Listening to My Life: Lost in the Shuffle

Illustration by Edward McGowan

For most of my music-consuming life, my collection has had an imposing physical component. I crammed huge racks of CDs into tiny dorm rooms and slightly less-cramped apartments. I scoured furniture stores for storage units that had shelves more than 12 inches deep. And I agonized over what to cull when I needed space for less essential items, like clothing or food. Visiting friends would always comment on the sheer bulk of music in my living space, as though they’d stopped by just to gawk at the alphabetically and chronologically organized spectacle.

Today, my music collection resides in a small grey box just a bit larger than the average jewel case—a hard drive that sits on my desk. Thanks to iTunes’ number-crunching faculties, I know that this box holds about 17,500 individual pieces of music which, if played start to finish, would last me almost 45 days without repeating a single song. No longer do I have to retrench albums in order to properly file new additions. With a single mouse click, I can organize my collection by song title, artist, album, release year, length, or ability to be turned into a ringtone.

But as much as I’ve become used to clicking through my library over the past few months, this transformation of music into something post-physical freaks me out. There was value in music having a physical presence—even those records that you’d only pull out for very specific reasons reminded you of their existence during a routine house-cleaning. Now it’s easy for songs to get lost in the shuffle. The labeling can be faulty; the artist’s name could be in a weird nether-region of the library that you never scroll through. The sheer amount of music acquired with just a few clicks can be overwhelming.

In the old days, pruning my record collection was an elaborate process that would start with struggling to squeeze an ill-fitting jewel case into an unyielding rack and end with a trip to the Princeton Record Exchange, where the “what do I get rid of now?” cycle would inevitably start anew thanks to the store’s copious bargain racks. Now divesting myself of music has been simplified to a keystroke. As music becomes less physical, its whole essence becomes more disposable. When we change our minds about a song, we just download it again.

The flip side: If anything, computer-based listening has made me more aware of sonics. While I’ve augmented my laptop’s tinny speakers with a fairly decent soundsystem, endless discussions of bitrates and audio clipping make me wonder what I’m missing by not hearing my music through a proper multi-component stereo—or even a boombox.

Sure, I can travel with every piece of music I own on my person, an endeavor that once upon a time would have required forklifts and vans. But I wouldn’t dare check a suitcase containing my hard drive, no matter how many layers of sweaters I’d packed around it—its brushed-steel exterior may look tough, but anyone who’s owned a computer knows that the components within, which house the precious data, are really quite delicate. Mercurial, even.

Cloud-based solutions, in which a person’s music collection exists on a network-accessible computer, are often touted as the next step in music consumption. But I have to wonder: Will the cloud’s infinite possibility result in me hearing more music than ever before—even more than now? Or will it result in me just pulling out the same old favorites—and forgetting that there’s other music lurking within, waiting to be discovered—simply because I’m not confronted with it when I wander through my collection?