Project: Recreating the internet of my youth

“Research suggests” that ones musical discovery peaks at age 24. I turned 24 in the year 2013. For me, this all makes sense. Between the years 2005 to 2015 I was totally obsessed with music. I spent hours online every night, scouring album review blogs, downloading random mp3s and watching music videos on early YouTube. I played in bands and went to shows. Music for me, like many at that same age, was everything.

There was something unique about music discovery during this period of time. The internet as a distribution mechanism for music was just starting to become truly meaningful. Enough time had passed since Napster, and big bands were blowing up thanks in part at least to platforms like MySpace. It was the era of the “free mp3” and transferring music from your laptop to your iPod with a USB cable. Even the streaming services (Spotify didn’t get to Australia until 2010-ish) were “library-first”. You had to search and tend to your your library like a garden, carefully.

It’s cliche, but there was something magical about stumbling upon your new favourite song in some weird corner of the internet. The serendipity of it all. I’m sure previous generations felt the same way about the record store, but actually for precisely the same reason. You went looking, and you found something. You weren’t served it.

Side note: A question I’ve had stuck in my head for a decade+ is why I’m willing to give music I actively discover a chance, but when passively served music via an algorithm, I find myself fighting the urge to skip any song I haven’t heard within seconds. Passive discovery for me requires discipline. There must be some interesting psychological explanation for this…

Anyway, during this “golden age” of musical discovery, I was very into the indie music scene. I read (brilliant) independent blogs like Gorilla vs Bear, You Aint No Picasso, I Guess I’m Floating, Tiny Mix Tapes and yes, a lot of Pitchfork too. These blogs ranged in size and popularity, some of the smallest probably had just thousands of daily readers, whereas Pitchfork was obviously a formidable cultural powerhouse at its peak, but all of them felt “intimate” anyway, in a way that has never really been recaptured in the social media/”big internet” era.

I find myself wanting to go back to this version of the internet (or maybe I’m just feeling nostalgic…), but I’m not sure that it’s possible. Most of these blogs have shut down and many of the internal links are almost all dead. This internet is gone, sadly.

So I decided to build a little time-portal for myself, a way to dip back into this era. It’s a list of the 1000 “best” (imo) songs from this era. It has a nice little YouTube player and there are even some categories and themes too.

Listen along if this sort of this is your jam: https://music.jamespember.com/