You might have seen the news reports with tongue-in-cheek segments noting the uptick in people collecting and listening to cassette tapes. Yes, those fiddly plastic rectangles I thought we'd left long behind once people figured out how to put a CD player in a car.

Against all my personal expectations that the fad would pass, vinyl records continue to be popular and there are hobbyists all over the world saying "no thanks" to digital music and prefer dropping a needle onto a vinyl disc.

While gameplay is the most important part of any game, music is an essential part of setting the mood or getting you pumped for the action that's to come. Over the years I've played thousands of games, and in a few rare cases the music was so good I had to stop what I was doing, and listen.

I'm not writing this piece to say that streaming music is bad, but when everything is handed to you, there's no real discovery, just mere consumption. The emotional bond that came from curating an MP3 collection, from physically or digitally managing files and playlists, is largely gone.

Earth Day and Spotify don't appear to share anything in common at first glance, but the way I use it to celebrate our planet is to create reminders of our planet's wonders, in addition to learning more about global warming.

YouTube Premium offers a compelling package for anyone streaming music and watching videos. It delivers a full YouTube Music subscription, ad-free videos on YouTube, and several additional features like offline playback. However, I want a few more features if I'm going to keep paying for it.