Where to Start: Rebuilding Your Listening Life (Part 1)
When All the World’s Music Wasn’t Enough
Part 1: How I Lost My Listening Life
There were warning signs of the Spotifi-clipse.
It was 2012. I was in my last year of a Bachelor of Music at Melbourne University. My major was classical violin performance, but I had convinced them to let me do my placement at SYN Radio.
One of the perks was the library of free CDs. I had been spending all of my spare student cash buying singles from iTunes. So between this and the university library’s collection of CDs, I couldn’t believe that I could listen to so much music for free (provided it was a new Australian indie release or classical music).
It felt a bit overwhelming. I’d take a CD home, rip it into iTunes, carefully tag the metadata and spend the next week listening to the album, but then ten more would be submitted to the station. I couldn’t keep up!
We started hearing about this “streaming service” from Sweden called Spotify. It had just launched in America and was about to launch in Australia. It was all we talked about on breakfast radio for weeks.
It felt too good to be true. To be able to access all of the world’s music, from any country, from any period of history, for ten dollars a month. Civilisation is peaking, I thought. It can’t get better than this. My grandparents, with their one shelf of vinyl records they knew backwards, wouldn’t believe the riches my era was serving us up, for free or near-free.
A year after Spotify launched and we all lost our collective minds, I had a gig with my band at a now-defunct Melbourne pub. I was chatting to friends of friends, a couple who had told me that they usually didn’t go to this sort of thing but were really enjoying it.
“What kind of music do you like listening to?” I asked.
Their answer haunts me to this day.
“Oh I don’t really follow artists” the guy said, “I listen to playlists.”
I pressed a bit further, “Oh! What kind of playlists, like any particular genre?”
He squirmed. “Oh just like, 'Chill' playlists”.
This was a 22-year-old man in 2013 who, in just a year of Spotify, had lost touch with the artists behind the music and could no longer even name a genre of music he liked.
But I can’t be too judgemental. Because within five years, with all the access to all the world’s music, I was listening to less music than ever. As a music professional!
What happened?!
And worse - and I’m scared to even publicly admit this - but despite being on the front lines of the devastation Spotify was wreaking on musicians...
I have only just cancelled my Spotify account.
At first, I was going to write another “How to Break Up with Spotify” article. But I’ve been reading these kinds of articles for years and, whilst I felt loads of guilt and had “Cancel Spotify subscription” permanently on my to-do list, these articles weren’t enough.
It was only when I started thinking about how listening to music fitted into the bigger structure of my life that I was able to start rebuilding my relationship with it.
So here's the upcoming series: ‘Where to Start: Rebuilding Your Listening Life’.
- How I Lost My Listening Life
- Working Out What You Need from Music Streaming
- Choosing the Right Way to Stream Music (for you!)
- Finding New Music That Lights Up Your Brain
- Rebuilding Ritual and Relationship Around Listening to Music
It will roll out over the next few months, interspersed with our usual schedule of hearing from musicians about their music and stories through our Song Lore and 5 Things features.
