By Jesse Raub
Getting hired at the record store meant immediate access to their entire music catalog. It was 2004, I was 19 years old, and I was new to Chicago—snagging a clerk job at the all vinyl shop on North Ave in Wicker Park meant living out a literal version of my High Fidelity fantasy. Record shelves lined the entire store from front to back, a never-ending aisle of album art just begging to be played over the store’s speakers. Just two or three years prior, being curious about Bruce Springsteen meant hunting for your parents’ music collection, ponying up for a CD at Best Buy, or spending money on iTunes for songs you had to burn onto a CD (likely violating usage rights). If you were ever curious how Darkness on the Edge of Town became some kid’s favorite Boss album, it’s because it was the one they found in their dad’s old record crate.
At the record store, however, we had the entire Bruce catalog at our fingertips. Over each eight-hour shift, we could flip through Born to Run before digging out The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle and repeat as much as we saw fit. We even had an original press copy of Nebraska. Through that level of access, it was easier to find the appeal of Born in the U.S.A. played over a hi-fi—the tinny sound of early digital production and high-pitched synthesizers had a depth and weight on vinyl that was missing on digital formats. As a budding music writer, this meant the world to me. I had an iPod stuffed full of albums I was sent to review for a volunteer-run punk website, but I was lacking fundamental knowledge of music history. I traced early blues compilations through early R&B albums straight through the Rolling Stones. I could play the Stooges back-to-back with the MC5 before pitting early Clash and Ramones albums against each other. Whatever I wanted to listen to, I could. And when I found an album I loved (say, 3+3 by the Isley Brothers or The Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden), I would buy it with my 60% discount on all used LPs and then torrent the digital file at home so I could take it on the go.
The artists, of course, saw none of that money.
The history of streaming music didn’t fully take off until LTE mobile broadband internet became widely available in 2013. At that time, Spotify had 6 million paying subscribers, with the rest of its 18 million users listening through ad-supported accounts. Just one year later, those numbers would nearly double. For many people, music streaming before 2013 was based around personal computers—you’d log in to the service and start a radio-like playlist that pumped music into the room through your computer speakers, with a promise that musicians would earn money every time you streamed their song. As an alternative to iTunes, where each $0.99 song splits revenue between Apple and the label (who paid out the artist), Spotify gave listeners unlimited access to its entire catalog for a monthly fee. Now, for the price of a single album, you could listen to thousands of songs from any era. The consumer value was through the roof—especially with the advent of unlimited LTE mobile plans—and artists saw a drop in album sales almost immediately.
As an alternative to torrenting, however, music streaming is a better option. Artists might only be paid fractions of a penny per stream, but at the very least, they are paid something. It also gives musicians and record labels better control over the digital quality of the files people hear. For years, I was convinced Metallica’s early catalog sounded like trash. It was believable—after all, St. Anger, their 2003 stab at nü-metal, was well noted at the time for its bizarre production and open snare hits that sounded like drummer Lars Ulrich was wailing on an old metal trash can. I was wrong about their early catalog, however. What I had been listening to was a low-bit-rate rip of a CD box set that was upscaled to a 192kbps resolution. That is to say, even though the file size suggested audio fidelity, it was like someone burned a beat-up VHS copy of a movie to a DVD and played it on a high-definition TV. The moment I signed up for Apple Music, sometime around 2015, I immediately had access to multiple remastered versions of Master of Puppets. Not only did it sound great, but I could listen to the album whenever and wherever I wanted—unlimited data plans had become commonplace for phone carriers at the time, who were giving out heavily discounted iPhones in an attempt to hook users onto slightly more expensive monthly plans. That is to say, if you were willing to spend $60-75 a month to Verizon or AT&T, you also had the privilege of paying $10 a month to have nearly the entire catalog of recorded music available anywhere.
That should be a boon to music lovers and amateur historians alike. So, why does streaming music often feel so empty?
On the surface, having Apple Music on my iPhone for 10 years should have been an extrapolation of the record store catalog. Instead of a limited selection of Isley Brothers albums, I could now trace the journey of the early vocal group’s addition of rhythm section Ernie Isley, Chris Jasper, and Marvin Isley as full-time band members. It gave me access to The Isleys Live, a 1973 live album that includes a 13:34 maudlin cover of Carole King’s “It’s Too Late,” and a tribute to the band’s early guitar player Jimi Hendrix with a mashup of CSNY’s “Ohio” with Hendrix’s “Machine Gun,” both featuring younger brother Ernie absolutely losing his mind on extended guitar solos that laid the groundwork for how Prince would shape his approach to the guitar. When I stumbled on a Joe Henderson/Alice Coltrane album for over $100 at the record store, I could pull the album up on my bike ride home, discovering my new favorite tenor sax artist and jazz composer. To this day, Apple Music offers two remastered versions of Henderson’s incredible Power to the People from 1969—that means I get to pick how tuned I want the stereo panning to be between the left and right channels. But perusing used record stores isn’t a sustainable way for most people to find streaming targets.
Increasingly, I hear the same refrain from music streamers everywhere: How do you find new music?
As the miracle of modern technology started to overtake our daily lives, the human touch has faded dramatically. Millennials who once listened to local radio in their cars and read up on new releases on music websites have less and less incentive to do so. Radio stations, already susceptible to algorithmic programming since the early 2000s, are basically fully automated outputs pushing the same popular songs you’ll hear in commercials or while shopping at department stores. Music websites, like all digital media, have been swallowed up by major conglomerates that work to maximize views for ad revenue. Nearly halfway into 2026, we’re lucky to be alive in a time when worker-owned music websites are trying to claw back relevance from the tech conglomerates, but that still means that your favorite indie outpost is fighting to get eyes on Chappell Roan news, as those clicks bring in the widest variety of readers. Nothing against Chappell Roan, of course, but meteoric success in music means no one is lacking access to the latest off-handed remake she made that some outlets interpreted as a political gaffe, or of her security guard allegedly scaring a child, or any other spur-of-the-moment outrage headline. At that point, the coverage is around her celebrity and not her music, anyway.
The question of what to listen to, whenever someone opens their music streaming app, is in some ways a question of autonomy. As streaming services grow, more and more offer personally targeted playlists that attempt to map your previous listens into categories like “Chill” and “Workout Mix.” If these mixes feel cold and impersonal, it’s because they are. They’re generated by various algorithms baked into the service, automatically suggesting one song if you liked another. The algorithms pull data from the widest variety of users—if Person X liked this song and that song, then we can recommend that song to Person Y if they liked this song. The result isn’t a playlist handpicked for you; the result is a playlist that appeals to the lowest common denominator. That is to say, you’re more likely to get recommended a Sabrina Carpenter song if you listen to a Kate Bush deep cut than you are a Kate Bush deep cut after listening to “Espresso.”
In the heyday of radio, disc jockeys used to have some say in the songs played, delivering a personal touch to your morning commute. Early music fans would subscribe to magazines and follow their favorite writers. If you liked Creem and Lester Bangs, you might have been turned onto Black Sabbath and Captain Beefheart fairly early. I used to load the A.V. Club every day and skim through the music reviews to see what might spark my fancy. Even the seemingly unlimited music catalog of the record store I worked at was represented by the owner’s personal taste—if we had it in the store, it was because he, personally, chose to buy and price out that album for resale. At the risk of sounding like an old crank, well, back in the day, music recommendations came from actual people.
But there’s a risk of romanticizing the past. Major labels had way more power in the past than they do today, and payola scandals (where labels illegally paid radio stations to play certain songs) tore through radio from the 1950s through the 1990s. And even if you heard a song you liked on the radio, it wasn’t guaranteed that you had access to buy the album it was on. Not every city had an independent record store you could shop at, and if you lived in the suburbs, you were limited to whatever you could find at a big box store or at the mall. Namely, the number of young punks embarrassed to push through racks of Korn shirts at a Hot Topic just to find a NoFX CD in the 1990s was higher than you would have expected.
It’s not uncommon for people looking to avoid auto-generated playlists to find themselves staring at the music app on their phone, unable to select what to listen to next. It happens to me nearly every day. In 2023, Nielsen released a report on video streaming that noted 20% of people surveyed said they “don’t know what to watch beforehand and couldn’t find something to watch—so they did something else instead.” Nowadays, I find myself reaching for my podcast player by default when I pull out my phone. New episodes of my favorite shows are lined up neatly in a feed—all I need to do is pick from one of ten options, based on the mood I’m in. My music app, however, has hundreds of saved artists with thousands of albums. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to an Omar Rodriguez-Lopez album from start to finish, and yet I, at one point, thought it was crucial that I add six of his albums to my library. At home, I try to limit myself to playing music on my turntable, selecting from the 200-odd albums that make up my collection. But a return to physical media isn’t practical for most people.
The home office for my day job in marketing has a turntable. My boss, fearful of his toddler being tall enough to interact with his hi-fi, brought it in along with his record collection so employees could play music throughout the day. When they complained about not being allowed to connect their phones to the speakers via Bluetooth, he gave them a pep talk. The point of the turntable, he explained, is intentionality: He wanted the marketing team to be intentional in everything they do, which means physically walking up to the record player, selecting an LP, and having to flip it over by hand midway through. When I was visiting Seattle on a work trip, I took a trip to a nearby vinyl shop to pick up records by Emmylou Harris, Steely Dan, Merle Haggard, and the Kinks. I was encouraged by the initiative—my younger co-workers would have access to hand-curated records by yours truly, giving them a way to engage with something new and easy to listen to.
In practice, my younger co-workers select one of the three contemporary albums they purchased and let a single side play for hours at a time, with whoever’s closest resetting the needle back at one on the latest Morgan Wallen instead of even flipping the record over to Side B. Most of them don’t even like Morgan Wallen; they’d just rather not face the choice paralysis of a record collection they’re unfamiliar with. Even one that was personally selected for them.
It’s a good reminder that, for most people, music selection has always been an illusion of choice. The music that we would hear on the radio, in TV commercials, at a coffee chain, or at a department store was always the music that record companies wanted us to hear. Even without payola, the marketing department of a major record label was able to put a full media blitz behind anything they thought could be a hit. That still rings true today: the aforementioned “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter was supported with a tie-in by Dunkin’ and café pop-ups in three major cities. In the summer of 2024, if “Espresso” felt like it was everywhere, it’s because Universal Music Group paid to make it be everywhere.
To a degree, digital music was supposed to be a revolution of audio autonomy: paying iTunes about a dollar per song meant you had access to that song whenever and wherever you went. A full iPod gave you hundreds more hours of music than you could ever possibly listen to in a week. The consumer model, however, wasn’t really any more affordable than physical media. Regardless of how well iTunes did during the early aughts, the pivot to Apple Music to compete with Spotify clarified one thing: when most people subscribe to a music streaming service, what they are paying for is the service—not the music. Even when people wanted to boycott Spotify for running ICE recruitment ads, the main complaint for many users was that they would lose access to all the algorithmically generated playlists they’d saved over the years. To put it bluntly, it doesn't matter if a different streaming service has all the same albums if you don’t remember what songs you like.
Users are also held captive by music streaming services. When Apple Music updated Meat Puppets’ classic album Meat Puppets II to a Deluxe Edition, they misuploaded the song “Plateau.” Often cited on lists of the best songs of all time, “Pleateau” earned renewed fame when Nirvana covered it during their MTV Unplugged in New York set with the Meat Puppets’ Kirkwood brothers accompanying it. When you tried to play the song on Apple Music for over a year, the program would instead call up a live version of the song. That means that for 14 months, one of the best songs of all time and one of my personal favorites was just unavailable on Apple Music. I’m lucky I snagged a vinyl copy of the album back in my record store days.
That doesn’t mean I think streaming has made the experience of listening to music worse overall. The convenience and audio quality make music streaming indispensable for modern life—I can’t pull out the Ryko reissue LP of Meat Puppets II when I’m in my car, and eventually Apple Music did fix the “Plateau” issue. If my issue with music streamers is the paralyzing effect of infinite choice, but most users struggle with having to choose at all, the solution may very well be embracing more intentionality. Every week or so, I rotate 10 albums into a record stand by my turntable so I have a few options to choose from when I want to play music. There’s no reason I can’t do the same thing when I pull out my phone on a walk. I encourage generated playlist lovers to consider intentionality, as well. Pick a new song from a playlist every day, download the entire album from that artist, and make a point to listen to it all the way through.
These aren’t steps that are going to save the music industry, but encouraging a closer connection to the music you choose to listen to every day has ripple effects. Maybe it inspires you to download the album directly from the artist, or on a Bandcamp Friday. Maybe it inspires you to check the tour schedule of a band you just learned about, where you can see them perform live, and maybe buy a t-shirt. It’s clear that music streaming has changed our relationship to music. Maybe it’s time to change our relationships to music streaming services.
After all, I don’t think many all-vinyl record stores are hiring that many 19-year-olds these days: you’re going to have to access the world’s music library some other way.
Jesse Raub is a freelance food and culture writer and 20-year coffee industry veteran. He’s written for outlets like Serious Eats, Bon Appétit, The Atlantic, and Vulture. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and when he’s not writing, you can find him enjoying cheap wine or expensive coffee in his backyard.