Listening More Slowly

Why I've been returning to physical records and tapes

I’ve been enjoying an anachronistic activity lately: Listening to music at home, I’ve been playing CDs and tapes by default.

Look, I’m not a disgruntled Gen X’er stubbornly clinging to analog formats. I was an early adopter of digital music and even worked as a playlist curator for the world’s biggest audio streaming service.

In fact, I used to think of streaming as a perfect proposition for music fans – to have access to an ever-growing catalogue in exchange for an affordable monthly fee.

But I don’t believe in that equation anymore.

And I’m not alone. In fact, I’m late to the party. Younger music fans have been discovering the joys of slow listening for years.

There’s a more general vibe shift happening, a conscious move away from big tech, social media, algorithms and AI. Call it a counterculture if you want.

Sure, streaming remains today’s dominant gateway to music – for the mainstream, that is.

In a vital niche, physical media have been celebrating a resurgence for years. Vinyl sales have been going up constantly, and due to rising costs and pressing shortages, CDs and tapes are now coming back as well.

Isn’t this just a beautiful artifact?

There’s no doubt that streaming is convenient, but I’ve been feeling overwhelmed from having constant access to so much music. It’s similar to that choice fatigue, when we scroll Netflix for what feels like hours, but end up watching an episode of an old familiar series and falling asleep after ten minutes.

Listen, I don’t need access to billions of songs. What I want is a limited, well-curated collection of music I love.

I also realized I don’t want algorithms to curate my experience. I’m a music fan, not just a consumer. I want recommendations from humans I know and trust.

I grew up on actual records. My parents owned a vinyl collection, and I started buying my own records when I was eight or nine years old.

When I was a teenager, the internet was in its infancy and social media non-existent. I got my first mobile phone after my 18th birthday. It couldn’t do anything except calling and texting.

I became a music journalist in my mid-20s, and labels and publicists started sending me free promos. As a magazine editor, I received between 10 and 15 CDs in the mail every single day.

In the early 2000s, I started engaging in some P2P filesharing. I’m not proud of it. I knew it was wrong, but it was so tempting. I still bought loads of records though.

When streaming came along, the idea sounded ridiculously good. All the music in the world at your fingertips, legally? Count me right in, I said.

Getting a streaming subscription and wireless speakers felt practical and liberating at the time. Once I moved apartments in the early 2010s, I got rid of 95% of my physical record and CD collection.

As a digital knowledge worker, I’d embraced a minimalist lifestyle, and with streaming and wi-fi readily available anywhere, you didn’t need to own a stationary hi-fi system or any physical records.

Access trumps ownership, right?

For years, that was my way of thinking.

Until I started questioning my approach, not just because I witnessed the music business become part of the attention economy and art getting degraded to content, but also because I became unhappy with my own listening experience.

It’s hard to describe, but it started to feel a bit hollow. I didn’t experience a deep relationship to the music anymore.

There I was, sitting in front of my computer, connected to the stream, playing music all day while working and reading and browsing, organizing thousands of songs into playlists that were mostly playing on shuffle.

But those weren’t actually my songs. They were just ephemeral, digital sets of data in some storage cloud I didn’t own or control. I paid for access, but that might be revoked at any given time – and it happened. Songs in my playlists suddenly appeared greyed out and weren’t playable anymore. Well, it didn’t matter because there was so much other stuff to listen to, right?

At some point I realized I didn’t want to depend on a global tech company for the supply of my cultural diet, not even one that I formerly worked for.

So I made a decision. From now on, I would be rebuilding my own digital music collection, buying and downloading full albums in lossless quality, neatly organizing the metatags and storing them on my own hard drive and cloud.

But not just that – more recently I decided that for each record I deeply enjoyed in the longer run, I would buy a physical copy as well. I got a set of used hi-fi components and returned to a habit of listening to actual records.

It might sound silly to you, but I didn’t even know what I had been missing.

Do you realize that some of these objects are extremely beautiful? People spend much time and effort on designing sleeves, choosing materials and even hand-crafting limited vinyl, CD or tape runs in special boxes, putting together liner notes and credits. I always loved reading through booklets while listening to music.

I’m also not listening to random single songs anymore. I’m playing albums all the way through, from front to back, as they were envisioned by the artist. As for the standard argument that “most albums just have one or two good songs” – this is mostly uttered by mainstream listeners that just want to hear the big hits.

Sure, it was standard practice of the mainstream music industry that whenever a new pop artist landed a hit, an album had to be assembled quite quickly to satisfy consumer demand. But this whole strand of culture is something that isn’t relevant to actual music fans like us, the artists we listen to and their thoughtful bodies of work.

Lastly, there’s the aspect of sound quality. I get it – if you’re just playing some tunes while doing the dishes, it might not matter much. But if you start to sit down and actually listen (as opposed to just hear), you will realize the difference.

As for which medium has the best quality, it’s a matter of personal taste. I understand why people love vinyl – it’s an aesthetic choice that I respect – but personally I prefer CDs because of their dynamic range. And I just love cassette tapes. Their hiss is ASMR to my Gen X ears.

Even though they’re definitely missing some frequencies in the high register, cassettes are the perfect choice for some styles of music. While I will rather try to get any ECM album on CD, I’ve bought most of the early Sonic Youth catalogue on tape. Many records in the contemporary ‘ambient/experimental’ category get released on cassettes, and it makes sense.

Of course, streaming has its undeniable advantages. It is perfectly convenient, and it probably won’t go anywhere for now.

But I’ve started listening more slowly, returning to a very personal daily practice that usually starts with going through my physical collection and choosing a record carefully. The act of putting on a record alone represents a more deliberate approach than pressing play on a stream.

It’s all about remodeling my music listening into an analog experience, a mindful appreciation of the art instead of mindless lean-back entertainment.