Tuesday 26th August 2025
I've had a bit of a revelation re: my music collection. My trajectory with music collection is as follows; started off as a kid with a walkman and cassette tapes. My parents had a big HiFi with two cassette decks, and I would raid their collection to make my own mixtapes. There were definitely some interesting combinations - I'm fairly sure at one point I made a mix which involved Britney Spears and one of my parents' David Bowie tapes. I'd spend ages making my own cover art for them - it was good fun.
Later, I upgraded to a portable CD player, which was good, but I remember being a bit annoyed that if I jostled it around too much it would skip a bit, which never happened with cassettes. One of my childhood friends had a minidisc collection which I was fascinated by, but minidisc passed me by and I never had much to do with them outside of listening to them at my friend's house.
My first CD was 'Electric Avenue' by Eddy Grant - I was absolutely obsessed with that CD. It's probably still at my parents' house and I'm going to make a point of trying to find it next time I visit. 
From then on my CD collection grew steadily - I'd go to HMV after school and see what they had, I remember they used to do a good 3 for 2 offer. Not long after that I got my first iPod - the original nano, for Christmas - and I ripped the CDs to that, as well as collecting a load of MP3s which I painstakingly found the album art for and manually added the genre and other details, to keep my iTunes library was nice and organised.
As my collection grew and I ran out of space on my nano, I had various different MP3 players but eventually settled on an iPod touch 4th gen 32gb - I LOVED that thing, it went with me everywhere, and it was such an exciting thing to own - I used it in combination with my blackberry for ages. It was retired once I got my first real smartphone, a Samsung J5 in gold - that's when my use of Spotify began.
At first, streaming seemed amazing - I could think of pretty much anything I wanted to listen to and there it was, immediately - no need to go to a physical shop for a CD, or to pay for it on iTunes, or go through the whole youtube-to-MP3 rigmarole. That brings us to the present day - I've been streaming music for about ten years now. I didn't really think too much about it until recently, when I found my iPod nano 7th generation in a box in my wardrobe. I got it because my original nano was one of the 2005/2006 editions which was replaced by apple for free with a 7th gen nano due to battery overheating issues.
At the time, I got the replacement nano and didn't think much of it - I was pretty set on streaming by that point - so it's sat unused for years. Recently, in an attempt to 'digital detox' or whatever you want to call it, I've been looking for ways to reduce the amount of time I spend on my phone. I've already got rid of social media which has been a huge plus, but I realised that by being reliant on spotify for streaming music, I'm still on my phone way more than I'd like to be. It's too easy to unlock the phone to choose a new song, then get drawn into notifications, or the web browser, and end up wasting time.
I watched a couple of videos about physical media, supporting artists by buying their music on CD or through bandcamp, etc, and realised - that's what I want to do! I've started by buying music from artists I love on bandcamp, and importing the files to my iPod. I have an external CD drive, and my plan is to check out second-hand shops for older CDs, and buy CDs of new releases. By doing it this way, my music collection will actually belong to me - I won't be at the mercy of a streaming service that could decide to delete my music whenever they feel like it. And of course, I'll be directly supporting artists, something which is very important to me.
Other reasons for CD-collecting include; I just love collecting things I'm passionate about, CD audio is much better quality than streaming, I can make my own mixes again, I can back up my collection, my car's got a CD player, so I can play music even when I'm driving around in the middle of nowhere and there's no reception...etc etc.
There's something magical about physical media. The ritual of finding what you want to listen to, admiring the cover art, reading the insert and appreciating the photos and lyrics, playing the full album without skipping - experiencing the songs in the order the artist intended, the feeling of satisfaction in watching your collection grow. It's a much more intentional, mindful form of listening to music - one I didn't realise I missed so much, until I rediscovered my iPod nano.