Another year, another look at my music trends for the year. It was another year of music acquisition (supporting the artists, ftw! - I knew Spotify wasn’t paying artists well, but Corey Doctorow’s book, Chokepoint Capitalism really brought home how much they’re screwing over artists), although I think things may slow down in 2023. Here are the albums I purchased in 2023:

• The Protomen - Presents: A Night of Queen
• Encantó soundtrack
• Moderator - The World Within
• Kognitif - Soul Food
• MxPx - Horns, Plans within Plans, Let’s Rock, Left Coast Punk EP, The Rennaisance EP
• Packy Lundholm - Track Sabbath Vol 1
• Lana Del Rey - Blue Banisters
• Catbite - Nice One
• Macroblank - entire discography - 14 albums
• Vicente Garcia - Lomas de Cayenas
• Girl Ultra - Nuevos Aires
• The Shape of Ska Punk to Come
• Me Like Bees - Songs from The Realm
• Kill Lincoln - Can’t Complain
• Jokabi - Chilltendo Deluxe
• Turning Red Soundtrack
• We Are the Union - Ordinary Life
• Chillhop Music - Essentials Spring 2022, Essentials Summer 2022, Essentials Fall 2022
• Anberlin - Silverline

New Music I got as a gift:

This year I was able to attend the Paul and Storm / JoCo concert that COVID stole from me last year. While there I bought the entire Paul and Storm discography, but I think because I listened to it so much on Spotify in the past, I didn’t listen to it as much as I thought I would.

This was not one of those years where I came out ahead by not paying for Spotify. I bought a lot of albums, including starting on my quest to get the entire MxPx back catalog from the time I stopped listening in high school until now. (This is reflected in this year’s numbers)

Technology continues to complicate the media landscape. The other day I learned on the Fedora Planet how to send Pulse Audio over the net - allowing one computer to listen to music (or other audio) from another. But, in the context of music, who cares? I have all my music on Google Music. I can just plug my phone into the sound system and listen to music (or any other speakers). This also eliminates my need to use DLNA / uPNP servers/clients to play my music. (They never worked all that well anyway)