Starting my digital music collection over

Over the last few months, I’ve been grossly aware of the how algorithms have been shaping my life. Content being directly streamed to my brain with no friction whatsoever. It’s been taking away from my attention span, my focus, my enjoyment and my well being. When I got into homelabbing and self-hosting, I thought it was going to be my solution to this. No more corporations, no more algorithms, I can collect the content I want to watch and listen to. But something felt missing, I think I was missing the core of the issue. Yes part of the issue is algorithms made to keep me consuming, but another piece of the puzzle is the over abundance of content available. Since there is no end to the content stream, there is no time to reflect on the content consumed. There’s always something else to watch. This is where I went wrong, instead developing a curated collection, I pirated all the music I’d ever want. Yes, the access was nice but it left me with the same decision paralysis from before.

I’ve been collecting CDs and cassettes and I’ve built a collection of about 35 albums. There’s something fun about loading up a CD into my CD player, and whether I’m sitting on my bed listening or playing it in the background while I do something, I feel like more there is more intention when I listen. When the CD stops, I have to get up and decide whether I am restarting the album, picking a new album or just stopping overall for now.

So, I’m deleting my current digital collection and ripping all the music I own from CDs. I will be consuming music I own from now on. I will pick 4 albums to listen keep on my digital audio player, and when I want something new, I must switch one of the 4 for the new one. Of course I can’t avoid streaming or Youtube, but I can work towards being more meaningful when I listen to music.