The way I buy and consume music has changed recently. So far this year I’ve only bought 5 records (the three that Rough Trade send me, plus two Belle & Sebastian records that I pre-ordered last year). All my other music discovery has been via Spotify, and I find I’m using it more on my phone now, with a huge big playlist of new discoveries being the soundtrack to my commute. I also spent most of January and February listening to vinyl and CDs rather than music on my computer (at least when in my study – I still need digital music for when I’m travelling).
This month I’ve been doing an experiment around listening to all my old digital music, and trying to rediscover old things rather than buying new ones. I’ve been building up a library of MP3s since I got this computer, and it’s now up to about 400Gb of music, which would take several months to play. I’ve had this playlist on shuffle for about a week now, and I’m fairly sure I can manage to hold off buying too much more new music this year based on the amount of great things I’ve rediscovered that I totally forgot I owned.