Tuesday, October 6th, 2026

Yesterday, I ended up going down a rabbit hole related to music listening. It all started with my goal to get a good bit of music onto my motorcycle GPS device, which happens to be an Android tablet. Since, like most of the world, we have long ago moved over to music streaming, I need to select which music is downloaded onto this device to keep it mostly offline and limit my use of my eSIM. This all seems pretty normal, but the whole process of looking at more and more playlists that were autogenerated by Apple Music made me long for the days of album collecting.

I feel like I’m in a music-related version of a time travel movie where a future version of yourself comes back to tell you something. If my future self had told my younger self, with his two-to-three hundred CDs, that one day he could have all the world’s music for the cost of less than one CD per month, I would have thought it was the greatest thing ever. And there are major benefits to music streaming. When I hear about a new-to-me artist that I want to check out, their music is usually just a few clicks away. No driving to the mall, hoping the record store has what I am looking for. Even during the age of music piracy, you still needed to go out and try to find the tracks you wanted, wondering if they were of good quality, etc.

But now, after years of living with music streaming services making listening to music so easy, it seems that this ease has made the experience less enjoyable. The collection and research into the artist—who they were influenced by, where they are from—seems to all be in the past. And I find myself listening to the same music over and over again since the algorithms know I like it. But it has made me dislike it. Not that the artists are worse somehow. It is just missing the decision step that pushes you to select a specific album because that is the mood you are in right now. With a near-infinite list of possible artists you could listen to at any given point, the decision fatigue usually means you just fall back to the same artists, or worse, let the system select music for you.

This is that point when I would normally go deep in the other direction. Start buying vinyl or something. Build back my album collection, likely to a point that was much greater than I ever had back in the day. The major constraint that is keeping me from going off that deep end is I know we won’t be home for at least two years. A vinyl or even a CD collection isn’t going to work well while traveling by motorcycle. No, digital music is a major advancement for mobile listening. And although I could just go out and start to buy music in digital forms from the artists I want to listen to—and I likely will for some newer bands—I think the main thing I need to change right now is to resist the algorithms. I need to get back to discovering music and listening to whole albums, not on shuffle or on some type of autoplay generated list based on the music tastes the computers believe I will like. Pick an album, and sit with it all the way through.

The trip through the South we are leaving on in a couple of weeks is going to be a great chance to get back to this. Finding local artists along our route, or music that really resonates with a place, and adding that to the soundtrack of my ride. Trying some music that I would normally pass up, sitting with it, and really trying to absorb what the artist is trying to say. You can’t get that from letting the algorithm select the next track.

I think there is something about how we keep letting technology make things “better” for us, while not realizing that we are losing something in the process.