I'm not saying that streaming services have completely eradicated this sentiment. Did you really want to buy that new Radiohead album, or were you more of a Blink-182 dude? You heard both bands' latest singles on the radio, and liked them, but what about the rest? What did Spin magazine say? Rolling Stone? Pitchfork? Did Tower Records have those albums loaded up into its weird communal-listening stations so you could give 'em a quick preview? Gah! You had to do work, dammit! When you had proverbial skin in the game - in this case, a finite amount of time and hard-drive space - learning as much as you could about the music you were investing in became increasingly important.

Still, there was something special about steeping in the anticipation of having a fresh new mp3 to add to your Winamp library. The whole thing is laughable compared to how quickly you can cobble together a Spotify playlist today.

Once your download hit 98% you'd invariably cross your fingers that you hadn't just wasted the last half-hour in vain on a glitchy version of 'The Middle' by Jimmy Eat World. Remember the countless hours spent staring at your old PC monitor, watching individual songs download over 56K dial-up connections until their progress bars reached that sweet, sweet 100%? Not to mention the rampant false-starts, corrupted files, and devastating system freezes that plagued Napster, LimeWire, and Kazaa. But I can't help but wonder if it's breeding generations of lesser music fans, who will never know what it was like to really put effort into finding music. Its cup overfloweth with incredibly cool features, all-knowing algorithms, and impeccably curated Discovery playlists. Back in those heady days before Napster was undone by the Man (roughly 1999 to the mid-aughts), we were forced to wait and work for the music we wanted to hear - and thus, we were more discerning consumers of it. In the wake of all this effortless, instant gratification, I can't help but think back to the days of yore: the expense of having to purchase a physical copy of an album in order to hear it, or the pain of waiting 15 minutes to download a single Nine Inch Nails track on Napster, only to find out halfway through that the file is totally corrupt.Īs silly and outdated as that process may seem in the era of Spotify, those experiences played a critical role in shaping my distinct taste in, and appreciation for, music.

This is, without a doubt, really fucking cool. Between Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, SoundCloud, and YouTube, I can queue up practically any artist, album, unreleased single, rare B-side, or other obnoxiously obscure piece of audio, all in a matter of seconds.

Spotify download waiting desktop