I listen to a lot of music. Today I spent the day listening to someone’s Summer 2019 playlist on Spotify. I’ve never met this person, but they had shared their playlist on their website.
The playlist was a combination of music I already love and a bunch of stuff I’d never heard before, but have since saved to my playlist. I remember the first cassettes I got. They were Hanson’s Middle of Nowhere and Shaggy’s Boombastic. A few years later my dad took me to a large CD sale in a local stadium and I bought my first CD was Savage Garden’s self-titled album.
Life doesn’t suck…
because I have almost unlimited access to music.
I had a mini system with detachable speakers that I detached because I could. I played my tapes and CDs over and over again. Around the year 2000 Napster became a thing. I downloaded Learn to Fly by the Foo Fighters on Mum and Dad’s dial-up internet connection. It took something like thirty minutes to download a single song. I then had to find something to play my new mp3 with. This came in the form of Winamp, with the catchphrase “It really kicks the llama’s ass”.
I downloaded a pretty decent collection of MP3s during my high school years. During my teenage years, I got an iPod classic with the small black and white screen and click wheel. I loaded this up with my MP3 collection and relied on that for many years, before moving onto a Pioneer CD player in my car with a USB input. I loaded USB thumb drives up with folders and folders of MP3s and drove around with all my music available via USB.
When I got my first iPhone I started using this to play my music using iTunes, eventually, I moved to Spotify and now have the ability to stream any music I want from the service and download songs I like to my phone and have them available offline whenever I want them.
Different songs spark different memories for me and I can feel the happiness when I hear specific songs. It’s amazing the collection of music I have built and the phases I can plot by looking at what music I was listening to at that stage.
Music is a huge part of my life and I am really grateful that someone else’s art can give me so much enjoyment.
Current gratitude streak: 22 days
Did you miss my post from yesterday? Read it here Gratitude, Day 21: I’m grateful for my family.