Meet your Average Millennial

The journey is usually the part that you remember anyways

I’ve been planning and formulating this blog in my head for several years at this point, but adulting has just been way too crazy.  If you think you don’t have any time for yourself, might I suggest having two children?  Then you’ll realize how much free time you actually did have back when you thought you were “too busy.”  It’s amazing how much time you can find for yourself when you’re forced to contend with two tiny humans who do actually need you for 98% of the day.  But nobody wants to hear about them, we’re here for the music.

My iTunes library (when it exists long enough for me to pull it out of the depths of my old external hard drive) has 7,538 songs which is apparently enough music to last 19 days straight.  I haven’t added a single song to my library since October of 2017 when I officially gave up downloading music and switched to using Spotify, which was extremely tough for me.  It wasn’t just the music I was obsessed with- it was also cataloguing, sorting, and charting play counts.  Scouring the charts for new things to add to my collection.  Researching and learning everything I could about the artists and why they wrote the songs they did.  My iTunes library and my old iPod classic were my pride and joy.  And then when the website I used to illegally download music from went down, I didn’t know where to turn to stock my collection. (Sorry artists, how in the world would I have been able to pay for that many albums as a teenager?  My iTunes says I have 1,841 albums, which some of those I don’t have the full album, just one or two songs, but still- 1,841 x $15 per album=$27,615 which is just about as much as my students loans started at).  I bought a few songs and albums but then finally gave in to Spotify because my husband (then boyfriend) wanted to get an account.

Over time, I’ve come to enjoy Spotify but I think that’s because the way I consume music has completely changed as well.  I no longer catalog and chart play counts because I can’t.  None of the music is “mine”.  I can search for anything and it will pop up.  I listen to my Discover Weekly and all of the songs are nice enough, but I hardly ever find one I actually love enough to want to listen over and over again, research the artist, listen to all their other songs, etc.  The only things that I’ve really fallen in love with lately have been new work from artists I already liked and listened to and researched in my past music life.  Is this how all our parents ended up listening to only the music they grew up with?  They just got too busy to find new stuff and then decided to stop trying and just listen to what they already knew?  My iPod classic will never die (right?!) so I should just keep using that and give up adding any new songs to my collection.

When I originally typed draft one of this post it said “last year I read this article,” but at this point it has been several years and I had to re-read it to confirm my thoughts. It did not disappoint- Maybe I wasn’t and am still not the only one going through this weird reprogramming of how I consume music.

https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2018/01/16/578216674/too-much-music-a-failed-experiment-in-dedicated-listening

The way the author talks about poring over music is exactly what I did.  I thought I was the only weird one so it’s great to know other people went down the rabbit hole as much as I did.  It also made me realize that my consumption also changed when I went from CDs to iTunes, though not as drastically.  I used to listen to the CD all the way through, in order, every single time.  I knew every song on each album as well as the order. But then when iTunes happened it started to become harder to listen to them all and really dive into each song.  They started to run together.  I would turn iTunes on in the background and it was just a stream of consciousness from an artist, it was harder to focus on each individual song and what it was saying.  I used to add songs one by one, only putting the next one into iTunes when I had fully enjoyed and grasped the previous song.

I agree with him at the end- why deprive ourselves of alllll of this music when it’s so easily accessible and ready for us to listen?  But I do miss actually loving the songs instead of them just being background noise.  So maybe he’s right and it’s all nostalgia.  But I want to find out for myself, hence this blog.  I’m going to attempt his experiment but tweak the rules a little bit.  I’m going to do one album at a time but instead of imposing the week timeframe, I’m just going to listen to it as many times as I can stand.  I want to know if I can get sucked in and obsessed with albums as much as I did as a kid or if their magic has worn off.  I’m going to write my thoughts about each album and compare my review now with my childhood thoughts.  And I’m going to do it in the same order that I originally listened to them.

When the Jonas Brothers got back together a few years ago I could not contain my excitement.  Of course I signed up for the verified fan pre-sale and secured awesome seats to one of their concerts, and then found out the ticket purchase included a physical copy of the CD that would be mailed to me.  I ordered one because, why not? But then I thought about what in the world I would do with that CD when it came.  Keep it in my car I guess (since at that time my car still had a CD player)?  And when it did arrive I ripped it open because I was so excited to dig into that lyric book except…there were no lyrics.  It was just pictures and then all the credits for each song but not a single lyric.  Well, no wonder nobody buys CDs anymore.

Follow along with this journey by subscribing! And I’d love to hear your guesses of who I’ll be listening to first for next week’s post!

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