yuna2k-MY SONGS.mp3

"Bro, what's the name of that song?" I asked my best friend.

He looked at me with a smirk.

"Nah bro, I discovered it and I don't want other people thinking you listened to it first."

Then he laughed really loud, as he always did, while shaking his USB MP3 player in front of my face.

What a fucking gatekeeper.

I can't blame him, though. Maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic today, but I remember the relationship we had with music back then being much more personal.

That song —I think it was from Linkin Park— was HIS song.

And I was gonna find a way to steal it anyway.

When I was little, I had very little exposure to music.

We didn't have any sound system in the house. If I'm not mistaken, we had a little radio in the kitchen, but it was mostly used to listen to the news in the morning.

My father is a devoted evangelical, and a phrase I heard a lot when he took me to church was: "the things of the world" —the mundane— "aren't meant for us."

On top of that, my grandfather was a pastor, so whenever he and my grandmother visited us, we had to hide every electronic device that could raise concern.

One day I came home from school and there was my grandma, sitting on my father's bed, watching TV.

What was the point then?

What a lame and stupid religion.

Anyways, the point is that I was very ignorant about music growing up.

But I had a friend from school: Mario.

And Mario had a collection of CDs in his room.

It was small, but for me it was a whole new world.

I remember the first time he played one of them. It was Marca Chancho (2000) by Chancho en Piedra. I immediately fell in love with that bass and guitar. The lyrics were also so funny to sing along to.

"Eligiendo una Reina" mocked the beauty pageants that were so popular back then. I'm not talking about the ones where women wear elegant dresses and answer questions. I'm talking about the ones where basically the "hottest" woman wins.

Another song was called "Historias de Amor y Condón."

"Durazno y Melón" discussed whether it was better to drink wine mixed with chopped peaches or drink it straight from inside a melon.

"Patá en la Raja" was about kicking asses...

They were fascinating themes.

At the time, I didn't understand much of the actual meaning behind the songs. But, as I said, they were very funny to sing along to.

Another friend, Felipe, had a bigger sister —one of my first platonic loves— and she possessed something even more fascinating: a CD binder full of "burnt" CDs.

But these weren't regular albums like Marca Chancho. These were mixes, or playlists as we would call them today.

She would play them on the car stereo on the way from school to their apartment. So when I was invited for the first time to play with Felipe after school, I heard Britney Spears, Black Eyed Peas, Gwen Stefani... one after the other.

It was fascinating.

I loved how she would write the artists directly on the CDs and give each mix a name. So you could find Britney Spears across different CDs, but the song she selected had something that connected it to the rest of the tracks.

Sometimes it could be something obvious, like a genre or a mood. Other times it could be something much more personal, like "Songs from the Summer of 1998."

She was a curator, and those were her songs.

Then my parents bought me my first computer, and I could finally get my OWN songs.

There was this P2P (peer-to-peer) program called Ares, through which you could download everything from music to videogames. All you had to do was type what you were looking for into the search bar and every available file with a similar name would appear.

Usually, you would just choose the most shared file. But if you were looking for an unpopular song, things got a little more uncertain. You didn't really know if you were gonna get the song, a virus or a porn video.

One trick was learning how much an MP3 file was supposed to weigh according to its length and quality (kbps). Eventually you could look at a file and think: there's no fucking way a four-minute song is 200 KB.

Thanks to Ares, little by little, I built my own music library.

I remember that most of the files had barely any metadata, or all the information was just crammed into the filename. Something like:

LINKIN PARK - IN THE END - HIBRID THEORY - 2000.mp3

So you had to rename it and search online for whatever information you wanted to add to the file: artist, genre, album, track number, release date, songwriters...

But the most fun part was choosing how your digital music player was gonna look.

There was another program called Winamp, where you could organize all your music, create playlists and, most importantly, play your songs. It had nice features like an equalizer and a little screen that displayed all the metadata.

But Winamp also had skins.

And that was a whole different thing.

There were whole communities of people who dedicated their spare time to making them. Thanks to them, you could make your Winamp player look like a cyberpunk artifact, your favorite anime or some videogame interface.

I would spend entire afternoons online looking for new skins and new bands I had never heard of.

The funny thing is that both activities felt almost the same.

I was customizing my player while also customizing my taste.

Next came the step into the physical world, so for my birthday I asked if I could get my own USB MP3 player.

My father, as expected, looked at me with concern, but it didn't take much to convince him.

The most typical ones were rectangular with rounded corners and came in all sorts of colors. Unlike Winamp, mine didn't have a shuffle button, so if you wanted to find a specific song, you just had to go through the whole mix until you found it.

But the one thing that really defined these objects was their storage size.

You couldn't carry all the music you had on your PC with you.

You had to choose.

You could buy a more expensive MP3 player with more storage, reduce the quality of the songs so the files took up less space, or simply decide which songs deserved to come with you.

The second option was unacceptable.

You could invite your friends over and show them your favorite albums, your burnt CDs, your digital music collection, your Winamp skins...

I feel like music had such a power to build connections between people.

I mean, it still does. I've made a lot of friends this year thanks to electronic music. But I still have this feeling that those ties were somehow stronger because you could make the whole experience much more personal.

Maybe I'm just nostalgic.

But if you compare all of this to platforms like Spotify... yeah, it was much less convenient.

You had to search for the song, download it, fill in the metadata yourself, choose how your player was gonna look, organize your library, burn the CD, buy the USB MP3 player, decide which songs you were gonna put on it and then carry that thing around on top of all your other gadgets.

All of this stuff took time.

All of this stuff took space.

And now almost all of that friction is gone.

That's obviously more convenient.

But sometimes I want to go back so much.