I miss having a dedicated device for music. When I was younger my iPod Nano followed me everywhere I went. It would accompany me on road trips, field trips, and throughout my day-to-day life. It felt like there was always something great to listen to on there, and I never tired of my library. What’s more, it’s not like I was able to carry around thousands and thousands of songs. Today, we’re spoiled for storage space, but back then every megabyte was critical. Most iPods and other personal media players had 4GB of storage, if you were lucky (unless you were rich enough for an iPod Classic, which I certainly was not). You had to be picky. Only the best music was good enough.
1000 songs in your pocket. That was the promise. And wow, did it deliver — as long as you were okay with highly compressed 128kbps MP3s. Which, as it turns out, I was — at least until I knew better.
Fast-forward to today, and I often find my music library stale. I have nearly quadruple the number of songs I had in middle school: four thousands songs in my pocket. I’m not sure that having that many songs is really a net-positive. The truth is that there is a lot of filler in there. In theory everything that has been added is something I enjoy, but mediocre albums filled with duds in between one or two hits take up a lot of the space, not to mention all music I’ve outgrown.
Over the past month or so I’ve started deleting music with reckless abandon. It turns out that you have to be ruthless about getting rid of things that don’t add value to your life not only in the physical space, but the digital as well. That Ed Sheeran album you liked briefly for two minutes back in 2018? Kill it. Those Fall Out Boy albums that were kind of OK in middle school but are a chore to get through now? Gone. That one Panic! at the Disco album that everybody thought was amazing but really only had like one and a half listenable songs on it? Chucked out the window, metaphorically speaking.
Now, with a few hundred fewer tracks (and more still to follow), I’m finding real joy in my library again. I’m foolish enough to press the shuffle button and let fate select tracks from my entire library at random, and there have been much fewer skips than normal. And as another benefit, hidden gems that I had forgotten about that rarely came up on shuffle before now seem to be finding their way to my ears. What a pleasure!
That’s not to say you should get rid of all your music, but pruning the stuff you outgrow, or the songs that never really sparked your interest much in the first place, makes the rest of the music stand out even more. I’m fortunate to be in a place where I can finally have as much music as I want with me no matter where I am or what device I’m using. The hard part is deciding what to leave out to make a library that I truly, truly love. Just like the good old days.