I’m not here to convince you to begin listening to albums. Although, if you do, it will absolutely change your relationship with music. You can’t truly connect with an artist’s work without context. And that the gestalt of a well-crafted album is often far greater than the sum of its parts. But that’s just my opinion.

Enough virtual ink has been spilled around the internet about our diminishing attention spans, the commodification and playlist-ification of music, and the watering down of artistic endeavor; which results in music that is engineered and mass-produced to give a momentary and disposable dopamine hit for the largest common denominator of listeners. The key word in the preceding sentence is ‘listeners’ — it seems like fewer artists are making music for people these days, but can you really blame them? Talent, alone, does not put food on the table. Liz Pelly recently wrote a fantastic piece in The Baffler touching on many of these trends in a lot more detail, I highly recommend you go read it!

For those of you who have been enthusiastically nodding along till now, I would like to introduce you to a project that I’ve been working on — Jams On Toast. It’s a delightful music player, a labor of love by and for the music-obsessed. It is also the only music app that lets you rearrange your albums in any way you’d like — kinda like a virtual record collection.

A quick, 30 second preview of Jams On Toast

I made this app because of two major complaints that people have with music players today. The first: interacting with your digital music library — browsing, management and organization — just seems broken. Having your music arranged alphabetically, by genre, or other such heuristics never made much sense — does AC/DC really need to be followed by Aphex Twin, or Linkin Park by Metallica? Do genre labels even mean anything today? Jams On Toast lets you rearrange your music in a way that’s meaningful to you — just like you would do with physical records and crates.

The second reason is that there are no music players that are focussed on providing a quality experience for those of us who enjoy listening albums cover to cover. Everyone seems to want to shove their recommendation engine or streaming service or social network or integration with <flavor-of-the-month tech platform> into the music listening experience. I’m not saying that these things should not happen. However, I think that for many people who connect deeply with music — amateur musicologists, if you will — these add-ons are not only unnecessary, but distractions which detract from the experience.