Watched an interesting YouTube video series by Digging The Greats. Queue obvious joke about the juxtaposition about watching YouTube about digital minimalism/detoxing…
One of the things that stuck in my mind is the discussion about “the algorithm”. (Let’s save the discussion about the fact that it’s not algorithms for another time).
When the algorithm is allowed to take over your feed it will eventually coalesce recommendations into the least common denominator of what is generally considered “good”. It will push you along giving personalized recommendations tailored to both your starting sense of “good” based on your manual listening when you first signed up and now also influenced by it’s own recommendations over time.
This can lead to something that I had not thought about. Not being exposed to bad things will eventually kill individual taste. Taste is built in the resistance between things experienced as good and bad.
Exposing yourself to things that are both good and not good is what builds taste. If Spotify algo was left alone it would only recommend the most common popular things after a while.
Going on this journey of deciding what is good and what is bad is a critical part of building a collection. My stuff. Curated by me, not containing everything in the world but things that matter to me somehow.
The act of building a collection makes us more invested into things. Listening to 10 seconds of a song and skipping ahead to the next one if it doesn’t “slap” vs listening to a mediocre album 10 times all the way through because you paid for it will probably yield very different results in the long run. It might take 10 listens to an album before it actually “clicks”.
Now I have recently gotten really into Vinyl and the above discussion plays a bigger role than the “digital vs vinyl sound”-debate. Besides having the physical media and all that comes with that I’m also musing on whether or not to start paying for digital downloads or collect CDs. Collect CDs and play them one by one to get that Vinyl resistance of having to physically do things like switch the CD, acquire the CD etc.? No, at the moment CD just doesn’t do it for me. Another alternative is to buy CDs and rip to lossless and then play via my Roon setup.
Or skip the physical media all together and buy digital downloads on Bandcamp or similar - that should pay the most to the artists while giving me some form of “artifact” that can be “stored”.
The most obvious answer is to just stream it from the platform that pays the most to the artists. But I don’t really want to, I want to build my collection.
Well see, I’ll keep thinking about it.