I go through phases of music listening. My most recent phase has been going for 5 years and is wholly unsatisfactory.

In the mid-90s, I was an album obsessive; I listened to every CD I bought religiously, repeatedly and analytically; deconstructing riffs, harmonies and solos, in part for mediocre reproduction purposes on my guitars, and in part because I had the time to do that.

Then came the late 90s and digital music. All was still good; I had time to make Winamp playlists, my music collection was still manageable.

Sometime around 2001/2, I digitised my entire music collection and gave up trying to listen to coherent collections of songs; I just chucked a bunch of music onto my iRiver/iPod and let it play on random; which had a few side-effects:

It drained the batteries out of my digital music players
It drained my enjoyment of music out of me

The latter was a gradual process, which only really properly sunk in this morning as I skipped through track number 175 of 400 on my Nano trying to get something I wanted to listen to. I gave up and put on the Anchorman soundtrack, which I then proceeded to enjoy.

So I think I’m going to go back to the album model of music listenership, and see if I can spare the time to build some playlists again.

All the automated online services that guess at what you want to listen to based on your previous faves – Last.fm, Pandora etc – don’t quite do it for me. Perhaps I’m just in a nostalgic phase of my life… who knows. But we’ll see if I get the music back into my world!