As I type this, I’m watching the progress bar on #k3b tick up. I’m ripping a CD I bought over the weekend at the local used record store. As an aside, I love that there is a local used record store in my town, even though when I go in there, I feel like a child wearing a propeller hat in a room full of sophisticated jazz listeners smoking pipes and stroking their funky beards.

Either way, I’m ripping this CD to my #jellyfin media storage so I can stream it later. I am doing this even though I already pay for a streaming service (#qobuz). I’m not sure I can explain why. I’d probably say I just want to own my music, but that’s not totally it. It’s partially just because I can. It was a fun project setting up this server on a junky old Dell desktop that I don’t even remember owning. But that’s not totally it, either.

One thing I guess I’m discovering about physical media - and to a certain extent, files I rip myself from that physical media - is that there’s a context to it that I don’t get when I stream. When I listen to this CD (Queensryche - Empire, thanks for asking), I will remember going to the store and finding it and then stopping off at the brewery on my way home and emailing my high school buddy who was a huge Queensryche fan and telling him I’d bought it and was thinking of him.

I’m not even that big a Queensryche fan, but the nostalgia got me when I held the CD in my hand in a way that finding the same album on Qobuz wouldn’t have. There’s some meanining imbued in the physical object - even if I’m the one doing the imbuing. It ties me to a greater context of friends and family and community and memory. Of course, the music itself does, too - but it’s like owning the media is a kind of memetic force multiplier.

My Jellyfin server is filled with music I’ve either ripped myself from thrift store finds or purchased back in that brief period where we were purchasing MP3s (though I do still buy them from Bandcamp) or found and downloaded from Limewire. I’m finding a certain happiness in limiting my listening to only the music I own. Not opening myself up to the entire catalog of the known universe provided by streaming is actually rewarding in its way. I’m not just choosing a song or an album, I’m navigating memory and community and family.

When I put on the copy of Graceland I own on vinyl, I am touching the actual LP my wife gave me for Christmas, and I’m remembering the casette of the same album I used to own that was given to me by my dad, who had his own copy that we listened to in the orange VW pop-top camper we’d drive around Colorado, singing along over mountain passes and coming home from fishing trips. That’s listening to music, not just consuming content, you know? It matters.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go figure out how to type an umlaut in Queensryche.