I used to own my music. Now I just ask Alexa.

That does not mean I want to throw everything away.

I recently cataloged my CD collection so I could offer it to some of the companies that buy used CDs. The problem is that they are likely to take the ones they think they can resell and discard the rest.

I understand the economics. I just don’t particularly like the idea of several hundred CDs that I carefully accumulated over the years ending their lives in a dumpster, which is probably the most likely scenario.

This is not the first time I have had this problem.

About ten years ago, before COVID rearranged everybody’s plans, I had a record collection of somewhere around 500 albums. I gave them to a friend who had the equipment to digitize records properly. The idea was that we would convert the collection and preserve the music without preserving several hundred pounds of vinyl.

That project never quite happened.

Eventually my friend gave the albums to a reseller.

So somewhere along the way I managed to dispose of nearly 500 records, replace many of them with CDs, and now find myself trying to dispose of the CDs.

Meanwhile, I probably have access to more music than at any other time in my life.

That is progress, although I am not sure anyone planned it this way.

When You Had to Buy the Music

For people who grew up with streaming, it is probably difficult to appreciate how much effort once went into building a music collection.

You heard something on the radio. A friend told you about an artist. You read a review. You went to a record store and bought the album, sometimes without knowing whether you were going to like anything beyond the one song you had heard.

Then there was the Columbia Record Club.

For those of us of a certain age, this was one of the great inventions in music distribution. You could get a pile of records for what appeared to be almost nothing, provided you agreed to buy some number of additional records later.

The trick was finding imaginative ways around the buy-later rules.

This worked so well that I joined several times, and I discovered a lot of music that way.

But finding good things was still a challenge. Mostly we were limited to what was available, what was being promoted, what our local radio stations played, and what we happened to discover.

Compared with today, we were working with a very small universe.

Now the Music Is Just There

Today I subscribe to Amazon Music, Spotify, and Pandora.

I have accumulated playlists and preferences on all three. They have gradually learned what I listen to, what I skip, and probably what I tolerate longer than I should.

I also have Echo speakers in several rooms, including some of the better ones.

That has changed the mechanics of listening almost completely.

Years ago, if I wanted decent music throughout the house, I would have needed an amplifier, wires, speakers in several rooms, and probably some holes drilled through walls. Then I would have had to choose an album or CD, put it in the player, and change it when it ended.

Now I walk into a room and tell Alexa what I want to hear.

That is an enormous improvement.

The bigger change, though, may not be convenience.

It may be discovery.

The Algorithm Occasionally Knows What I Want

My musical preferences lean heavily toward jazz and related music from the 1940s through the 1970s.

In other words, I listen to a lot of dead people.

That used to create a problem. If you listened primarily to older jazz, discovering new musicians required some work. You had to read about them, hear them on the radio, see them somewhere, or get a recommendation from somebody whose musical judgment you trusted.

Today the streaming services do something surprisingly useful.

They give me what I already know I like, but they also slip in current musicians who fit somewhere around the edges of my preferences.

So I may start out listening to someone from 1958 and, without doing anything, find myself listening to a musician recording today.

That would have been much harder fifty years ago.

The algorithm is not replacing my taste. It is extending it.

And occasionally it gets it very right.

My Wife and I Do Not Have the Same Algorithm

My wife and I have different musical preferences.

She listens to Frank Sinatra.

A lot.

I liked Sinatra once, but I pretty much gave him and his contemporaries up sometime in the 1960s. I had heard enough.

She also likes other pop music from the 1960s and 1970s, along with classic country from time to time.

She tries jazz with me, which I appreciate, but there are limits.

Jazz often requires patience.

A musician may spend several minutes developing an idea, followed by another musician developing a different idea, followed by a saxophone player deciding that eight minutes would be about the right length for a solo.

I am perfectly happy.

My wife is not.

When the whining sax starts, she changes the channel or tells Alexa to stop.

Then we have the opposite problem.

There is a category called smooth jazz that is apparently intended to prevent anyone from becoming overly excited.

Some of it is among my wife’s favorite music.

It can drive me up the wall.

So, technology has solved the problem of finding nearly unlimited music.

It has not solved the problem of two people wanting to hear different things.

Popular Music Is No Longer Common Culture

There is another curious change.

I do not listen to much current pop music.

Actually, that may be overstating it. I listen to almost none.

If I want pop or country music, I generally go back to the decades when I was growing up and starting my adult life. Those songs are attached to places, people, cars, jobs, and experiences that newer music simply cannot duplicate.

I could not name a Taylor Swift song.

I know who she is, of course. It would be difficult not to.

But I could not identify one of her songs if my life depended on it, and there are probably several other major current performers I would not recognize at all.

What is interesting is that this no longer seems unusual.

At one time, popular music was genuinely popular in the sense that nearly everyone was exposed to it. There were relatively few radio stations, a handful of television networks, and a limited number of ways music reached the public.

Even if you did not like a performer, you probably knew the songs.

Today we can each construct our own musical universe.

My wife can live with Sinatra, smooth jazz, and classic country.

I can spend the afternoon with musicians who died before some of today’s listeners were born, interrupted occasionally by a new saxophone player an algorithm thinks I should know about.

Someone else can listen exclusively to Taylor Swift.

We can all be listening at the same time and have almost no musical overlap.

So What Exactly Do I Own?

That brings me back to the CDs.

I used to own my music.

I owned the record, then the cassette, then the CD. The collection took up shelves. It had weight. I could lend an album to someone. I could lose it. I could scratch it. I could spend twenty minutes looking for it.

Today I have access to far more music than I ever owned.

But I don’t really own much of it.

I rent access.

If Amazon, Spotify, or Pandora changes its service, raises its prices, loses the rights to a recording, or disappears entirely, my enormous music collection can change instantly.

Maybe that should bother me more than it does.

Convenience is a powerful argument.

So now I have several hundred CDs that I don’t need, sitting on shelves while Alexa waits patiently for me to ask for almost any recording ever made.

The CDs are probably obsolete.

I just wish they did not know it.