REJECT CONVENIENCE: On-Demand Music and the Case for Suboptimality
Why I made the switch to an mp3 player and the benefits of being slightly inefficient.
November 2nd, 2025
Betty Woodman teacup and saucer. (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
[Note: this article was originally published in a small local music commentary magazine. For the sake of privacy, the title of said magazine and its associated meetings has been censored.]
Last year, I wrote an article about WACUP, a media player I installed on my laptop that kicked off an mp3 downloading crusade and a small step away from streaming services as the site where I listened to any and all music. In our penultimate [zine] meeting of the year, after staring directly forwards in complete silence for thirty minutes (I promise “deer in the headlights” is just my default state of being), the utterance of the word “Bandcamp” was a sudden injection of pure adrenaline (manifested outwardly, for the perceptive, as maybe a slight turn of my head and dilation of my pupils). Bandcamp? I love Bandcamp! I love slowly growing and organizing my hoard of audio files! Unfortunately, all the words that followed were a little more harrowing: why exude the time and energy to grow a collection of digital music when streaming services are always right there and are so much more convenient?
This is actually a very good question. Such a good question, in fact, that I think you will find many people asking it all the time in completely unrelated societal arenas. Why write a letter when you can send a message instantaneously and near effortlessly on your phone? Why put deep thought into how you engage with others online when a social media algorithm can endlessly feed you everything you want before you even know you want it? Why spend all that time dicing the veggies for your yummy fajita dinner when instead you could eat a Trader Joe’s box meal, the burden of preparation shouldered entirely by your microwave? The answer in that last case is that the yummy fajita dinner you dice your veggies for is, in fact, much yummier than the Trader Joe’s box meal, both for your stomach and for your heart, soul, etc. But not everything is so clear cut.
The truth is that our Spotifys and our Apple Musics provide an all-you-can-eat buffet to satisfy our every music-related desire — the entire discographies of nearly all popular artists lie at our fingertips. We can easily search up whatever we want to listen to, or take a chance on the new and unknown (but probably not that different from what we’ve listened to before) with whatever the algorithm tosses onto our home page. We can plop everything we like into a MEGA PLAYLIST that we can then turn on for all occasions without having to think very hard about what we want to listen to.
[Zine] has mused before, and I’m sure will continue to muse at great length, about how we can be more intentional listeners. But rather than looking at the big picture, I want to focus on one particular aspect relating to this goal: how we listen to music. Not our attitudes, not what we listen to, but the simple question of what you do in order to turn music on in the first place.
It’s a careful balancing act of priorities — I’ve landed on local storage of audio files on my laptop, accessed by a simple (but effective!) media player, because it’s what feels comfortable to me personally. I pick out albums I want to listen to one-by-one, and listen to each all the way through before switching to something else. The system itself encourages me to be more thoughtful in picking what I want to listen to from my library and also in choosing what to add to my library at all — the fact that adding new music is a little cumbersome forces greater mindfulness. This system won’t be a good fit for everybody, but I promote it simply to argue that alternate models of listening to music on-demand that aren’t streaming services still exist and are perfectly feasible. If you want to buy a vintage Walkman and only listen to music via cassette tape from now on, that’s great too!* Just, y’know, you’ll only be able to listen to music that you can get on cassette tape. All manners of listening carry some restrictions of access — there’s lots of lovely music I have downloaded on my laptop that can’t be found on Spotify, and also plenty of songs I listen to on Spotify that I unfortunately can’t find a (certifiably legal) way to download to my laptop. Such is part of the aforementioned balancing act.
Streaming services are, in the end, a service. You pay continuously in return for consistent access to music. But it’s not just music — perhaps above that, it’s stimulation. Not unlike Twitter or TikTok, Spotify’s business model relies on users who will consume, consume, consume content, which is incentivized by Spotify Wrapped, by numbers to raise, statistics that are supposed to mean something about you, that you should show off to all your friends and maybe convince them that they should be listening to more music more often in the process. And why wouldn’t you gorge yourself? It’s so easy, after all. We don’t judge Spotify as harshly as social media, because consuming music can be a passive activity where consuming posts can’t — thus, Spotify does not grasp towards our undivided attention, just a small piece of it.
But still, there’s something that unnerves me when people who hold just as deep a love and passion for music as I do mention how constantly they listen to it via Spotify or Apple Music, like a never-ending white noise to underscore their life, a constant consumption. But I don’t want to “consume” music! I don’t want it to just be content to me! I want to sit with it, and treasure it, and with each listen, hold and observe it in my hands gently as if it were a baby bird. And based on our conversations in each [zine] meeting, I get the impression that many other people feel this way too. How often would the beauty of the sunrise strike us if the sky always looked that way?
Believe it or not, the topic of this article was inspired by an anecdote I recently read pertaining to ceramics, of all things. The author recalls receiving a set of teacups from American ceramicist Betty Woodman — teacups that, in his view, were beautiful but of poor functionality. He notes that, as a writer, he would drink tea and coffee near constantly, doing so absent-mindedly as he typed. But it’s upon eventually trying these teacups that that changes:
Woodman’s cups brought all that to an end. They cannot be used casually. Their balance is precarious and the act of picking up and putting down a cup became a very conscious, risky and considered action. Secondly, the liquid would become cold very rapidly. As a result I found that I would leave my work, pour the coffee, sit down in a comfortable chair and concentrate for the next three to four minutes upon this newly acquired, very relaxing habit. I drank less coffee, tasted it for the first time, and returned to my work refreshed by these breaks, the manner of which had been determined by so called badly designed cups!
It is by introducing inconvenience into his routine that turns it into a meaningful ritual, something thoughtful and considered, something he can actually appreciate. The activity returns to what it presumably began as — drinking coffee for the experience of drinking coffee, not as a routine pursued for any passive stimulatory effect. Our natural instincts may be to live our lives as quickly and efficiently as possible, but a sense of fulfillment often comes from the moments we slow down. My thesis for this article? In music listening, as in all aspects of life, find the beautiful, “poorly designed” teacup that speaks to you. Though its contents remain unchanged, you will find them more nourishing.
↩ *This is an unrealistic example on purpose, but I have heard whispers of an iPod resurgence — the thought of owning a dedicated music-listening device is not so far-fetched in this day and age.