Audio cassettes were great for albums. For the most part, you had to listen to them the way they were intended. It was like reading a book, not for quotes, but for meaning, which is only accessible if you read the sentences in order until the end. Sure you'd like a track more than the others, but the whole thing was an experience packaged by the artist. Cassettes didn't give the instant gratification of an audio streaming service, but they gave us the ability to carry the sounds that stayed with us. In a walkman. In the cassette player in our cars. Cassettes were meant to be kept, and because they were relatively cheap and sturdy, they democratized access to recorded sound across the world.

Are we trading in nostalgia? Perhaps a little. Pushing a cassette into the slot of a cassette player, hitting rewind and play, is like driving a 1980s Corolla. It is a lot nicer than driving a modern electric car because you feel things and hear sounds and face resistance through it all that we have paid dearly to get rid of. The more frictionless our consumption becomes, the more meaningless it is.

Thing is, not everything we hear stays with us. Most of it passes through, played once, maybe twice, then replaced by whatever comes next. Rarely, something holds. An album, a voice, a moment in a podcast. Sounds that don't just sound good, but disturb the way we see ourselves and the world around us. We call them keepers, and they're the heart of what this platform is.

Recorded sound can be a cue to the mind even more than moving image. "Take the L Train (To 8 Ave.)" by Brooklyn Funk Essentials transports you to Union Square while you're still sitting in Paris. How does that happen? Sound sets the mood: Fuck. Weep. Dance. Be melancholy for no good reason.