*This story is an excerpt from Matty Lamp’s senior Media Communications capstone blog, “Let’s Get Physical: a Music Collection Exploration Series”

With the new year already introducing big changes in politics, pop culture and consumer habits, some online users are turning to a life of simpler digital habits and dubbing 2026 “the year of analog.”

On December 22, 2025, singer Charlie Puth took to X to say “2026 will be the year of analog. It will be the first year in awhile where it feels weird to be on your phone all day.

I predict less phones at concerts too…”

While it might be too soon to tell if collective screen times and phone usage will decline in 2026, the discussion surrounding negative mental health and excessive phone and social media use has been around for years. Notably, it was found in a study from researchers at University of Texas at Austin earlier in 2025 that when participants blocked the internet from their phones for two weeks, 73% of people reported better mental health and 73% reported better subjective well-being.

As of the first week of January 2026, the hashtag #physicalmedia has 194.8k posts on TikTok and is filled with users declaring that they are “going analog for 2026” and ditching social media and internet streaming services in favor of offline activities. In many of these videos, users are showing off their collection of CDs, mp3 players, portable DVD players and cassette tapes that they are using instead of music platforms.

Other users are taking the hobby route of the discussion, posting ideas for non-digital hobbies and activities to take part in to get away from doomscrolling, such as crocheting, sketching, and filling out word search books. There has been an additional, parallel trend that has sparked from this idea of people making “analog bags” filled with non-digital activities of their choice.

Of course, both of these aspects of “the year of analog” have garnered their respective discourses. Mainly, some users find the movement to be just another trendy lifestyle for people to try for a few weeks and get rid of when they don’t find it to be as convenient.

“I genuinely don’t understand why people just don’t use their phones? I ditched the mp3 player and have had my entire 12k songs on my phone ever since,” user @dr._rockso posted under original poster @lislevonrhoman’s TikTok showing off the functions on their iPod Classic. Rhoman replied “I don’t have the space for that” and “…I’ve had this iPod for over a decade – why not use it !”

On a TikTok posted by user @klemensvonmetterdih, another iPod Classic is featured with the sentence “your sign to get an ipod to stop giving money to spotify +be cooler”. This sparked a mixed reaction from other users, with some replying with photos of their own mp3 players in solidarity, but others expressed confusion and disapproval.

“Or just pirate the music on your already owned device? No need to buy a completely unnecessary different one??”, said user @tbonestbone420. Another user, @buzzcutaari, posted a YouTube video thumbnail as a reaction image, which had the title “We’re living in a performative epidemic”.

Of course, there is a discussion to be had about how normalized overconsumption is on social media, even when the products featured are found secondhand. But as someone with a years-long infatuation with physical media and technology from the 2000s, I just had to hop on the bandwagon.

Recently, I have had the realization that I’m dissatisfied with how much time I spend scrolling through social media throughout the day, especially on days where I don’t have much going on (i.e.: when I am stuck at home during winter break).

While it is crucial that I still participate in social media daily, whether that be for communicating with friends or keeping up-to-date with breaking news and pop culture updates, it has become exhausting being met with constant notifications and headlines of impending doom. As a journalist, sometimes you want to have a way to take a break from the constant and infinite stream of information while keeping the balance of communication in your life.

Lucky for me, I saw this new resolution as the perfect opportunity to try out something I’ve had in the back of my mind for months but never committed to: using an mp3 player, just like when I was a young child growing up in the late 2000s, to listen to my favorite music instead of streaming.

For those of you who don’t know, I am a huge music fan, and I am constantly on the pulse of new releases to listen to with my friends and write about for my monthly album review column for my campus newspaper, “Footnotes”. However, when I’m not doing that, I’m listening to my favorite tracks through both my CD and vinyl record collection and my Spotify playlists.

While we continue to see some consumers pushing back against companies implementing new (and often needless) AI projects and taking part in other harmful practices, Spotify is no stranger to the discussion.

Last year, the streaming titan has been involved in multiple controversies, including but not limited to, creating AI-generated artists to spotlight on the platform, a class-action lawsuit accusing them of accepting payment to push artists more in people’s curated algorithms, allowing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to run ads for its agency to listeners of Spotify’s free version, and Co-Founder and Executive Chairman Daniel Ek investing $693.6 million in an AI military drone company in the face of rising global tensions through Ek’s venture capital firm.

That being said, my desire to give my brain a much-needed break paired with wanting to back up my music in case I wanted to go cold-turkey from Spotify in the near future led me to search eBay for the perfect pre-loved mp3 player that spoke to younger me.

I found a nearly-mint hot pink iPod Nano for $35 after shipping costs, and I waited a week for it to arrive. In the meantime, I spent that week searching Reddit for the most effective music piracy tool (sorry, I am not above it.) After finding two crowdfunded mp3 converter sites, I took my favorite songs from my most-played Spotify playlists, downloaded them one by one, and renamed and sorted them based on which albums they were originally part of.

After my iPod came in the mail, I connected it to my laptop, synced the 308 songs over, and kissed my ad-blocker on the forehead goodnight for its hard work.

My implicit goal for using my iPod is to keep myself from getting distracted by scrolling when I should be focusing on other activities. Since I usually stream music through Spotify on my phone, I am always looking at my screen to select certain songs and playlists, which leads me to see unneeded notifications, click them, and get sucked into Instagram.

I’m hoping that this new habit will allow me to sustain another, related goal that I have for this year: replace my scrolling with more fruitful and productive activities, like reading. I find that as much as I love reading in-theory, I can never get my brain to calm down after a long day of work and classes in order to focus and retain the information…

To read the full story, check out Let’s Get Physical!