Hello, friends! I happened to catch Joe Brockmeier's 78th favorite album on Twitter yesterday. It occurred to me that even though I've seen Journey in concert, I haven't listened to many albums. I have Escape on CD somewhere, but I think that's it for their actual albums. When I was 16 or 17, I joined the Columbia House CD Club (Gen Z, ask your parents). I got a lot of "Greatest Hits" albums with the initial purchase, since I knew what bands I liked, but I didn't know much about their catalog. As a result, a lot of my music has been driven by greatest hits and the even-narrower playlists of classic rock stations.
So while much of our current technological landscape sucks out loud, the music sites have been a big boon. In the late aughts, I had Pandora on pretty much constantly at work (I even found a command line client that I kept running in a screen session and would occasionally forget to pause). That helped me branch out from the music I knew I liked to music I found out that I liked. And the best part was that it was essentially free. I didn't have to drop $12 for a CD in the hopes that I liked it. I could try stuff and then go buy what I liked. I think I bought more CDs per year after I started listening to streaming music than before.
The down side is that my listening has become very...short-attention-spanned. I use the skip button way more than I ever used to because there's an infinite pool of music waiting for me. But every once in a while, like today, I'll sit down and listen to an album in its entirety. And it's a nice change of pace.
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