Listening to music
Over the last few years my music-listening habits have changed significantly. My family pays for Apple Music and has done so for years, but recently I started collecting some music of my own.
The first thing I ever got on Bandcamp was some Graham Kartna music. Specifically, An Obsession With Kit and .temp. I discovered Graham from the Soundodger 2 level for Chiltonwalk.Temp and decided to buy the album because I thought the music was really neat and wanted to use it in videos (with permission from Graham). That was more or less it for a while: I would buy some music I thought was neat to support the artists, but still used Apple Music for most of my actual listening. This changed last year though.
Mp3 players are neat, and I do own an iPod Video, but it's really old and ifixit refuses to ship batteries to Canada so I never really got much time to actually use it. I'm very against setting myself up for a life of subscription services, so I decided to get an mp3 player that I can load my mp3 files onto directly. (I also lost my wireless earbuds in another country and didn't want to buy new ones.) The one I ended up going with is the FiiO Echo Mini, because it looks cool. I would have gotten the full Echo if it existed back then, but the Mini is still pretty nice. I've used it a lot over the last year, and this is what really started to change my listening habits. For one thing, the Echo Mini doesn't have playlists. You can sort music by album, artist, genre if your music is tagged right (mine is not), favourites, or a file view that I suppose you could use like playlists, but there isn't an actual "playlist" feature. I don't mind this because what I've found is I tend to just listen to albums from start to end now. There's a joke in hit MTV classic show Zach Stone is Gonna be Famous where he starts a band that only makes ringtones because people don't want to listen to their favourite songs anymore, just their favourite parts. I was gonna talk about how this relates to people going from albums to playlists of just their favourite songs but that's literally the joke in the show and I just wanted to talk about Zach Stone for a moment there. Overall I've really enjoyed just listening to albums through. It turns out there's a reason those songs are bundled together!
I've also noticed that I just generally feel more free to listen to whatever. When you listen to music on Apple Music your listening is shared with your friends and family members, which made me moderate what I listened to in order to fit their preferences and not appear "weird". This is a problem because I AM weird! I listen to Graham Kartna!! I also dropped Last.fm, partially because the Echo Mini doesn't make a listening log you can scrobble, which lets me more freely listen to other mediums like vinyl or rip CDs I own without the fear of missing something there.
That said, there are absolutely downsides to this. For one, I need to buy music to be able to listen to it. I mean, Bandcamp does allow you to stream music you don't own a few times before prompting you to pay, but I have to go out of my way to buy the music I want to listen to, which could also be a plus to some degree. More intentional listening or whatever. There's also a good amount of music that's just not on Bandcamp because the artist or label isn't aware of it or refuses to publish there. An alternative platform with a download store is Qobuz, which tends to have a lot of the stuff that's not on Bandcamp because publishing there kinda just happens as part of the process of publishing to other streaming services, but it's still not perfect. I tend to go there when I can't find something on Bandcamp and 9 times out of 10 they do have what I'm looking for though. I still prefer Bandcamp first because the artist is more directly profiting off of it.
All in all though, I am very happy with my mp3 player. I think it's a good step in decentralizing and moving away from my smartphone to some degree, I save a lot of money not needing to buy wireless earbuds, and I can redirect any subscription money towards just buying a few albums. It also seems like a pretty good time to get into mp3 players with companies like FiiO and Hidiz creating a whole bunch of dedicated non-android players (and Android ones as well). Technically my car is an mp3 player too since it can read audio files off of a USB drive lol. It's definitely not for everyone, but I've enjoyed this so far and don't see that stopping anytime soon.