Slow music

This is not about music played at a slow tempo. This is about how we consume music.

Modern music is too fast. Like much of the world we’ve created and became intoxicated with we took it too far. Everything, even ideas, are mass produced disposable plastic crap. Streaming has made it so that as long as you pay your $10 a month you get to hear the latest release every Friday, press that button to add it to your library, then never listen to it again after a while.

Don’t forget that the way we consume most media these days drains your wallet and leaves you with nothing should you decide to stop paying. From streaming TV and movies to the movies you “bought” from your cable provider, all the way to your music. If you don’t pay it’s all gone. Switch providers? Gone. Sometimes they just take things away from you for no reason and there’s nothing you can do about it because you had to accept the terms of service.

The hunger

People are getting tired of the situation and it looks like we’re at the start of a backlash against it. I took to buying tapes and old Walkman’s some years back, I have a small vinyl collection, and I never got rid of my old CDs from when I was a kid. Now we’re seeing people restoring iPods so they can hold their entire music collection that they care about.

People have a hunger for things that are real, with craftsmanship, something that speaks to them. It’s great that we have whole computers in our pocket but the novelty has worn off and we’re all asking whether we really need to be using them as much as we do. Our faces are buried in these screens all day long. Our attention is on everything always except what’s right in front of us. Distraction is normal but the level of it we have now is like obesity of the mind. Just truly unhealthy.

How to slow down and why

I’m no Luddite. I love my phone but hate what it’s done to me. I don’t have the solution to how to fix phone addiction but I do know it’s time to start paying attention to one thing at a time. All that talk of mindfulness that we hear about might be useful.

When it comes to music we luckily still have options for how to enjoy it. Each has its place so here’s how I think of it.

Streaming

Streaming won’t go away and I’m not going to stop using it. I have stopped paying for subscriptions I didn’t really need like the Netflix account I used once every other month and Amazon Prime (you’d be amazed at how little you really need delivered and how waiting an extra day or two doesn’t hurt).

But for music, I won’t stop paying for Apple Music. It has its uses like being able to preview the entirety of a whole album before buying it. I mostly use it as a music discovery service and I keep my library full of what I own physically plus the stuff that I don’t like enough to buy any copy of.

Digital files

Digital files to me are the songs that are important enough for me to keep a lossless copy of on my own hard drive but maybe not important enough to buy. Or maybe I’ve bought the record and want a digital backup in case the physical copy gets messed up. It’s a time consuming process at first but once you have everything digitized you spend 20 minutes per new album you buy to keep it up to date. I even got an old iPod like I used to have in college to store all my music.

CD, cassette, vinyl

Physical media is something I buy for the music I cherish most. Sometimes I’ll put it in a portable CD player or Walkman while commuting but the real joy of it is in the experience. CDs are close to digital so the experience isn’t much different but with a cassette you pretty much have to play it all the way through unless you want to fast forward and search for the start of any given track. The vinyl experience is something I cherish most. I don’t care that the sound quality is objectively worse than any other medium. I put a record on, always listen to it out loud, and sit in a room with the music. Sometimes it’ll be background music while I read.

Physical media forces you to slow down and engage with the music, even if it is just at first. Often times those first moments are enough to drive some momentum and get you to be present for the experience. You may decide to sit back and listen instead of opening 50 browser tabs and scroll your shitter feed.

I’m deciding to slow down. I’m consciously aware of my decision. That doesn’t mean I’m in some zen Buddhist state of mind all the time. I’ll get distracted on my phone and act ADHD like everyone else but I’ll be doing it less and enjoying learning how to be present like I knew how to do when I was a young, before we opened our wallets and minds to the greedy, attention robbing services we have now that we traded in what matters to us for just a little more convenience than we used to have.