How self hosting changed my relationship with media and art

Lately i have had the opportunity to slow down my lifestyle a bit which has given me time to actively reflect on how I use, or rather consume, art and interactive media, which in these modern times are one of the main sources of entertainment.

I started practicing self hosting, which for those not in the know is the practice of managing your own streaming services instead of using those offered by big players like Spotify, Netflix, etc… and over time, I realized how my consumption had shifted from a “horizontal” consumption-centric mode where the important thing was not the medium but to use a medium, to a more vertical mode where the media is at the center of my interest. I could summarize it in a phrase like:

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i want to read this book

Vs

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i want to read something

The turning point

The turning point for me was when I started to self host my music collection, which I had previously stored on Spotify (rent i should say… 😞), i was afraid that removing spotify i will lost access to a lot of interesting content but i realized that i didn’t care about it, I will often found myself listening to the same artist or the same albums over and over again, but at that point i wasn’t listening anymore, i wasn’t focus on the music, it was just noise.

So some questions start to boil in my mind:

Why doing all this?

I recall a conversation that has append to me with one of my friends when i was fixing some strange behavior of my proxmox cluster

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But why are you doing all this? You can just use youtube or spotify, and save yourself the hassle

In a first moment i agreed with that sentence, it’s true that i can just use youtube to listen to my favorite artists without configuring a virtual machine over a proxmox cluster and blablabla but the point is exactly this:

I have to do it now if i want to listen to something

This forces me to choose between albums, cause i have to put an effort on setup the media in the cluster, finding and buying CDs for physical copies, ripping them and uploading them, this gives music an importance, if i listen to a specific album or artist is because i want to not because i can.

Me exiting the music store with the treasure 😎

Forcing myself to do this effort has other benefits, i’m starting to gather information on the artist, the message that he wants to send through is music and what part of that message can i grasp based on my life experiencing and my current understanding of what is the world around me.

It’s like living a music opera, not listening it, you start to feel the emotions that the artist wants to pass to his audience and music becomes a part of your life in a much deep way.

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