Services like Spotify, or the various forms of file sharing out there, would’ve been a total fulfillment of my former desires – retroactively seeming a little too fantastic to even be imagined back then.

But as such wishes have nonetheless been granted, why am I so often left starring at my Spotify search window with a strange feeling of apathy?

An old Persian curse comes to mind: “May all your desires be granted at once”.

With music being so easily available, new types of symptoms have emerged. The feeling of not having enough time to enjoy it all has been labeled “time famine”. This creates a “choice fatigue” – out of e v e r y t h i n g, what should I listen to right now?

I don’t know, it’s kind of like being able to be beamed anywhere in the world at the blink of an eye – perhaps traveling would start to lose its charms after a while. And imagine the amount of nostalgia that would start to be associated with trains, planes, and airports.

Something similar must have happened to the good old cassette tape. This may at least partly explain why cassette tapes have increased in sales in the last 12 months. “We're pretty surprised actually”, TDK’s Craig Hill recently told Sky News. It might seem strange, but isn’t it also kind of understandable?