Music has been a core part of who I am for about as long as I can remember. For most of the last twenty years, though, that's meant streaming — Spotify's catalogue standing in for a collection, convenient in a way nothing before it was, and easy to stop noticing the actual cost of. You don't own any of it. It's a folder on someone else's computer, and you're paying monthly rent to keep browsing it. The physical relationship I remember from before that — cases you opened, discs you actually put your hands on, spinning in a tray, cover art you looked at properly at full size while the thing it belonged to was playing, liner notes you read because you were sitting there anyway — that went missing.
The CD-and-vinyl revival isn't really nostalgia, or not only that. It's a rejection of the Spotify model specifically — people deciding the rent isn't worth it and buying the thing outright again. I've landed somewhere in between: a real library, ripped and organised through Roon, that I actually own rather than lease — but even a well-kept digital library, looked at on a screen, is just a searchable list. Nothing about a list makes you want to linger. Owning the files back didn't get me the shelf back.
So I tried to build the shelf.
/music is what that turned into: every album is a jewel case, not a thumbnail — the closed case sits in the grid as its front cover, full size, with a thin sliver of spine against its left edge the way a case actually looks resting closed on a table. Opening one is a deliberate act, not a hover state. Older records in the collection actually look older — the covers pick up a bit of sepia and dimming by decade, the plastic case itself gets a faint yellow cast the further back it goes, the way a real case does sitting on a shelf for twenty-odd years. Click a case and it doesn't pop a modal over the page — it slides to the centre of its row, and the cases either side of it rotate and jitter out of the way, the way things actually move when you reach into a shelf to pull one out. Browsing it is closer to standing in front of a collection than typing into a search box, which was the entire point.
<figure class="note-figure"> <img src="/images/how-music-works-kid-a.jpg" alt="An open Radiohead Kid A jewel case on /music, showing the printed spine, the disc, and the album's info panel with play stats, a tracklist, and genre tags" loading="lazy" /> <figcaption>Kid A, open — spine art, disc, and the panel underneath.</figcaption> </figure>
The trick, and the part I like most, is that almost none of that is real in the way the original was. Underneath a page built to feel tactile and slightly analogue is something thoroughly digital: a library exported from Roon as a CSV, synced to the site by a GitHub Action that watches that one file and rebuilds everything when it changes, cross-referenced against MusicBrainz and the Cover Art Archive for the facts and art I don't already have, with iTunes and Last.fm filling in whatever's still missing after that. A separate, live thread runs to Last.fm to know what's actually spinning right now, and to pull out whatever I've played most this week and give it its own permanently-open case next to the stats — a small, fairly obscure nod to This Is My Jam, a site I loved and still miss. None of that infrastructure is visible when you're just looking at a shelf of cases, which is exactly how a shelf should behave — you shouldn't be able to see the cataloguing from the browsing.
It's an odd amount of engineering for a feeling. This is the same impulse as the rest of the site — the part of me that's a designer, that used to just make things for the internet because making them was fun, reaching for the part of me that's been a music obsessive for twenty-five years. Two identities that don't usually get to sit on the same shelf, here actually sharing one.