Longtime readers will recall that in the early days of this blog, I would spend the last days of the year posting about music. I'd post a record every day for 10 to 14 days. These would be my top records of the year. Then a few years ago, I stopped doing that and went to a single post with my top ten records of the year (usually with a few extras thrown in for good measure). Here is last year's post for example.
This year, as hard as I tried, I could not get up for doing it. It's not that I am losing interest in music. Far from it. I am more into music right now than I have ever been.
As I've been pondering my complete lack of interest in a top ten records post over the past few weeks, I've come to the conclusion that it is the result of two factors. The first is that I don't listen to records much anymore. And the second is that I don't collect music anymore. I guess the two are related.
For me music has become real time, all the time. My current music experience is like a twitter feed. Music comes at me from everywhere on every device I own. I'm on turntable.fm at 5am hanging in the indie while you work room. I'm on soundcloud on my android at the gym at 7am. I'm listening to my girls' recent listens on rdio on sonos over breakfast at home. I'm on the ex.fm app on my android on the subway to work. I'm listening to fredwilson.fm on my computer at work. I'm watching my son's friends YouTube music videos on our kitchen iPad before dinner. I'm listening on the hype machine app on boxee on my family room TV after dinner. And it goes on like that all the day, until I get into bed and go to sleep.
Instead of getting obsessed about a record, I get obsessed about a song. I listen to it over and over. Then eventually I move on. But not before posting it to my tumblr and my music stream. fredwilson.fm is like my delcious feed for music, but you can listen to it. If you want to know what I was into in 2011, that's probably the best thing to do.
But if you don't have 21 hours (that's how long it will take to listen to the past twelve months of my music stream), then here are a few songs I'm obsessed with at the moment.
