The joys of buying music

About 6 months ago, I decided to cancel my Spotify subscription and switch to purchasing music. It had been so long since I had bought an album or song that I didn’t even know where to start. Returning to where I left a decade ago, I searched for iTunes. Sadly, it has now been so integrated with Apple Music that buying music is an afterthought and difficult. Searching for “Song title buy” on the internet often doesn’t return anything useful, all of the top links are for YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, and often lyrics. I ended up finding 7digital and bandcamp. To my surprise, the prices weren’t that bad. To my delight, they also had some really high quality files available for many newer tracks.

I purchased a few albums and listened to them exclusively for a few days, substituting in some radio or Spotify’s free plan when I just couldn’t take Viva La Vida for a tenth time. At first, it sucked. Who in their right mind goes from having almost every song in the world down to 20, paying almost twice as much that month to have the privilege of doing so? It felt like I was making a mistake, that I would end up switching back to Spotify premium, and the money I spent on the albums would be wasted. If I was a less stubborn person, I might have.

One of the things that I liked most about Spotify was the excitement about New Music Friday, and so I wanted to continue incorporating that in some way. Every Friday, I would open the playlist, and pick out 2 or 3 songs to buy for the week. This had two effects: first, it forced me to focus on only those songs that I truly enjoyed, and second, it kept my spending roughly on par with what Spotify would have cost in a month. Each week become a treasure hunt, and the selection and waiting made me enjoy the songs more. After purchasing, the songs were no longer just the next song suggested in an algorithmic queue, they were part of a collection that I curated[1].

Now, I have hundreds of songs that are a joy to listen to, and I no longer return to Spotify except on Friday mornings to audition new additions. Today, I lit up when I heard Reminisce by Said the Sky. That’s a buy!

  1. Yes, of course Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist is generated by an algorithm, so the entire pipeline isn’t algorithm free. ↩︎