On Rediscovering Vinyl in the Streaming Age

I sold my parents' record collection at 19. I bought my first turntable at 39. The arc was not what I expected.

Streaming made me a less attentive listener. Not because the technology is bad — it is mostly amazing — but because the abundance trained me to skip. The first 20 seconds of every song became a tribunal. If the hook had not landed, the algorithm would suggest something else.

Vinyl reverses this. You commit to the side. You sit through the songs you do not love because flipping the record is more friction than tolerating one bad track. You hear the songs that grow on you.

I am not making a luddite argument. The convenience of streaming is real and I am not giving it up. The vinyl is a supplement — a way to enforce attention on the records I really care about, the way I used to before I had a thousand alternatives a click away.

What surprised me most: the listening habit has improved my work. The patience of the format trains a patience I now bring to other things. I am sceptical of romantic claims about analog. This particular one I have lived.