My love of music began to fade 7 years ago - the same time I become a paying subscriber of Spotify.

Before that I’d kept a local music collection on my phone/PC stretching all the way back to my early teens through whatever MP3s I used to exchange with friends and family. Over the years I refined it, standardized it, and prided myself over not having to pay for a subscription service like many others.

For some reason though right as I was graduating university I decided to take the plunge and get on Spotify. I’ll admit, those first few months were pretty cool. I didn’t have to worry about acquiring a local copy of a song file anymore. I’d just search it like I would a Youtube video. I also wasn’t limited to just my phone that had all my MP3s on it. My PC, my iPad, or really anything that supported the Spotify app or a browser became a portal to my music collection.

Over the years, however, I stopped enjoying music. It became something to fill the silence or to block out thoughts rather than something to immerse myself in completely. Growing up, music was almost sacred in how I lived my life. Each year, each phase of my life was marked by a song or a string of songs. It’s how I remembered events or marked memories in my mind. In fact my music collection, when sorted by date, was a sort of unofficial diary of my life. I lost all of that with Spotify. Between the on-demand nature of it making music feel less special, to its shuffle feature just recycling the same 20 songs per week, to its lacklustre discovery options, music became something mundane instead of special. I yearned for that feeling I had growing up where I was proud of what I listened to and the excitement of discovering something new.

That’s when I got the idea to get myself a used iPod.