My car has a built-in hard drive for indie music

This is not a review of a Mini Cooper, nor is it a technical observation of smart device functions. It’s more about how I started to realize the importance of supporting artists and how thoughtful things were, and how this becomes less and less.

My two-day journey began with a longing for a CD-like experience in my car again. Unfortunately, my new car no longer has a built-in CD player. I never wanted a new car because I loved the classic cockpit of my Mini R54 and the orange-red monochrome LCD. But sometimes, things have to change, even against your wishes.

However, my new car has other cool features, and I figured it could read music on USB sticks. I remembered those cool Sony car radios you can buy online, where you can put mixtapes on a USB, and it plays them, which was the closest thing in my mind to the old CD collection I had.

Now, I faced the problem of not having a CD reader to load my music onto the USB stick I bought a few months ago. Additionally, most indie artists have limited, sold-out CD releases, if they have any at all. So, I put the whole project aside for half a year because I didn’t want to just pirate it, especially from indie artists who barely make money on Spotify.

I hoped a solution would just come by, and I wouldn’t have to work for it. But that’s not how old tech used to work, and I didn’t want to take the easy way out because there is a beauty in accomplishing even small hurdles.

So, I found this website called Bandcamp. After researching how to download one of my favorite lofi albums, I was surprised to find it was free. Like, 0 Euros legally free. High quality, FLAC, or whatever format you wanted, free. But I couldn’t just let it be. It was my first-ever lofi album, and it helped me through hard times, and I have so many memories attached to it. I found joy in giving money for good music. I thought that if I had met the artist in real life, I would have at least spent a coffee or two. So, this was the minimum I could do. And I did this several times with other artists who were in my Spotify Wrapped from the last few years.

I think this joy was not comparable to the „joy of buying things.“ It had more connection, like the joy of going to a concert, but in my own bedroom.

But that’s not the end of my journey.

When I finally bought and loaded my music onto the USB stick and into my car, my car asked to import the music. I first thought it was just a way of indexing so I could search it better, but I was wrong. I played around, checked out some settings, and newly added features that I didn’t have before because my phone was too new for my car’s Bluetooth to support every feature correctly.

And there it was. A setting to see the free storage space in my car. Around 20,000 MB. I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect it to be that much. I know map data can be pretty big, but this amount seemed reserved for music. And then I just pulled out (safely) the USB stick, and the music was still playing without the USB. I didn’t import the music’s index. I imported the whole library from my USB! How cool is that? It makes sense afterward, and it doesn’t seem like the biggest deal, but 20 GB for a 2015 car seems like a lot to me. And there, I found joy in discovering new hidden things by just trying. No Googling or anything. Just based on trying and reporting my findings afterward.

There, I feel that older tech was better. Not because I’m starting to be in an age where I can first feel nostalgia, it just seems that people thought more about what could be helpful, about the things you use daily. Or, to be completely out of context, like on a Game Boy. You couldn’t just fix it via a software update for bugs or missing features. The things had to be there when they were in the wild. And now my expensive mobile phone can’t even back up photos to iCloud without glitching out.

I’m still experiencing the world. I’m still navigating who I want to be in the future. But I think I want to take this with me: think thoroughly to help people and appreciate the world around you.