27 karma · joined August 8, 2018
This is a tangent, but I feel like I enjoyed things more when I didn't have practically unlimited entertainment. Video games before the digital era with Xbox Game Pass, PSNow / PSPlus, etc were limited to a few games that you bought and really invested in. Videos before streaming where you were limited to what was sitting in Blockbuster or in your physical collection. Music was limited to what the radio was playing (which you had no control over) or what you had in your tape/CD collection. Because physical media was something of an investment, it sort of led to a sort of 'automatic curation' that's much harder with having just about every game, movie, tv show, and album at your fingertips.
Maybe it's an age thing, but now I have 'back catalogs' for all of this stuff, and there's a constant feeling of 'missing out' if you choose one thing from your unlimited supply over another thing. It's exhausting.
I use Apple Music and only have about five playlists which are sizable. I haven't seen any music go 'grey' in any of them (I just checked). Some of that might be that my music tastes arent' particularly obscure, some of it might be Apple Music's licensing relationships with the record labels.
CDs are currently the best bargain in music at the moment. I can hit a thrift store and find about 10 discs that I'm interested in. Of those, about 5 are usually in mint condition, which I buy for $1-2 a piece. If there's a disc that I'm really* interested in, I can usually pick it up on eBay or Discogs for $3-5, shipped. It's almost always me looking through the discs which tend to be about 10% CCM, 15% country, 15% classical, and about 60% rock. There's always at least one other guy sifting through the Lenny Dee, Herb Albert, and Lawrence Welk records that are all that remains of a thrift store vinyl section these days (though I think Herb Albert is becoming harder and harder to find... :P ).
* We get Spotify for free with our phone contract, but I prefer the interface / integration of Apple Music on my phone.
(The (strange) exception being vinyl, and I suspect that a fair amount of the albums that get purchased don't actually get played. The records are really more 'collectables' than an actual means to listen to music for many people...audio funko pops, if you will...)
I've got a hard drive full of FLAC rips of my CD collection, which I listen to when I'm at the computer working. (I think I have about 600 discs.) I have plex serving the FLAC files, so I can listen to my music collection on my devices, but other than at the computer while working, I never do.
In the car and away from the computer listening is almost entirely music streaming services, with titles downloaded to my phone when I know I'm going to be somewhere with spotty internet.
My wife is 100% Spotify. My daughter (12) uses streaming services or youtube (!) to listen to music.
That was my take on it, too. I have one cheap Chinese radio in a box somewhere, but I got rid of all of my decent radios a few years back. I can just imagine what our local repeater devolved into during the Trump years. :/
The once-a-month meeting at the Village Inn was filled with laments about how there were no young people involved, but the repeater was filled with conversation that no young people would possibly want to be a party to.
I've discovered that it's unpopuler to point this out, but a big problem with amateur radio as a hobby is the current hobbyists involved.