If specialization is your thing, there’s never been a better time to be a music fan. If you want to create your own radio station based on your favorite genre or artist, you can. If you’d like to listen exclusively to chillwave all day, every day, you can. But that’s just the beginning. In the last several years, music formats have begun to mirror the personalized path music has trod in the Internet age. Even within each medium, segmentation abounds: the options for vinyl vary by size, color, and weight; downloaded music can take the form of an MP3 (with its own range of bit rates) or some type of lossless format; and in the realm of streaming, there seems to be a new service—offering even more meta-preferences—popping up every month. More than ever, how we listen to music can seem just as revealing as what we’re listening to.

Each format has its own cheerleaders and naysayers, of course. For example, vinyl is seen by some as the reclamation of listening in its purest, most immersive, and tangible form; for others, it is utter snobbery. But it’s not that simple or binary. In fact, the BBC broke vinyl collectors down into eight separate tribes last year: the nostalgic collector, the new buyer, the audiophile, the young enthusiast, the romantic musician, the digger-turned-DJ, the digger-turned-dealer, and the sighing skeptic. (Not to mention the countless permutations between those tribes.)

There’s no typical downloader, either—and this goes for fans and artists alike. Twenty-five-year-old Yannick Ilunga of eclectic R&B act Petite Noir tells me he prefers MP3s because he’s tethered to his laptop all the time, while my 65-year-old father-in-law used his first iTunes gift card to buy Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” because it’s over eight minutes long and he wanted to get the most song for his money. Or perhaps you got a download code after buying an album on vinyl, and you want to be able to listen on your computer, too. And then there’s grumpy-old-man audiophiles like Neil Young, who swears only his Pono player and files can provide the high-resolution experience we need to truly appreciate music (even if a scientific study determined the difference between CD-standard recordings and high-resolution recordings is virtually undetectable).