5 Big Lessons I Learned After Listening to 250 Albums in Under 6 Months

Matt Fish
8 min readJun 12, 2023
Photo by Eric Nopanen on Unsplash

At the beginning of 2023, I made it my mission to listen to 450 albums in a year. Averaged out, that’s about 1.25 per day.

The reason was simple: My music consumption habits were becoming stale and limiting. Despite craving exciting music experiences like a kindergartner craves candy, I’d regressed to a passive model where I was mostly listening to the same four or five playlists over and over again.

I needed to make a change.

Nearly six months into my listening challenge, I can safely say the experience has been enjoyable but also eye-opening. It’s taught me some important lessons about the state of music and the music industry, as well as its impact on my life.

In this blog post, I’ll share the five biggest takeaways from my journey thus far. Let’s get into it!

Music isn’t worse than it used to be (but sometimes the mastering and mixing sure are)

One of the most common criticisms of modern music I hear all the time, even from my audiophile friends, is that music in general kinda sucks now. Or, at the very least, it’s not as good as it used to be.

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Matt Fish

Writer, content creator, music obsessive, DJ, currently sitting down.