In the time between compact disks and streaming, we had mp3s. A person would use software to search for music and download the music from other users. It was fun. Back then internet connections were garbage, so I spent a lot of time hunting for users who had good connection speed and a lot of interesting music. Some people didn’t share music, they only downloaded it. The term for that was leeching. Do people still say that? Who cares. We’re probably taking about 1999ish is when this started and it stayed this way for a good long time. Throughout my 20s and into my 30s. Eventually it became more convenient to just stream music using Pandora, Spotify, whatever.
Back in 2000 you would have thousands of mp3s on your computer. I would visit friends or whoever and music was constantly playing. There was always a laptop attached to a sound system and a sad old desktop riddled with viruses was looping on random through a playlist of thousands of mp3s. You see, the mp3s were files that you played using software. In my experience this software was generally Winamp. You could use Winamp to listen to a song or an album or a list of random songs.
Another new concept was the playlist. Of course had mix tapes in formats like cassette or cd. I loved making mix tapes. I recorded songs from CDs and the radio. I preferred cassettes because they were durable. And I didn’t own a car with a CD player until long after the technology was relevant. Mix tapes had limitations based on store space (for a CD) or total minutes (for a cassette). Playlists had no such limitation. Playlists could contain thousands of songs, days of music. All kinds of music. I made a lot of playlists.
Time passed and here we are. I work too much. I have two kids. I certainly don’t have the time or energy to curate thoughtful playlists like the navel-gazing weirdo who wore my skin 20 years ago. But I do have a list, one list. That list is goose farts.
I like geese because they are ornery. They eat grass in mud. They go to the bathroom all over walkways. They don’t take any grief. And they stick together. I overthink a lot of garbage. This is probably a relic from when I had way too much time on my hands.
I started adding songs to goose farts in 2016. I originally created it earlier than that, but my Spotify account got hacked. I got to work one morning and realized some bozo deleted my playlist and all my albums. So I booted him out, set up 2FA, and started again. All the songs are sorted based on the order I added them. That’s not particularly helpful. Sometimes songs go dark: they stay on the list but I guess they’re no longer on Spotify. That’s an annoying nuance I didn’t have to deal with in 2002. Oh well.