Music has been a constant in my life for as long as I can remember, and in many ways my relationship with it has evolved alongside the formats used to store and play it.

It started with a small collection of vinyl records at home, shaped mostly by what was playing around me rather than by deliberate choice. Dire Straits, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who. As a kid, music was something you absorbed passively. It was always there, but it wasn’t yet something you managed.

That changed during my teenage years, when cassette tapes entered the picture. Recording songs from the radio and making my own mixtapes was the first time music started to feel personal. I wasn’t just listening anymore, I was curating. When CDs became mainstream, that sense of ownership intensified. My collection grew quickly, eventually filling boxes that now sit in the attic.

In the early 2000s, iTunes and mp3s arrived, and with them a new kind of freedom. Combined with how easy it was at the time to get music from the internet, my library exploded. Hundreds of artists turned into thousands. Albums, playlists, folders. I started building structures just to keep things manageable, grouping music by genre and creating hierarchies to impose some sense of order.