I've been thinking lately about the ways in which I listen to music and how that affects my enjoyment of the music.

When I was younger, I used to buy physical CDs. I would put them in my CD Player and listen to the same CD over and over and over again, mostly without skipping songs.

I started listening to my music differently when I digitized my collection. I'd play them out of order, skip songs, build playlists, etc. Eventually I got lazy and started listening to my entire music library on random.

I'd never really thought hard about it, but somehow playing everything on random made me enjoy my music way less. There was some undescribable feeling I got whenever a song came on the radio I hadn't heard in a long time. I rarely got that feeling of rediscovery with my own music anymore.

I've decided to try something new: instead of giving myself access to my whole collection at all times, I'm going to limit my playable music to a few albums and keep everything else locked away in a folder. That means I'm taking everything out of iTunes, everything out of Google Music, everything out of Spotify. I might keep some playlists, but I will no longer have easy access to my entire music library.