There’s always at least one hour of my day, if not six or seven, that is accompanied with uninterrupted music blasting from my phone, headphones, speaker or TV.
I confess, I regard myself as a better listener than others. This is because I listen to music in the same way I read a book.
For me, the changing of titles from track to track is like turning the page and reaching a new chapter.
I guess I should preface that I don’t listen to all my music "left to right," but when in the mood, I’ll fill my commute to work, hour of doing laundry on Sunday or minutes of waiting for my air fryer to cook my Trader Joe's Orange Chicken by listening — front to back — to an album.
Now, listening to whole albums is almost a lost art. In many ways, we can attribute the death of this experience to Spotify and other streaming tycoons. These platforms emphasize clips, skips and quick cuts; nothing is to be listened to in full anymore.
To me, this is like skipping a chapter or even the climax of the novel. If I were to be reading “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” it’d be a crime to my understanding and appreciation of the books to entirely skip when (spoiler alert) Cedric Diggory dies, or when Voldemort returns.
For me, looking in a non-literary way, there were so many songs I realized I loved that were lost in the system of skips I’d been sucked into.
The overwhelming takeover of streaming has its obvious pros, but its cons are a little more hidden. Less popular songs routinely get less attention in a self-feeding cycle. If I don’t feel my curiosity piqued by a song title or it has low marks of listens, I’m just never going to choose to blast it over something popular that I already know I love.
Listening to a whole album helped me realize how much I love the song “Still Sane” by Lorde, which I never would’ve just chosen over the amazing, Billboard-charting “Royals,” which comes a few tracks before.
