Returning to owning things in a streaming world

There have been various blog posts and social media posts in the last couple of years about people rejecting streaming services and going back to buying music, listening on handheld devices that - gasp - aren't phones. Vinyl's bigger than it's been for years. Multiple colleagues have shown me their CD collections - even cassettes have made a comeback, which makes me wish I still had the incredible glow-in-the-dark Sony Beans walkman I had as a child. I like that some people catalogue their music online, like Hidde and Andy, though I'm not sure I want to broadcast some of the garbage I listen to, or reveal quite how many times I've listened to the K-Pop Demon Hunters Soundtrack (which is a reason I don't use Last.FM any more).

It occurred to me that everything I have is digital now, and I don’t own any of it. I stream my music from Apple; I borrow books from Libby, or buy them from Kobo (though I do back them up via Calibre); we watch all our TV and films via streaming services. It’s happened before that I’ve been halfway through a series and it’s suddenly disappeared from the service I was watching it on, because the licence expired. I don't really trust these providers not to disappear, or become so freaking evil that I can't in good conscience give them my money.

I sold my entire CD collection to MusicMagpie in the early 10s, having moved entirely to digital music years before. They’d been gathering dust at the back of a cupboard since about 2006. My DVD collection went to CEX, where they rejected half of them for being too shit to sell.

It was around 2013 that I started using Spotify, so my digital music collection has been frozen in time ever since, on an external hard drive languishing in the back of a cupboard. All the albums I’d enjoyed listening to since then, and the songs I’d been obsessed with, were just borrowed. If I cancelled my Apple Music subscription (and I would, if we didn’t have a family Apple One plan) I wouldn’t be able to listen to any of it.

So now I’m on a quest to build it all back. This week I bought back some of those CDs second-hand, and a few newer ones I’d never owned, only streamed.

What makes the cut

I went through my Apple Music library looking for the albums I really wanted to keep, and the ones I didn’t love enough to buy physical copies of (or literally couldn’t find on CD) I bought digitally.

I chose CDs that meant a lot to me - RHCP’s By The Way was the first album I ever bought, Metric is my favourite band and has been for over 15 years, Keane and Tegan and Sara were teenage favourites. The aforementioned external hard drive is still full of bootlegs and B-sides from god knows where that I’d completely forgotten about, but of course I kept them all.

The Organ’s Grab That Gun is brilliant start to finish: I saw them described as "[Debbie Harry] singing The Smiths" - all female, queer, no Morrissey, there’s a Hammond organ. Katie Sketch's entrancing vocals (ngl I fancied her to bits). You may remember them from that one episode of the L Word that one time. I’m still sad they broke up not long after it was released, but I was lucky enough to see them at The Garage in Highbury in 2005.

A handful are just great albums I could see myself putting on and listening to: Franz Ferdinand’s debut (solid gold), Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Show Your Bones and It’s Blitz (I should get Fever To Tell as well), Vampire Weekend’s self titled (memories of Reading Festival 2008, and unrequited crushes on colleagues at my part-time job), Parachutes by Coldplay (when they were really good). On the more recent side, I picked up MUNA’s Dancing On The Wall which I haven’t stopped listening to since it came out, Carly Rae Jepsen’s iconic EMOTION, Paramore’s brilliant After Laughter (wait, what do you mean those two came out a decade ago?).

I 3D printed myself some sleek CD racks for my bookshelf (I’m not ready to embrace the CD towers of the early 00s just yet) and bought a second-hand external CD drive off eBay for about 7 quid (complete with mini-USB port) which works great for ripping CDs. Once I’d stacked them up I got a bit of a warm fuzzy feeling because I owned music I loved, tangibly, in a way I hadn’t for over a decade.

Bandcamp is my first choice for digital downloads, as the artist gets the most money from it. If you buy physical media from there, you also get the digital version, and they offer various encodings including FLAC. More commercial stuff doesn’t tend to be available there, so I also picked up a few tracks off Beatport (though they only price per-track which can work out a lot more expensive). There’s also Qobuz. The iTunes Store still exists, hidden away - you can right click a song in Apple Music and click “Show in iTunes” - I bought a few Metric acoustic session tracks there that I couldn’t find anywhere else.

A Creative Zen to complete the experience?

For listening, I’m still using Apple Music when all I’ve got is my AirPods and my phone, but I’ve bought myself a little mp3 player (a HiBy R1) which has pretty great audio for the price. I was also eyeing up the Fiio Snowsky Disc because look at it, but the Hiby had better reviews. I’ve been having a few problems with Bluetooth being spotty in busy areas - on Reddit the general consensus seems to be “don’t use Bluetooth lol” which isn’t really an option for me - but otherwise, it sounds good and I’m enjoying just focusing on albums again instead of getting distracted on my phone. Plus, I can walk around in central London holding it and not worry that some twat on a Lime bike is going to nick it out of my hand.

I actually have my old iPod Nano Gen 5 (an iconic design!) but the nostalgia died quickly when I tried using the click wheel and it hurt my aging thumbs, and honestly the display is kind of garbage and it doesn’t have Bluetooth. I looked it up and apparently these old Nanos have a reputation for expanding batteries, so I decided to go for something new.

The only thing I don’t have is a hi-fi to play CDs - in fact, the ancient external drive is the only thing we have in the house that can play a CD right now. But the R1 has AirPlay built in (impressively) so I can always beam it to the Sonos for now. But I do miss the physical intention of Putting On A CD, in the same way I miss Going On The Computer.

Will buying CDs and mp3s instead of streaming services drastically change the way I consume music? Maybe, maybe not? I'll probably give things a more considered listen because I have to decide whether to buy albums. I find streaming services already pretty terrible for discoverability of new music, because they algorithmically recommend you things like what you're already listening to, so you miss everything else (Spotify was the worst for this). I've already been listening to some albums I haven't heard for ages, and remembering how much I loved them. But mostly, I'm protecting myself from the whims of big companies, and I'm also putting a bit more money in the pockets of the artists who made the music.