At the start of this year, I made a resolution: I would listen to one new album every day of 2026. I’d grown complacent with hitting shuffle on decade-old playlists and zoning out to the same cherry-picked songs on repeat while exercising or cycling to work. It was a comfort zone, and I’d lost the excitement for discovering new music that first made me fall in love with it as a tween in the early 2010s.

So, I made a spreadsheet assigning an album to each day of the year, and posted on Instagram asking friends for recommendations. What I didn’t expect was for my inbox to be flooded with dozens of people saying they’d made a similar resolution and asking to see my list. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one grappling with the choice paralysis of music’s streaming era.

It’s a shift that’s been in the air for a minute now. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, opening up vast catalogues of sound at the tap of a screen. But that abundance can also make listening feel passive, flattening albums into background noise or algorithmic mood boards. In response, some fans have started seeking out slower, more intentional ways of listening: buying vinyl, returning to MP3s and iPods, browsing artist-first platforms like Bandcamp, or simply committing to playing an album from start to finish. The common denominator is a desire to build a more deliberate relationship with music, even if it takes up a little more time, attention or money.

“I feel a streaming fatigue, it got uninspiring,” one intentional listener named Harry tells me, pointing to the choice paralysis that accompanies the ability to listen to literally every album ever made at the tap of a screen. Harry solves this by “avoiding digital throughout the day,” instead making a morning ritual of setting out which vinyl records he’ll listen to while working from home each day.

Other fans framed their shift in more moral terms. “It’s an acknowledgement of the fact that algorithms, like anything else in late-stage capitalism, are controlled by big businesses who can afford to swing that algorithm your way,” says Offie Mag editor-in-chief Greg, who consciously seeks new music out in clubs and on independent radio stations like NTS and the Loft instead. “It’s about de-centring big companies and those with big budgets.”

Meanwhile, devoted front-to-back album listener Ed phrases this more directly: “Put simply, it’s about paying art the respect it deserves. The notion of an AI DJ curating a playlist for me makes me feel sick. I will always seek out full projects to listen to from top-to-tail as this is how the artist would want their work to be experienced, in full, no skips.” For these intentional listeners, the shift can feel almost like musical vegetarianism: a form of ethical consumption emerging in response to the speed, abundance and perceived devaluation of music in the streaming age.

No one has felt that devaluation more acutely than artists themselves, particularly independent artists, and a small but growing number are beginning to explore more intentional release formats, too. In the last month alone, I’ve downloaded a .zip file of Dean Blunt’s new album directly from Mediafire, attended a listening session in which H.LLS previewed their new music on a fleet of iPod nanos, and read James Blake’s widely shared Instagram story criticising what he described as the corruption of music streaming by “label bot farms”.

“Artists are incentivised to make songs that suit the algorithm rather than fulfilling personal creative desires,” rapper Noah Bouchard explains. “As an artist, I feel like I’m working on making music to be given for free to platforms that don’t value my, or any, art, and only value profits for shareholders.” Singer Maz echoes these thoughts: “There’s new music every second and people are more disengaged than ever. As an artist it feels like selling your soul.”

Crucially, however, neither of these artists nor any listener I spoke to wanted to return to the analogue age. Instead, almost everyone pointed to the pre-streaming internet era of Napster, Limewire and MySpace as the sweet spot between the reduced barriers to entry and accessible listening facilitated by the internet, without the flooding of material that came later. “Napster and Limewire were the golden era of collecting music digitally,” says Harry. “I remember when I got stoned for the first time when I was 14, I pirated the Bob Marley collection because I thought that’s what you did when you got high. There’s nothing more intentional than that.”

This collective yearning for the early digital era is telling. While the piracy of platforms like Napster was wildly controversial, some listeners now remember that period as a moment when digital discovery still felt active and community-led. “OG MySpace was a super reliable online platform to share music, promote shows, make acquaintances and foster real community,” recalls Ed. “Those key pillars feel like tiny croutons in the dirty digital broth these days.” More widely, it’s important to remember that it wasn’t actually artists themselves who eventually got Napster shut down in 2001, but rather the larger, industry-led lawsuit brought by major label trade organisation RIAA. Meanwhile, writing about the music piracy debate in 2000, Courtney Love quipped that “major label recording contracts” are the real pirates.

This doesn’t mean streaming has no value. Time and money feel scarcer than ever nowadays, and music shouldn’t be reserved only for those who can afford fancy record players, hi-fi speakers or endless physical releases. Streaming remains a vital access point for many listeners and artists alike. What this shift does suggest, however, is that some fans are beginning to question whether convenience alone makes for a satisfying relationship with music — and whether slower, more intentional habits can help restore some of the intimacy that abundance can erode.

This rise of intentional listening practices like buying physical media, paying attention to human curators in nightclubs and on independent radio stations, or simply making a conscious effort to seek out and listen to records from front to back not only helps to remedy these industry imbalances but, by all accounts, has increased people’s enjoyment of music itself. It might be an uphill battle to walk back from the undeniable convenience of music streaming today, but there seems to be a growing resistance. “I am hoping for a shift in how we consume music,” concludes Maz. “I feel a revolution on the horizon.”