Curated Music

I have listened to music through multiple formats and tend to spend a good amount of time organizing and curating the music I listen to.

This started with Compact Discs (CD), the first CD that I owned, and in my mind the first album I owned, was a Beach Boys CD that I permanently borrowed from my dad in elementary school. I got a lot of my music influence from my father.

By middle school I had accumulated 20+ CDs that were most pop at the time, and mostly the result of Christmas Gift Exchanges with Jess, my friend down the street.

In Middle School, my CD collection was stolen out of my backpack as I had frequently brought it to school to listen to during our "Technology" class.

I rebuilt my CD collection and by High School would spend hours arranging and re-arranging my CDs in my CD binder. First in alphabetical order, then by artist, then by genre, then by personal rating.

By college I had built a digital library, ripping all of my CD collection into iTunes and carrying it around with me on an iPod. I traded arranging the CDs for rating and curating playlists in iTunes.

While my roommate (the friend from down the street) would load up a random selection of music to his iPod and hit "shuffle" I would never be satisfied with a purely random play order. I found great joy and excitement in categorizing my tracks and having iTunes auto curate a playlist to walk across campus to.

When Spotify came about, my iTunes collection and curation I spent years building was immediately left in the dust. I immediately began curating Spotify Playlists and digging into finding new music. After the excitement of having access to any piece of music that I could ever want wore off, I found myself less and less satisfied with giving my music listening habits over to an algorithm.

Only last year did I begin to consider and re-consider what Spotify's goals were when delivering up music to me.

I've got an interest again in curating my own music, in limiting what I have access to, and in intentionally seeking to enjoy a curated set of music. Currently that takes place via listening to Vinyl Records, but I am always exploring other means of controlling my music more and more.