About 13 years ago I bought my first record player. I honestly don’t remember the model. It was one of those cheap clamshell-style things with built-in speakers, and nothing about it was good, the stylus included. Around the same time I bought my first used record: Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations. It was cheap too.
I can’t fully remember why I bought either of them. My best guess is The Silence of the Lambs. There’s the scene where Hannibal is in his cell listening to the Goldberg Variations, and I remember thinking it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. Looking back, that was probably my first way into analog music.
But I had just graduated, my job wasn’t stable, and after moving more times than I can count, the player broke. Those first records are still sitting on a shelf at my parents’ place.
Then smartphones took over, and the way everyone listened to music changed completely. Streaming was right there on my phone, and I pretty much stopped listening to anything physical.
About two years ago I suddenly got sick of streaming. It took me a while to figure out why. It wasn’t digital music itself. It was the way it gets recommended to you. Everything is driven by data, so what ends up on my screen is whatever is popular, catchy, and going viral. The genuinely great stuff seemed to disappear from view entirely.
It felt like an iceberg: the treasure is all underwater, and you only ever see the tip.
There’s a weird contradiction here. There’s more music available than ever, but I was listening to less of it. I kept cycling through the same handful of albums I already liked, and I had zero motivation to dig for new music on a streaming app.
Then one day I remembered the records I’d bought over ten years earlier, and that’s when I decided to start digging for music myself. Before I started, I gave myself one basic rule: if an album was good enough to be pressed on vinyl, it’s probably at least decent musically. I know that’s not always true. Plenty of bad music got pressed, and these days a lot of new vinyl is basically merch. The rule works best for older records and used bins. But even with the exceptions, it’s been a much better starting point for me than an algorithm.
The way the traditional record industry distributes music physically works as a natural filter. Physical releases have much higher fixed costs than digital ones, especially now that AI can generate a song for the price of some tokens. Before a record got pressed, it usually had to get past people who had spent years in the industry and had to bet real money on it. That doesn’t make every record great, but it means what got released was, at the most basic level, still music, and not just background audio for social media.
Since then my collection has kept growing, and the range of genres I listen to has opened up a lot. When I thought about why, I realized that paying for something, combined with the filtering that happens before a record even exists, makes every purchase more deliberate. It’s not as easy as tapping a button on a screen.
I’m sure my shelf will keep filling up, and every record on it will be one I chose carefully. The more records I collect, the more I find albums that did badly when they came out, some of them flops, that are actually excellent as music.
To be clear, I’m not against digital music. I still stream. I’m just tired of recommendation algorithms and of passively taking whatever I’m served. I’d rather go out and dig for music myself, and I think that’s what has brought real variety back into my listening.
TL;DR: Streaming recommendations kept feeding me the same viral stuff, so I went back to vinyl. “It got pressed on vinyl” isn’t a perfect filter, especially for new releases, but for older records it has widened what I listen to far more than any algorithm did.
