What We’re Listening To
When we have free time, the stereo goes on. Not streaming, not playlists, but CDs. We don’t listen to them because it’s trendy or because we’re clinging to nostalgia. We listen to them because when we buy a CD, we own it. The music doesn’t vanish if a subscription ends. The money goes straight to the artist instead of being shaved down to fractions of a cent. And the album sits on our shelf where we can pull it down and hear it the way it was made.
Part of it is the process. We walk to the shelf, pick out a CD, and put it in the player. It requires presence. It’s different from hitting play on a playlist created by someone who doesn’t know you and never will, designed to match a mood you didn’t even choose. And unlike streaming, no licensing dispute or contract fight can make our library vanish overnight.
The subscription economy sells the opposite. It convinces you that access is ownership, that renting everything forever is easier than holding something in your hand. But access can be shut off. Prices go up, catalogs shift, and the art you thought was yours disappears behind another paywall. A CD doesn’t ask for a monthly fee. You pay once, it’s yours, and it will still be on the shelf long after the subscription model has moved on to its next product.
Listening to music this way slows everything down. Instead of skipping around or letting an algorithm decide, we sit with an album from beginning to end. Sometimes that means hearing tracks we might have skipped if we were streaming. Those songs often end up becoming the ones that stick, because they weren’t written to be singles, they were written to be part of a whole.
Right now we’re listening to Even in Arcadia, the new album from Sleep Token, and Blue Öyster Cult’s Greatest Hits. One is a full record that builds song by song, the other is a collection that never gets old no matter where you start. Both belong on the shelf, ready to play whenever we want.
There’s also something about holding the case, flipping through the insert, and seeing the art and lyrics printed in your hands. You don’t scroll past it, you engage with it. It feels real. A CD is something you can pass to a friend, or put back on the shelf and know it will be there years from now.
It’s a different kind of experience when music comes from an album, not a stream. It isn’t background noise while you scroll or work on something else. It asks you to slow down and actually listen.
When was the last time you listened to an album in its entirety? What are you listening to? Is it just sound in the background, or something you sit with and actually hear?