Haystacks

Hayley Hutchinson

Whenever someone asks me what I envision for my future, I will always say “surrounded by music”.

In the digital age, I anticipated this in a metaphorical sense, with limitless songs I could listen to right this second on any streaming platform. But with a seemingly infinite catalog, I never venture too far beyond what I am familiar with. Maybe it’s because of my algorithm, recommending and re-recommending the same sounds, devoid of any context aside from “you may like…”. Sometimes I did like the suggestions, but I rarely loved them.

The more I learned about the platform I was using, particularly the pay-per-stream rates, the more resistant I became to it. The price I was paying to choose almost any song at will was costing the artists I wanted to support, and instead was lining the pockets of a company that is essentially a digital shelf. While I moped about not listening to anything new, my CD collection sat plentiful yet largely untapped, doomed to collect dust.

My first memory of my love for CDs was on trips to the barber shop with my dad. He would put Hotwired by the Soup Dragons in the car’s CD port and turn it up as loud as he thought my little ears could handle, delighting me every time. I have collected CDs for as long as I can remember, and I loved being able to digitize them back when I had a lime green iPod shuffle as my only personal listening device. I have since upgraded my device, but nothing was stopping me from digitizing my CD collection for personal listening.

So, I gave up music streaming services at the start of 2026. It was a slow process to start downloading my CDs to my computer, making my personal listening pretty slim to start out (never a shortage of The Beatles, thanks to my dad’s collection). As I expanded my collection, my music discovery began to flourish. My trips to the record store began to serve a more practical and exploratory purpose. I found myself doing more research on the music I was listening to, looking to buy, and really anything that piqued my interest. Noticing the connections between the music I already knew and music I loved that was new to me ultimately inspired me to start Haystacks.

I understand that few are ready to abandon streaming services altogether, and that many don’t have a collection of physical media to fall back on; that is okay! I created Haystacks to promote a more old-fashioned, non-algorithmic form of music discovery. Happy intentional listening!