I should be writing, but it’s a little after 18.03 on Wednesday evening and I have an in-progress manuscript and 22,733 words in front of me… but I’m listening to music, as I invariably am when I’m writing, but this evening the music reminds me I owe the ether a thing on music-related stuff, so.
A few months ago, I started to tire (not sure that’s the right word, but it’ll do for now) with Spotify. I have a premium account; have had it for a few years, so when the Spotify taste began to turn bitter in my ears, I thought the problem was Spotify itself. I investigated other streaming providers. Eventually I narrowed alternatives down to Qobuz and I gave that streaming service a go on their free ticket, just to see how it sat with me. Unfortunately, Qobuz left me the same slight tinge of aural bitterness, the same unbalanced sense of something not being quite right.
I went old-school, turned to my vinyl and things improved. Hang on a sec, I need to make a note…
It was like encountering that attractive person in the coffee shop and you strike up a conversation with them and a small, but very important connection forms between you both and you know you’re never going to see them again but everything about this moment moves into your brain and you know your imperfect memory is going to retrieve this moment whenever you want and you will be able to picture their smile, their eyes, their face on cue…
Sorry. I should be writing.
Anyway.
Vinyl lifted my ears out of the audio doldrums and pushed me to consider a new/old direction. I used to have a fantastic music library before I embraced the self-defining evil of streaming. And I still have it, this fantastic music library. It’s tucked away on my NAS in a 2TB folder called, originally enough, ‘my music’.
So, I breathed life into my old portable music player, wiped it clean, updated the OS, and synchronised a quarter of my music library onto it. Quarter? Well, yes. There’s plenty of space for the other 75% on the player, but even on a wired connection it took 24 hours to sync 25%, and I wasn’t sure everything would still hang together so baby steps, yeah? Yeah.
Anyway, that was weeks ago, and those 8,904 tracks are continuing to bubble into my ears and spread goodness into my brain several times a day. The portable music player has only needed a recharge once, and my senses feel like they’ve been on recharge since I made this audio transition.
Over the coming weekend I’ll sync another 25% from the NAS onto the player and then, if it all continues to hang together nicely, I’ll do the other 50% in two stages sometime before Christmas. But the real difference (apart from a lack of strangled/compressed nonsense from Spotify, is the 33,000 tracks I’m going to end up with on my music player… well… they’re mine. I own them. Some I paid hard cash for. Some I bought as CDs. Others came to me direct from unsigned bands (I’ve got probably a couple of thousand of those albums), brilliant unsigned bands who no longer exist, but whose music will live on in my world.
But, and here’s the good thing and I know I’m repeating myself… I own them all! It’s not a subscription. I paid once for all these albums, singles, EPs, and tracks, and I’m not paying again! In your face streamers.