For a musician, I sure haven’t been listening to much music lately.
I realized this when my brother asked me last week if I’ve heard anything good lately. Nothing came into my mind at the moment, and I realized I haven’t been much of a music consumer for the last two years or so. It’s been even longer since I’ve been a regular concert-goer.
Most of my music consumption stopped when we unsubscribed from Rhapsody To Go. Rhapsody was a great service, and I found a lot of new music that way. With the subscription service, I was able to load tons and tons of music onto my mp3 player and find new music ever week. When we stopped our subscription, we lost not only the ability to find new music but also the library of music that had become favorites.
We still had (and have) lots of mp3s ripped from our CD collection, but most of those songs were from our pre-Rhapsody days. And to put the nail in the playlist coffin, the computer that acted as our media storage and server recently died a violent death.
There’s still Pandora, of course. The streaming radio service is my main outlet for music now. I mostly use it for background noise or to entertain Ian, but lately I’ve been trying to release my inner music-lover and find some new tunes. I currently have a channel called “Random New Music,” to which I add artists whenever a Twitter buddy mentions going to a concert or buying an album (thanks for the recommendations, Ashley, Aaron, Christy F, Annie, Hutchmo, et al).
I’m also trying to watch for Amazon’s free and super-cheap mp3s to bring our permanent collection to a respectable state.
It’s funny, but when I think about my listening habits, I think I feel a type of performance anxiety. I mean, I’m a musician and was a music major. My music listening should be the center of my life, right? But it’s not. I do seem to be much happier with a good dose of music in my life, though, so I’m looking at my music listening resurgence as a way to take care of myself during a difficult time.
