How I find and listen to music in 2025

Today I’ve been thinking about listening to music, because I wasn’t doing so. This Saturday morning I did a bunch of tasks with some audio accompaniment: read news, biked three miles to the gym, lifted weights, biked back, gave the cats some catio time in pleasant weather, went to the local farmer’s market for produce and gardening advice, made lunch, etc.  A soundtrack played over most of this, emitted from my Fold phone, but it wasn’t music. Instead it was spoken word, a series of podcasts and an audiobook’s chapter, which satisfied me.

An old, old music box at the Fairbanks museum.

Yet it also made me reflect on when I actually do listen to music and how. So now I’d like to follow the weekend practice of my friend Kent Anderson.  His Geyser newsletter offers solid and provocative content about scholarly publishing all week long, but on weekends takes the time to offer selected musical entertainment.  Here I’ll set aside my usual futures work and while what follows might not be quite so entertaining at pure music,  readers might find this sample of one interesting as an idiosyncratic slice of technological experience.

Here’s how it works in mid-2025.

YouTube is my music central. This is where I look for and find recordings, starting from the search box. The site also suggests interesting music for me on its front page, both individual tracks and auto-generated mixes.  In a sense YouTube acts like a clutch of music radio stations or MTV, playing audio at me. (I also use YouTube for many other purposes, including posting my own videos, watching videos, etc., but that’s not what we’re talking about today.)

There I also make and revise a ton of playlists. My tastes are diverse if not simply strange, so those playlists show that: punk, Russian classical, 1980s New Wave, baroque, atmospheric black metal, Gothic Western, Vienna school, space music, etc.  Some playlists are for certain purposes, like a series of martial tracks to help me power through hundreds of emails.  There are a couple of arrangements of quietly haunting sounds to help me sleep when my mind won’t shut down.  I adjust and grow these lists over time, curating as I learn and find more.

Hardware: most of my music listening takes place on desktop and laptop computers.  At home, late at night, I’ll sometimes switch music to a big screen tv.  I don’t use tablet computers in general, although I’ve thought of setting one up as a kind of music box. Weirdly, I rarely use my Android phone for music. One downside of YouTube for listening is that on my phone it shuts off when I close the device or when its screen goes dark, unlike some other apps.  Instead I use the phone for podcasts and audiobooks.

Beyond YouTube I use several other sites for music at times.  On Bandcamp I maintain an odd list of artists and genres which I try to check out daily. I follow and support a few artists on other platforms, such as Patreon, where I find, for example, TC’s glorious Spacemusic show.

What I don’t use much: I don’t use Spotify at all, unless someone shares a playlist there. That service never appealed to me since I have YouTube.  I never use iTunes as a place to find music. I was against the thing when they made the big DRM deal, and it hasn’t seemed useful since. Besides, that app is a giant clunky thing.

I usually don’t buy music in physical media, CDs or vinyl or cassettes. I used to as a teenager and when I in my 20s, slowly and carefully assembling a library as best I could. Now I fear having too much stuff now as it is, although I sometimes buy the occasional item to support an independent artist and if the object looks lovely. I’ve dreamed about building up a series collection of physical media against the possibilities of streaming going bad, but that would be a major investment in money, space, and cataloging to do properly.

For finding music, I don’t read music journalism as such.  Sometimes friends or contacts on email, social media, messaging apps, or MetaFilter will recommend something and I may search for web articles on it.  And I must credit the awesome Map of Metal project for beautifully outlining that genre’s history and scope.

Apart from the digital world, I don’t listen to radio in the traditional sense, except when I drive somewhere I haven’t been and I sample the dial to get a sense of the area, scrolling AM and FM to pick up local voices and tastes.  Some web radio does cross my dashboard. For years I loved listening to William Berger’s awesome My Castle of Quiet program (“House of Horrors; with black/death/doom metal, punk/grind, Kosmische/Krautrock, filmmusic, and noise/improv”) on WFMU until his untimely death, and I still return to the impressive archive.  And every Wednesday I listen to my dear friend Sara Grosky’s weekly freeform show, Beat the Bezoar, on Michigan’s WCBN.

I haven’t seen live music since before the pandemic. That’s not a deliberate choice so much as I’ve been very, very busy.

That’s where things stand now. My habits don’t seem very futuristic right now. How does this little music autoethnography seem to you? Does it have any echoes with your own practices?