It was September 2009, and I was anxiously waiting to head off to university. My friends had already all left and my small home town in Wales felt even more claustrophobic than before. It was also the month I downloaded a relatively new music streaming service called Spotify. I was immediately in heaven. I’d sneaked in just before they ended a free sign-up offer and so, for precisely zero pounds, I suddenly had access to a musical library that had previously been unthinkable.
I made a playlist titled, very imaginatively, “September 09”, and added all the songs I was listening to at the time. The soundtrack to my small-town angst? Frank Turner’s This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the One of Me and Bright Eyes’ First Day of My Life. I soon made it to university and, even now, listening to December 09 (Emmy the Great, LCD Soundsystem, Frightened Rabbit) gives me an almost painful pang of nostalgia for evenings in my grotty but much-loved student bedroom, with the new friends I’d made.
If I’d been born a few years earlier, I’m sure I’d have been painstakingly making mixtapes (I still remember my excitement at about the age of 10 when we got a CD burner and I could produce my own compilation discs), but Spotify let me carefully curate playlists quickly and easily. Sure, it wasn’t quite as romantic as a custom-made cassette with a hand-drawn cover, but it had its own charms.
