By Oscar Gallup (guest contributor)
Back on New Year’s Day 2025, I resolved to listen to 300 LPs that I’d never heard by the end of the year. As it goes, most of my other resolutions were abandoned, but I was determined to see this one through. One year and many many albums later, I regret it.
I knew this would require steady persistence, so I immediately started consuming as many albums as I could get my ears on. I gathered albums from just about everywhere, and I did this constantly. I listened to albums mentioned on social media, which exposed me to a wide variety of genres, but nothing riveting. I listened to the albums I came across day to day when browsing vinyl, or hearing a new song and listening to the whole album. I even dug through my favorite songs and listened to the full albums I hadn’t heard. Some of them were good, and some of them were so unbearable that they ruined my once-favorite songs.
Friends and family shared albums with me, including my girlfriend, who, I realized way too late, was exploiting me to screen albums for her. Some of these were excruciating to get through. Altogether, however, the majority of the music I listened to was what Spotify recommended to me. I listened to anything and everything it offered me, which, for whatever reason, happened to be a lot of very small bands. This is where things started to go wrong.
When you listen to anything and everything your algorithm recommends, I discovered, you’re bound to expose yourself to music you wish you hadn’t been exposed to. I came across a lot of exciting small artists that sent me down rabbit holes and opened new doors. Regrettably, however, most of the small artists recommended to me made me regret opening doors at all. Many of these albums began dull, stayed dull, and were sometimes intolerable by the end.
At first, I suffered through them in an attempt to consume as much music as possible, as quickly as possible. I always hoped they would get better as they went on, or contain a saving grace; a few of them did, but not enough to justify giving all of them the benefit of the doubt. Every so often, I would stumble upon a gem hidden in a pile of mediocrity, but for the most part, my algorithm was feeding me slop.
From my commitment to exploration, a consequence had emerged: Because I was repeatedly suffering through intolerable recommended albums, the algorithm was feeding me an endless loop of bad music. By the time I decided to stop tormenting myself, my algorithm was thoroughly devastated. I don’t know if it will ever fully recover. To an algorithm, once you’ve opened a door, it can’t be shut.
All this made it difficult to ignore that Spotify, as a streaming platform, is increasingly problematic. Spotify’s pay-per-stream rate for artists is notoriously shameful, and this rate has gone down over the years. At the same time, they’ve repeatedly raised their subscription prices. Let’s keep in mind that Spotify’s founder and owner, Daniel Ek, is already a billionaire.
I’d give Spotify credit for having platformed small artists to me over the course of the year, but they also gave ICE recruiting ads a platform for the majority of 2025. This is a whole other topic, and not a fun one.
About four months into the year, I realized I was going to blow past my goal of 300 LPs, so I changed course to 500 LPs and 100 EPs. Constantly consuming so much new music introduced a new side effect. At the expense of actually listening, I often found myself burning through music just to meet my quota. The artists, albums, and covers began to blend together. There are many albums that I cannot reliably confirm having listened to or not, despite having documented them as listened to. Even albums I’d mentioned liking, I sometimes had little to no recollection of.
As I continued to sift through massive amounts of music, I grew to appreciate the albums with clear stylistic intentions, even when they fell outside of my typical taste. Sometimes I’d come across albums that were very cohesive, sonically and lyrically blending and adhering to their sound from beginning to end. More exciting than those were the albums that were all over the place. Each song sounded like it belonged to a separate album, making you repeatedly question whether you were still listening to the same album. Once in a blue moon, I’d run into albums that told stories; those were the most fun, and I regret not having had more time to immerse myself in them.
By the end of November, I’d surpassed my goal, and by the last day of 2025, my LP count totaled 516, and my EPs totaled 114. It took me about a month to narrow them down, so here are my top LPs and EPs in no particular order.
Top 10 LPs
- Kae Tempest – “Let Them Eat Chaos”
- Wet Leg – “Moisturizer”
- Saya Gray – “SAYA”
- Racing Mount Pleasant – “Grip Your Fist, I’m Heaven Bound”
- MSPAINT – “Post-American”
- Prewn – “System”
- spill tab – “Angie”
- Mannequin Pussy – “I Got Heaven”
- Dutch Interior – “Moneyball”
- mui zyu – “Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century”
Top 2 EPs
- Animal Collective – “Meeting Of The Waters”
- Girl Pusher – “Groceries EP 2”
In 2025, I subjected myself and the people in my life to a lot of bad music. Would I do it again? Absolutely not. Like a kid that ate too much candy and got a tummy ache, I listened to too much music and gave myself a perma-headache.
My taste changed so drastically over the course of the year that albums I’d once enjoyed now sound stale and distorted. I can no longer tell what sounds good to me, but I now definitively know, my algorithm isn’t helping. I am reminded that people listen to music for fun. My self-imposed challenge mutated into an obligation. Completing this resolution has exhausted my will to listen to music. So my New Year’s resolutions this year include listening to more music I actually like, and cancelling Spotify.
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