Music you liked as a youngster but you now no longer like. and music you still liked

[Prediction? Pain.]

Prediction? Pain. I see you have purchased a butt-load of music in your life. I have as well. Spotify is great but also pisses me off for all the money I've spent purchasing albums over the years because I do not listen to anything but Spotify now....there's no use.

I'm in y'alls "spent a ton on music" boat too. Especially when I was at State. My best friend and I virtually lived at BeBop and became friends with the staff, and there was so much good stuff coming out from late 1991-1994 that we just gobbled up everything we could - not to mention buying up cheap back catalog stuff that was being re-mastered for CDs.

I haven't jumped on Spotify yet. My daughter keeps telling me I need to.

From the time I was in high school until I finally had a real job-type job some 15 years or so later, almost all of my disposable income went to buying music. New, used, CD, record, cassette, box sets, etc. And when I worked in a record store for a few years in college, I was like a junkie working a methadone clinic.

Weird to think about how different it is now. It's a shame in some respects, too. Digging through record and CD bins, listening to stuff while you shop for other stuff while you carry on goofy conversations about obscure music with record-store clerks, and then ending up with some random thing that wasn't even on your radar when you walked through the door is hard to replicate online, I think. Sure, the access now is infinite -- I can hear whatever I want to pretty much whenever. But getting there is a solitary, insular experience. And what lies at the end isn't a thing I can hold and flip through as I listen. It's a super-compressed, subscription-based stream. So strange.

Not that I don't take advantage of it. Spotify is worth a look, Brunswick. The database is enormous. The only artist I can think of off the top of my head whose entire catalogs aren't available are the Spacemen 3. (Oh, an Sonic Boom/Spectrum of the Spacemen 3.) Every other album from every other artist from every other genre that I've looked for has been there. The free version is ad-supported and only lets you play shuffled radio stations for artists or songs that you like (similar to what I remember of Pandora) if you're playing stuff via your phone or app-based device (like a Roku stick or something). But the free version for desktop computers is fully functioning, so I can play any song off any album I want to. There are fairly frequent ads between songs, but if you manually select a new song before an old one is over, the ads don't seem to pop up. Again, it's compressed as hell compared to a CD or record, but if you're listening over computer speakers, the lower quality isn't really apparent.