MUSIC TO WORK TO

What music do you listen to at work? Not the music on the speakers at your office but what are you actually bumping in your earbuds when you are at your desk? Is it the same music you listen to in your car?

Where do you get your music from? Spotify? Apple Music? Pandora? Jammin Z90 on the FM dial? I guess I first need to know how and where you consume your music before I actually put together a playlist for you. Going back to the 80’s and 90’s, mixtapes were awesome because you could literally debut new songs with the homies before classes started at school. Do you even realize the bangers I was cramming onto those blank TDK cassette tapes back in the day? I always made sure that my friends were laced with any new music that just dropped.

And while cassettes/mixtapes were all the rage back in the day, the technology to turn your analog music (cassettes, vinyl) into digital files (CD’s) quickly became widely available through your home computer’s CD drive which was a total game changer. Through this technology you could take your favorite individual songs from albums and make your own greatest hits compilation CD’s. File sharing services like Napster gave you millions of songs at your fingertips for the downloadable cost of $0.00 per song. What a steal! As for me and my music habits, I was always a purist. I had to have the original versions of every cassette tape and CD and that was what I was playing in my car. These tapes and CD’s became an obsessive collection for me just like my baseball cards when I was younger. Those little full color artwork inserts you received with each music purchase meant the world to me because I could find out everything I needed to know about an album by reading its liner notes. I would spend hours each week at my local record store searching for new albums to buy and when I wasn’t digging in the music aisles you could find me reading all of the magazines. I was that guy at Tower Records late on Monday night waiting for midnight to hit so I could purchase Tuesday’s new music releases the first second they were officially available. All of the time I spent in record stores will forever hold a special place in my heart. Fast forward to today where the presence of music streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, etc.) has wiped out all of the mainstream music stores where I used to buy my physical copies of albums. R.I.P. Tower Records, Music Trader, Sam Goody’s and The Wherehouse!

With the rise of music streaming services I’ve actually seen a new little stream of cash into my bank account. I used to buy a minimum of 10 albums (tapes, CD’s, LP’s, etc.) per month so my annual spend used to be in the neighborhood of over $2,000 per year. Totally fiscally irresponsible (why didn’t I save money?!) but I needed my music and spent the money whether I had the cash or not. Hello credit card debt! But with the fall of record stores and the rise of streaming, that pricey music addiction I once had was gone. Just doing some simple math, I’ve saved $10K over the past 5 years by streaming which is a nice chunk of change!

How do you consume your music? Some of you don't even care about music so will just do the Pandora thing where their algorithms literally force feed you the same songs in continuous cycles. Laaaaaaaame! Some people listen to the AM/FM radio in their cars and for those people I gotta give you props. You are true soldiers! Me? I'm all in on Spotify. I pay $9.99 per month and literally GET TO LISTEN TO ANY ALBUM I WANT AT ANY TIME right on a music app on my phone. Many are still scared of Spotify so here’s a quick video to show you how it all works.

Now that I’ve gotten completely off topic and have covered a history of how music has been consumed over the past 30 years, I’m going to hone in on what I really want to cover with you today. What are you listening to at work or when you need to study? Are you actually able to focus on the work in front of you when there are lyrics included? For me, the answer is a flat no. I can’t really focus on work if I have music with lyrics or a podcast with somebody talking about something that you really need to listen to. Maybe I’m just a little too A.D.D. but I have to think that a lot of you out there would have increased levels of productivity with the right soundtrack in your eardrums. And what is the “right” soundtrack? I remember being in the 8th grade when I first heard a song by Curtis Mayfield that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was a song with absolutely no lyrics but it’s musical composition was beautiful. The song struck a chord with me and turned into a song that I would listen to on repeat while I studied. My mind is so scattered and then that song came along and became my audio Ritalin. It made me focus on the work right in front of me. That song was “Think” off of the Superfly Soundtrack from 1972. A song I’ve probably listened to over 1,000 times.

When I'm working I need beats and instrumentals without any words so I can focus on my tasks at hand and zone out. I often times need to cram several hours of work into 30 minutes so I can get home before dinner with my wife. Several years ago I started building out a playlist of these types of beats without lyrics so that I always had some background music in my earbuds while I worked on some sick Excel spreadsheets. What started as a long mixtape for my personal use eventually started to get really lengthy (over 24 hours!) but something funny happened during the process. As I put in work on the instrumentals playlist I noticed that I was started followers for the mix that I put together. And this wasn’t just my friends following this playlist. This was random people all over the world listening to the mixtape I compiled. As I write this, my original “Music to Work to” playlist has over 1,600 followers! Do you know how crazy that is to me? All I’ve done is make myself a mix of my favorite beats from my favorite hip hop producers like Oddisee, Madlib, Alchemist and DJ Shadow and other music lovers are listening to it. Dope!

So if you’re tired of hearing the same songs on weekly repeat while at the office, go ahead and give my playlist a spin. And if you’re somebody who likes some visuals to go along with your instrumentals you should give lofi hip hop radio a spin. Listen while you work… while you study… while you clean… while you relax… It’s music for everyday living!