Music is the oldest type of media we have, both in terms of when it was probably created (40,000 years ago) and when it was first recorded (the late 1800s). Music is in the background of our lives from beginning to end: from birdsongs and train whistles to lullabies and symphonies. And as tricky as it may be to write about music, that hasn’t stopped critics, analysts, theorists, biographers, and fans from trying their hardest anyway. In this episode, we look at our relationships with music and music writing, and how what we know about music informed what we read for this episode. Music is a deeply personal medium in a way that television, film, and even books are not: music is essentially built to access our emotions directly, which means that comfort zones, even in reading about what we like, can be very isolated. We also discuss the future of music, which is speeding rapidly away from a physical medium at a rate we’ve never seen before. How that impacts music writing is anyone’s guess, but we share a few ideas of what we expect to see over the next ten years.