This Was Our Algorithm

The first record I ever bought was Especially For You by Kylie and Jason 🙈 And before anyone tries to rewrite history and claim their first purchase was Nirvana or The Smiths, I’m going to say it proudly.

I was a kid and I saved my pocket money especially to go down to Woolworths with my mum to buy it. I remember standing in the shop holding it like treasure. Turning it over. Reading the back. Checking the price again. Handing over actual cash. Walking out feeling like I’d just made a decision about who I was.

Because that’s what it was. It wasn’t just music. It was identity forming in real time.

We didn’t have curated playlists built by data scientists studying our micro-behaviours. We had choice. And once we chose, we committed. You bought the tape. Or the CD. Or if you were fancy, the vinyl.

You took it home. You opened it carefully. You read every word in the sleeve. You stared at the album artwork like it meant something. Because it did.

You played it on repeat. You learned every lyric. You knew the bridge. The key change. The quiet bit before the chorus explodes. You didn’t skip after twelve seconds because the intro was slow. You sat with it.

And that’s the part that fascinates me now.

We had friction.

You had to save for it. You had to go to a shop. You had to physically own it.

You couldn’t flick endlessly between songs. You couldn’t outsource your taste to an algorithm that told you what you might like next.

You built your taste. Slowly.

Music told people who you were. The indie kids. The pop girls. The rock boys. The ones who insisted their band was underground and misunderstood.

The dramatic ballad phase when everything felt like heartbreak even if it was just someone not sitting next to you in maths.

Music was tribal.

It was social currency.

It was how you found your people.

You’d walk into someone’s bedroom and scan the posters.

Madonna? Interesting.

Take That? Okay, we see you.

Nirvana? You were deep.

Music was how we signalled belonging before we had social media bios to do it for us. And here’s something else we had.

Privacy.

You could play the same song 47 times in a row and nobody knew. You could cry to it. You could obsess over it. You could reinvent yourself next month and there was no digital footprint following you around reminding everyone what phase you were in.

Our childhood and teen years weren’t archived. They were lived. No one was recording you singing into a hairbrush and uploading it. No one was analysing your taste data and feeding it back to you in predictive form.

It was messy.

It was imperfect.

It was yours 🥰

Now music is infinite.

Every song ever written is available instantly.

No waiting. No saving. No friction. Skip. Next. Skip. Next.

And I’m not anti-technology. I use Spotify. I love discovering new artists. I’m not pretending we should all go back to rewinding cassettes with a pencil like it was an Olympic sport.

But I do think something subtle has shifted. When everything is instant, nothing feels scarce.

When nothing feels scarce, nothing feels sacred. We didn’t just consume music. We experienced it. You waited for your song to come on the radio.

You sat through the DJ talking over the intro, praying they wouldn’t ruin the first line. You pressed record at exactly the right moment and hoped your timing was perfect.

There was anticipation.

And that’s why a song from 30 years ago can stop you mid-conversation.

A few opening notes and suddenly you’re not in a boardroom.

You’re a kid again. Bedroom door shut. Posters on the wall. Volume just loud enough that your mum shouts upstairs.

Music doesn’t just trigger memory. It resurrects identity.

You don’t just remember the song. You remember who you were when it mattered.

The version of you before responsibilities. Before constant notifications. Before life got loud in a different way.

That’s powerful.

And it’s communal.

When someone says, “Oh my God, I love that song,” what they’re really saying is, “That moment meant something to me too.”

A stadium full of strangers singing the same chorus.

Different lives.

Same lyrics.

That’s connection.

Real, unfiltered, not-curated connection.

And I think that’s why nostalgia hits so hard right now.

Not because the 80s or 90s were objectively better. But because attention was different. We gave music our full attention. And in return, it gave us something solid. Now attention is fragmented.

Music competes with notifications, scrolling, messages, endless content. It becomes background. But back then, it was foreground. It filled the room.It filled us.

That first record we bought with our own money wasn’t just a purchase. It was a declaration.

This is who I am.

This is what I feel.

This is my tribe.

Mine happened to be Kylie and Jason.

No shame.

Just child sincerity.

So now I’m curious. What was the first record you bought with your own money?

The real one. Not the one that sounds cool in hindsight. 🙈