You are what you [eat] consume

As we sat around to eat dinner, Evie ran up to grab her mother’s CD of Swamp Ophelia. She put the disc in and we chattered amicably among the tenors of the Indigo Girls. It feels less surprising these days to see a stack of records by a turntable in a dorm or CD’s in the console of your friend’s car. Click-clacking through, reminiscing over albums you liked in high school, laughing, bonding over that one track you are obsessed with, then picking that one out one for the ride home, to belt it or cry it out together. The rise of physical media appreciation could just be the fact that I exist in a vacuum of Middlebury esotericism, a populace composed of highly individualized and often affluent characters. No matter the means or the process by which you got into collecting – from discovering your mom’s old CD collection to ordering rare, limited editions online – the rise of physical media in the recent generation is not just simply a collectors hobby but it is an act of resistance against the rise of digital monopolization and the increasing homogeneity of cultural consumption and taste. 

Music discovery and taste cultivation is becoming increasingly dependent on digital media platforms (ahem, the Spotify Monopoly). There is something essential and precious lost when we reduce the quantity of opportunities for lived experiences of music sharing. 

Of course, this is not isolated within the framework of music, there is a thrill of flipping through an old book with footnotes, tear stains, dog ears, and with an old receipt tucked in as a previous bookmark. This relational experience expands past temporal boundaries, connecting strangers with the joy of being human despite never knowing one another. 

To love is to be changed: consuming media is an embodied experience when it is through a physical medium. There can be a beautiful exchange when you lend someone a book that you have held and loved and cried with. The book itself is transformed by human hands, which is then translated across time and space to the next reader. These forms of media hold memories, emotions, and moments that simply can’t be replicated by a screen. To hold a stack of photos, flip through the family scrapbook, your mother’s wedding pictures, is wildly different from the aimless scroll through your camera roll—interrupted 30 times by Instagram and GroupMe notifications. By physically holding ours and others thoughts physically in our hands, we get a reprieve from the constant stimulation of our handheld supercomputers.

As you hang up the pictures you printed out for your dorm, tracing the edges, remembering the exact moment it was taken, you are present and gaining perspective on the past. Writing in your journal, relishing the privilege of flipping through yesterday’s thoughts. It forces us to slow down and be present and live with that exact moment in time. Especially in college, our absolute dependency on technology and the subsequent screen time can feel draining, but engaging with physical media is refreshing. It reminds us that life happens in real time, not just through pixels and clicks. 

With the music subscriptions we have adhered ourselves to, we are given a false sense of security in the permanence of our music. Downloaded music is an illusion of ownership which ceases as soon as we stop subscribing to Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, or whichever. This relationship of  “renting” music on the conditional basis of a monthly payment is a convention of capitalism to commodify music and maximize profit on the experience of listening. To what extent does the consumer truly own anything they purchase? Essentially, the industry has found a way to make consumers pay repeatedly for duplicate content by monopolizing distribution channels where your time, data, and socialization are being monetized (ahem! social media!). Is this a true immortalization of the media? Or is that fabricated by our desperate hopes for legacy?

By collecting your personal data, these companies are creating algorithmic and highly personalized consumer systems, which, don’t be fooled, is not a complete paradise of individualized music recommendations but an economic strategy designed to shape and control your consumer behavior and turn it into an automatic, predictive, and repeatable process across the masses. The rise of these adaptive algorithms within this economic model creates parallel yet separate realities where we are unlikely to encounter anything that might introduce us to new ideas, small artists—or really anything that may challenge, upset, or provoke us. AI applications only intensify and dehumanize this. 

A person’s taste in music, fashion, movies, books, etc, is an expression of their identity: you are curated by the people you surround yourself with and the media you consume. When we share physical media with others we are stimulating discussion and allowing for personalized annotation and collaborative curation—impossible with the convenience of streaming services, where listening and discovery is passive. We have immediate access to any song we desire: music is more available to use now than ever before, yet thus has also never felt so disposable. 

There are, of course, barriers and possible harms to collector culture: it is inherently an economically privileged activity in which the collector needs adequate space and money to invest in a CD, DVD, or record player collection. There is also an incredible opportunity for collectors to reinscribe hierarchies of taste and “legitimacy”, which is perhaps even celebrated in our culture obsessed with possession, materialism, and keeping relevance/being trendy. This is especially crystallized by social media currently by reinstating what music is “indie” or whether you are a “deep cut” fan, further determining what is “cool” and whether you belong in these music communities. There are ways to direct collector culture away from overconsumption, privatization, and from commodified nostalgic indulgence into consumer resistance against corporate algorithmic flattening and to truly “owning” our beloved media. 

By utilizing your purchasing power, you can engage with curatorial resistance and not just experience a sense of ownership over your favorite album, but also participate in a sense of stewardship over what media–artists, films, books, you name it!—matter.

Today, to be a collector, you are joining communities that resist the logic of capitalism: you are rescuing the forgotten or underappreciated works of media and reinstating them as valuable artifacts, which should be shared. Not only does this have the possibility to salve the community-starved youth populous but it supports local, independent artists which may have fallen to the wayside in this age of perfumed, sanitized corporate hogwash we are being pacified with. By reserving memory through this niche economy and embracing your autonomy as a consumer, you are enacting a micro-resistance against the suppression of cultural individuality. To fight the digital age, where we are vulnerable to the whims of billionaire tech overlords, our shelves must not only be curated against diminution and the homogenization of taste, but also cultivated for connection.