You’re in a restaurant or a store or a bar, and from somewhere you can’t quite pinpoint, a song starts playing. Not the main sound, but underneath it, or bleeding through from the kitchen, or through the wall from the next room. It catches your ear. Three seconds of it. Just enough to matter.
Your brain lights up. You know this song. You think you know this song. You’ve heard it before, but not recently, and not in this context, and you can’t remember the title or the artist, just the melody, just the feeling of it.
You spend the next 20 minutes trying to find it. You ask the bartender, the waiter, the person sitting next to you. Sometimes they know. Usually they don’t. You leave the place and it stays with you. You hum it in your car. You try to describe it to a friend. You might spend hours later looking through your music library, trying to match the melody to something in your head.
And eventually, you either find it or you don’t.
I grew up in this world. I was a DJ in Miami in the early 90s, and before Google, before Shazam, before the world became instantly searchable, this was how music discovery actually worked. You heard something. You hunted for it. The hunt was part of the experience.
The Romance of Not Knowing
There was something almost sacred about that search. It meant your ears were active. It meant you were paying attention. It meant that music could surprise you, could arrive unbidden from a stranger’s car speaker or a passing radio, and become part of your life through effort and luck, not algorithm.
I remember hearing a track at a club in 1992 that I couldn’t identify. Four measures of it. The DJ dropped it as a bridge, a transition. I went up to him afterward. He didn’t speak English well. I described the sound as best I could. He thought maybe it was something from a bootleg compilation. We never found it. But I heard echoes of it in other songs for years. It shaped how I thought about production, even though I never knew what it was.
That couldn’t happen now. Now Shazam is a reflex. You hear three seconds of anything, you hold up your phone, and in two seconds you have the song, the artist, a link to streaming, the producer’s name, the year of release, reviews, and a recommendation algorithm telling you 47 other songs you might like.
I’m not going to pretend that’s not useful. It is. But something got lost.
What Changed
The Shazam era made music instantly knowable, which sounds great in theory. In practice, it killed a certain kind of curiosity. It killed the hunt. It made every song equally accessible, which means nothing is precious. If you can name and possess any song in 3 seconds, the emotional weight of actually finding something diminishes.
I think about this when I’m out with my kids. They hear a song somewhere, pull out their phones, identify it, and three seconds later they’re listening to the full track on Spotify. It takes the mystery out of it. There’s no story. There’s no “I heard this once and spent months looking for it.” The experience is flattened.
The other thing that changed is that music discovery used to be serendipitous. You had to be listening. You had to be in the right place, with the right DJ, at the right moment. Now, every song that was ever recorded is always available. Recommendations follow you. Playlists are infinite.
What this means is that you’ll never again hear a song in a passing car that becomes an obsession because you can’t find it. You’ll never have that moment in your 40s when an old song comes on the radio and unlocks a memory you’d forgotten you had. You’ll never discover an entire genre because someone made you a bootleg mix on a cassette that you listened to 100 times trying to figure out what half of the tracks were.
You’ll just have access. Which is not the same as discovery.
The Still Searching
I’m not completely nostalgic about it. I can find anything I want now, and that’s useful. I can pursue a thread of musicology that might have taken me years in the library, now takes me 20 minutes on my laptop.
But sometimes, in a bar or a car, I’ll hear something and I’ll deliberately not Shazam it. I’ll just listen. I’ll try to remember it. I’ll see if I can find it later, through actual thought and effort. Usually I do. But sometimes I don’t.
And those ones are the ones I remember. Not because they’re better or worse than the songs I find through search, but because the hunt became part of the song’s meaning. The song is tied to the experience of wanting it, and not being sure I’d ever hear it again.
My daughter asked me the other day why I don’t just Shazam everything. I told her: because sometimes the mystery is better than the answer. Because a song that surprises you is more surprising than a song you’ve pre-verified. Because the things you have to work for feel different in your hands.
She looked at me like I was describing the ice age.
But I meant it. There’s a track I heard in a coffee shop in Barcelona in 2008 that I still haven’t identified. For years, I tried to find it. Now I’ve stopped looking. I just remember how it sounded, how it made me feel in that moment, in that city, at that moment in my life. And that’s enough. That’s maybe better than knowing its name.
The mystery is the song, sometimes. And we’ve traded a lot of mystery for a lot of convenience.
