I wanted to expand on yesterday's post with a reflection on how I listen to music. With a hefty dose of nostalgia thrown in.

My first personal listening device was a Sony Walkman. And it was perfect. I got my hands on the cassette of Amy Grant's ‘The Collection’ and had my first notable experience with a pop song. But getting tapes wasn't easy. Any allowance I had was spent on candy and RC Cola that I biked into town to buy so I was mostly limited to whatever tapes my parents had. Thankfully they both liked music so there was a fair amount to choose from at home; but I wanted to figure out what I liked.

So I learned how to make mixtapes. This involved waiting for songs on the radio and hitting the play/record buttons at the same time and just accepting that you would forever listen to this song with the missing first couple seconds or a DJ's comments overlaying the intro. Daily countdowns were a great way to grab a specific song you wanted (Mix 99.9's top 9 at 9). It often sounded like garbage but this was my music, self-selected and personal.

In junior high I got a Discman and this began a whole new journey in my music experience: collecting cds. For a while this involved jumping on my friend's Columbia House subscription and ordering cds. I was so envious of anyone with a Columbia House subscription. Imagine getting new cds just mailed to your house every month. This enabled me to buy the album of some of the bands I was listening to on the radio. I started discovering new rock (as distinct from my parents' old rock). Bands like Everclear, Eve 6, and of course, Green Day were early purchases and filled my headphones. This also very much represented me listening to music that I didn't want my parents to know I was listening to so I remember hiding cd sleeves where they couldn't find them.

The first cd I ever purchased from an actual, physical music store was MxPx - Life in General. I was with my family at a mall and I left them to go into the store myself and came back with it. It was also a declaration: this is what I'm into and I'm okay if you don't like it (they didn't). From here there was no stopping, I began collecting cds with a new intensity. Saving up money however I could and going and picking out cds from HMV. My collection grew and evolved as I grew and evolved. I'd buy cds sometimes because they looked cool; it was a gamble and it cost me money and sometimes it didn't pay off. But sometimes it did. I also started picking up music magazines to try and discover new bands. My tastes were all over the place. In my late teens I even got into that old rock my parents were into because we listened to Q107 at work.

At some point in my teenage years two pieces of technology changed everything: the iPod and Napster. My hunting for music shifted from magazines and stores to the computer. Music blogs became my source for recommendations and then I would track those songs down and fill my iPod with them. There was nothing between me and the endless consumption of new music (other than copyright laws and the shutting down of piracy sites). But there was very little friction. I could hear about a band, download that band, and listen to that band. Then move on to the next band. And there was no shortage of new music to discover. During this time, new bands were popping up constantly and it honestly got hard keeping up with them all. You'd have a current obsession but easily forget what you listened to last week. This wasn't inherently a bad thing, but it fundamentally changed how we would experience music.

I want to note two things here: 1) my relationship with music began to change at the same time society's relationship to media began to change; and 2) I was well past childhood or adolescent development when these shifts took place. I think this matters.

I'd also like to acknowledge that I think the iPod was a really great example of technology moving us in the right direction. It solved a legitimate problem: how to carry around a larger collection of music. But with that move came new problems. When the metric become convenience, we started to embrace other conveniences as well. Like, what if it could do more than just play music? [As an aside, the other issue I have with the iPod was the way it walked us into the normalization of walled gardens in how we experience media. I wrote about that a bit here.]

In my late 20s I started collecting vinyl. It was a return to how I used to experience music. Something less instant and more tangible. I think that's what the vinyl resurgence was all about. We can argue that there's something purer about vinyl or it sounding better or whatever; but really it was mostly people like me remembering what they loved about listening to music before the internet took it from us. I still collect vinyl for this reason. The friction is part of the experience. As the meme goes, "the two things that really drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience."

All of this leads me to what I said yesterday about buying my kids dedicated music players and getting them off of Apple Music. I'm trying to find a way to give them the ingredients necessary to nurture a relationship with music during their formative years. It involves creating the right amount of friction to slow them down just enough to appreciate the music they're choosing to listen to right now.

I know our kids live in a different world than we grew up in. It would be ridiculous to insist that they experience everything the exact same way that we did. But I want to believe there's a healthy middle ground. One that doesn't just give in and hand our kids a smartphone because it's the easiest option. I believe friction is a good thing; and just maybe it’s better for kids to not instantly have access to whatever they want without a little bit of work and patience.