Bought any music lately? Probably not, right?

As a certified mall goth, my friends and I used to fuck around and generally be a nuisance up at the local shopping center every Friday night. When we weren’t busy fighting off the emo kids for control over the Dance Dance Revolution cabinet in the arcade or loitering around outside the truck delivery bay smoking cigarettes we bummed from strangers, there were a half-dozen different stores there where we would spend our allowances on new and used CDs. This was the dominant era of Nu Metal, Pop-Punk, and Bling Rap, and anything that sounded like it was made with a synthesizer and/or drum machine was only for nerds and colloquially referred to as Techno. I don’t recall exactly, but I’m pretty sure the first album I ever paid money for was Linkin Park’s Meteora (their last good album, I’m afraid.)

I’m only one paragraph in and already I sound like an old fart. Ugh…

Oh yeah, I also pirated an absolutely massive amounts of music, movies, and games during high school and college. I ran a public file server at the time that was accessible via web browser from a link on my MySpace profile page so my friends could grab whatever music they wanted off of my computer. Naturally, movies and games were entirely out of the question when working with 1 megabit ADSL upload speeds.

Given the large media library I had been stacking up for years, I was one of the last holdouts within my social circle to transition to using subscription music streaming services. Pandora’s free ad-supported tier was perfectly fine when you had access to a computer (most of us didn’t have smartphones until after high school) and the forced radio station-esque experience of not being able to choose what song played next made it more of a complementary tool for finding new artists to listen to alongside your existing CD or MP3 collection, not a replacement for it. MySpace was pretty good for this purpose too, despite being limited to a handful of single tracks that artists picked and uploaded themselves, and was still good for a while even after Facebook had come along and crushed it as the dominant social media platform. With all the options available to me, I didn’t really see the point in paying money just for the privilege of listening to music I wasn’t allowed to keep. Until around 2016.

The biggest part of that reasoning was time - After all the effort that I (arguably) wasted on college, I finally had a fancy Professional Career in big capital letters. I also now had a girlfriend, whom I would go on to marry shortly after we had joked about the idea of being husband and wife while in the parking lot of that very same mall I used to troll a decade prior. (Life lesson: Always be committed to the bit. The more time your partner spends laughing = more time spent with their eyes closed and not spent looking at your ugly mug.)

I suddenly had a lot more money, a lot less free time spent alone, and basically required headphones in order to get my work done at the office while a bunch of people stood around and chatted loudly like they had nothing better to do. With all of this, music streaming services like Spotify finally presented themselves as a reasonable compromise, for a while.

Now, I’m not going to get into how terrible media streaming services like Spotify, or Netflix, or Amazon, or Disney+, or [insert name here] have been for artists and the entertainment industry at large. We ain’t got time for that here, and I hope at this point in 2025 that you’re at least somewhat aware of the incredibly shitty things they’ve done over the years. They’re just as bad as the major record labels and movie studios are and often work hand-in-hand with them to fuck creators over for profit. Instead, we’re gonna skip all of that and just talk about buying music for your own personal library. Wow!

If you haven’t done so lately, there’s your homework for today. Go buy some music. Or give an artist some money. Like right now. Subscription fees do not count for this assignment. Come back afterwards if you want.

(Continued in part two.)