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The only music-streaming account I\u2019ve ever had lasted less than 72 hours in 2012. In 2023, I\u2019m still building a non-streaming music collection, shelling out hard cash for what the streaming industry has convinced consumers should be free. As a very online millennial, that makes me somewhat of an anomaly among my peers. I know it\u2019s a privilege for me to pooh-pooh streaming \u2014 after all, for those with less disposable income than I have, it offers access to enormous music libraries at little to no cost. But even for those who can afford to purchase music, the concept of paying for songs is a foreign one to many of us.<\/p>\n
People like me, who came of age in the decade after Apple introduced iTunes and before Spotify took over the market, belong to what is probably the last generation to remember what it was like to own a music collection that doesn\u2019t live in the cloud. Maybe that\u2019s why I never latched onto streaming services \u2014 I didn\u2019t like depending on a third-party platform, or being part of a social experiment that feeds Spotify data that it then sells to advertisers. There\u2019s also the matter of fair pay: Streams are the slowest way for musicians to earn money, at fractions of pennies per stream. Most important, though, I don\u2019t like how streaming feels \u2014 like I\u2019m only borrowing something for a while, rather than having a handpicked library of albums (digital or physical) that I\u2019ve vetted and can keep forever.<\/p>\n
I was still using iTunes until 2019, when Apple decided to sunset the app and replace it with a new media player called Music (not to be confused with Apple Music, the streaming service). The appeal of the app remains the same: a media player where I can see my entire music library hosted on my local machine rather than in the cloud. In fact, I have several libraries across different devices and drives that \u2014 much to my dismay \u2014 all differ from one another slightly. What I lack in portability, I make up for in security. Once I add something to my iTunes library, I have it forever. I have no fear of platforms\u2019 removing artists, or of artists\u2019 removing themselves.<\/p>\n
When I started this journey in grade school, I, like many of my peers, got around the new order via dubious means. I started by importing CDs I found at the library (the \u201cJuno\u201d soundtrack, anyone?) to my hard drive. I graduated to downloading MP3s online in the heyday of music blogs (\u201cBitte Orca,\u201d by the band Dirty Projectors, darlings of the hype machine) and searching Google for compressed files. I was a D.J. at my college\u2019s radio station, where we shared files and browsed the station\u2019s racks for CDs we could rip, all to fatten up our iTunes libraries.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
These days I\u2019m paying for nearly all my music, and have become more selective when adding to my collection. I lean into Bandcamp for MP3s. The platform\u2019s low barrier to entry allows nearly anyone to share and sell their music, whether they have a distributor or not \u2014 a limiting requirement for most major streaming platforms. Bandcamp is also possibly the best way to give the most money to small artists, aside from picking up a T-shirt from the merch table. If something isn\u2019t available on Bandcamp, I\u2019ll scope out used CDs to buy and rip. If I love something enough, I\u2019ll try to get the record. If it\u2019s out of print, I\u2019ll throw it on my wish list and cross my fingers for a reissue. At the end of the day, the goal is to have something to hold onto: a digital file, a CD, a record, anything other than an ephemeral stream.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t always convenient: Depriving myself of streaming means there\u2019s no easy way for me to repeatedly listen to a song without a deeper monetary commitment; but for me, listening to music is not about convenience so much as engagement. Resisting Spotify pushes me to actively find new music, as opposed to sitting through Discover Weekly playlists generated by an algorithm. I tune into local college stations, or online stations like the London-based NTS Radio network, and go down rabbit holes on YouTube, whose algorithm can still surprise me as long as I give it the right seeds. YouTube can be the most reliable platform for obscure finds, like live sets or rips of small-production seven-inches lost to time (I\u2019m still trying to find out more about Naming Mary, a not-so-S.E.O.-friendly \u201990s shoegaze band with little to no internet presence that surfaced after several recommended videos).<\/p>\n
This process of discovery has created a stash of albums that is dwarfed by Spotify\u2019s bloated world of curated playlists and anarchic algorithmic \u201cradio stations.\u201d I prefer it that way. When everyone has access to everything, nothing is stamped with the personal memories \u2014 the particulars that hold our experience of music together. I don\u2019t need the entirety of recorded music at my fingertips. I just need the few curated albums that I cared enough about to collect. Having my own library means I can distinctly remember the context of every find, and that makes my intimacy with the songs I care about \u2014 the ones I can mentally fill in when one earbud falls out as I\u2019m tying my shoes \u2014 feel especially rich.<\/p>\n
Denise Lu is a visual journalist at Bloomberg News. She has previously worked for The New York Times and The Washington Post.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n