But as I look back on the churn of the past couple of decades, I feel uneasy about the hundreds of playlists I’ve taken the time to compile on the company’s platform: 10 or 20 years from now, will I be able to access the music I care about today, and all the places, people, and times it evokes? The music I’ve salvaged from earlier times is now part of my collection on Spotify, which I’ve been using since it launched in the United States, 10 years ago this month. Read: The aughts seem both cooler and sadder in retrospect Losing some of that music has felt like severing lines of communication with versions of my former self, in the sense that hearing even a snippet of an old song can conjure up a first kiss, a first drive, or less articulable memories of inner life. Just as remarkable as this rate of change is how useless previous iterations of my music library are today-my first iPod is unresponsive, and I have no idea where my poor Baha Men CD is. Now, instead of buying music, people rent it. Tapes were displaced in the 1990s by CDs, which were displaced in the 2000s by mp3s, which were displaced in the 2010s by streaming. Every decade I’ve been alive, a new format has ascended. I came home with two CDs: the Baha Men’s Who Let the Dogs Out and the pop compilation Now That’s What I Call Music! 5.Įach of those albums cost more than a month of streaming does today, which reflects all that happened to music listening in the intervening 20 years-Napster and LimeWire, iPods and iPhones, Spotify and TikTok. The first time I remember shopping for music was at a Best Buy one day in 2001.
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