More and more, with each passing day I am rethinking my priorities in audio.
The 'listening experience' is eroding in value, lost in the choice of a thousand tracks at your fingertips where you, the poor soul after hard day's work want to listen to just 3 and rejuvenate yourself. It happened a while back with the myriad of streaming services for visual content, you keep scrolling, and after 15 minutes just give up, bemused and tired. With just 3 channels on TV, we were content, did not have the scope of complaining there is nothing to watch.
Piracy is booming again, people have caught up or are catching up to the myth of endless choices and opulence. It was great, fantastic, to take out a DVD and dedicate the coming 2 hours to an experience. An experience where you wished to learn, challenge your thought process, and most importantly, you enjoyed what you intended to enjoy perhaps since yesterday or weeks before. The 'intent' of enjoying one's time had meaning, we watched pirated copies of films we could not afford during our college days, a new horizon was discovered when you could watch movies from different lands and in outlandish languages. Today it all feels like an exercise in futility.
God knows I know now and feel to the core how less is always more.
I curate lists on IMDB and then hunt for one of the items on the list, meticulous searches yield that the content is not available even though all the big tech giants promise it is. Then I sigh and turn off the TV, an younger me would have cursed few choices words, now me has lost that energy.
Audio is going the same way, I dread the fact that it is there already. Can not give up on music, the generation to which I belong, grew up sharing content on CDs and DVDs and accumulated vast libraries. Yes, all of them pirated. You did not have much money after books and movies and cigarettes in college, so you relied on generous seniors and a shared library.
In later days like everyone else, I bought physical media, CDs to be precise. I want my library, my own library and not someone else at the other side of the world who's listening taste is similar to mine. I am putting my flag down, I claim my library as my own.
I am going to invest in a good NAS system, have my library as my own, stream in lossless or even in crap quality, my choice. I will be happier with a library of 500 rather than be lost and be another in 55 million.
Spotify lossless, lets hope that it will be fantastic. I have upgraded to Platinum, will keep the subscription to discover new music but I am going to stop relying on streaming content for my enjoyment.
techcrunch.com
