Bringing out the tapes

This week, I've been thinking about the way media consumption has changed.

When I'm on my own computer, I'll usually listen to the music files I have on my computer--usually in a shuffle playlist with everything I care to listen to, but sometimes my various holiday playlists as well. I'm not on my own computer as often anymore, because I don't have homework and I have better things to do than YouTube and silly websites. When I'm at work, I use Pandora and Spotify. (I make good use of Pandora's "I'm tired of this track" feature, and I switch to Spotify when I run out of skips. Spotify has a disproportionate amount of alcohol commercials. They clearly don't know this market. Sam Adams commercials are especially annoying.)

I still buy CDs. If I own a CD, I can listen to it as a CD, or I can simply listen to the digital files by ripping it to my computer and having Google Play upload it. I don't have to choose, because I can have both. I've listened to CDs more since I moved up here and have been commuting to work, since I listen in my car. (Surprisingly, one of my favorite albums that I've purchased from 2015 was Fall Out Boy's American Beauty/American Psycho.)

However, last month my CD player quit working, and I haven't gotten it to work since then. However, I won't really know whether it works or not until spring, because it doesn't like to work during cold weather. I find this a little unfortunate, because I've bought several Christmas CDs, yet I haven't listened to them as CDs, only as digital files.

It makes me wonder if I should buy any CDs at all anymore. This week, Google Play had three free Christmas albums--Kelly Clarkson, Mariah Carey, and Blake Shelton--so I had to get them to improve my Christmas playlist. (At the moment of this writing, they're still free, but I don't know how long that will be.) I also bought Walk the Moon's Talking Is Hard when they had it on sale for ninety-nine cents.

Anyway, in the absence of a working CD player, I looked through our family's leftover collection of tapes, since my car is old enough to have a tape deck. Most of it isn't stuff I'd care to listen to, but I was looking for some nostalgic Christmas music. I found one tape that I put in--it was mediocre at best, but I was surprised when it was playing along and suddenly my mom began singing "I Am a Child of God"! I remember those days when, if you wanted to record something, tapes were the way to go.

It's easy to be nostalgic and miss those things--but there's a reason that mixtapes and tape recorders are obsolete, because they really are cumbersome. I thought about making mixtapes for my car, but I have a tape deck adapter, so it would just be easier to make a playlist on my phone and use that.

This was terribly uninteresting. Sorry about that.