Why don't I listen to music anymore?

That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but there's a lot of truth to it. Despite the big deal I made in a post not long ago about the return of The River to the Windsor/Detroit airwaves, I've hardly listened to the station. When WDET dropped all its daytime music programming a while back, it wasn't nearly as big a deal to me as it would have been ten years ago. I used to buy CDs at a rate approaching one per week for at least a decade, and while I still have most of them (a number ended up getting traded at Dr. Disc), for the most part they sit on the rack gathering dust nowadays. What gives?

In large part, the answer seems to be that I've stopped filling my head with music and started filling it with the spoken word instead. I've been a CBC Radio listener for a long time, but a bit more than a year ago, the CBC had a strike and my old favourite dependable programs just weren't there. This coincided with the rise of the podcast, and if you put that together with my intellectual and political proclivities, and the fact that I could timeshift and listen conveniently whenever I felt like it, you get a bit of a sea change. In the past year, my listening habits have now adapted to what is available online, including Rachel Maddow (long may she run and sorry about the stumble ), roundtable discussions about arcane topics , geek vanity radio , and pseudo-religious provocations .

Be that as it may, though, it fails to address the reasons why music doesn't appeal the way it used to. Has music gotten too cheap? Is it devalued now because it's so easily available online? Is it because I'm getting older, and I no longer define my life through the music I listen to? Or did I just get tired of the old stuff without learning how to appreciate the new?

It's getting late. Maybe I'll think of an answer tomorrow.