen to in the future. Whatever it is, I’ve realized that it’s going to take an active effort to not get lost in the endless ocean of music that streaming offers.