One of my most distinct boarding school memories was encountering CD library of my math teacher. The collection took up the entirely of a wall in his house, floor-to-ceiling shelves that spanned some 15 feet across.
How many CDs did he own? He had no idea. But that’s not to say that the collection had gotten away from him, or was in any sense overlooked. To the contrary, he had subjected the collection to rigorous organization, grouping albums by genre, era, and even geography. I was in awe.
Over the next few years, I made reasonable strides in growing my own CD collection, getting to somewhere over 100 CDs. But by the time I went to college—lugging a sizable selection of those CDs with me in a big shoe box—the streaming was upon us. Come junior year, I was an acolyte of Spotify (I recall, somewhat shamefully, recruiting friends to sign up) and the idea of a CD collection seemed laughable, old fogey-ish.
Cut to ten years later, my wife and I have three separate bookcases for the hundreds of books that we (mainly me) own, which I’ve organized with a touch of lunacy: history books proceeding chronologically, based on the era of their topic; fiction alphabetical; business books by topic (e.g. advertising), etc.
But no music—no CDs, no vinyl, no cassettes. (Heck, I have more books about music than actual albums of music.)
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My music—if I can even append the possessive my to it—lives exclusively on Spotify. If Spotify disappeared tomorrow, I would be devastated. The entire record of my last decade of music listening—dozens upon dozens of curated playlists and thousands of “saved” songs—would vanish.
Spotify serves as a digital record of my personal music listening history. My playlists and saved songs allow me to travel back through time and revisit, for example, the music I was listening to seven years. Cuing up an old playlist can transport me back to a wildly specific moment—waiting for the 2/3 on the unloved Franklin Avenue subway platform in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Spotify enables this Proustian recall, acting as a digital ledger for my musical transactions.
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Recently, I’ve been thinking: wouldn’t it be nice if that “digital ledger” were physical? If, in other words, I had a library to peruse? The past year gave me plenty of time to comb through old playlists (some of them from my iTunes days!) and rack my brain for old favorites. I turned up plenty of albums that were favorites from years ago—including Ambulance LTD’s self-titlted debut, Oasis’s Be Here Now, and Sara Bareilles’s Little Voice. I even owned a CD of the last one!
These were all albums that I loved, but once the initial blush of infatuation passed, they fell out of my mind and into digital oblivion. Without a physical record, they effectively vanished. When I finish a book (that I own, of course), it goes back onto the shelf, spine out—effectively begging to be picked up again. Not so for the once-loved collection of bits that is an album on Spotify.
Taylor Coe 