They told me student interest in college radio has dramatically increased in recent years. Stations that once struggled to fill airtime are now turning people away, shortening shows, alternating time slots, and running training programs just to keep up with the demand from aspiring student DJs.

[..]

“I’m 21. I grew up in the age of algorithms. The way music is right now scares me because of the rise of AI. Not even AI made music (I hate it) but even just ‘Daily Mix, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5.’ It’s not made by someone. It’s made by an algorithm. I wish more of that stuff was person curated.”—Mari McLaughlin, WHRW (Binghamton)

This really spoke to me. I feel like a product with the algorithm suggestion which even on Spotify, it's so hit and miss. It feels like it suggest me to listen to an aleardy popular music or music that's optimise to be used on a TikTok video.

I brought an MP3 Player like an year ago as:

• to conserve battery life on my phone
• Google Pixel didn't have MircoSD slot or headphone jack without use of headphone USB-C dongle

So I look around for any good second-hand MP3 players which I did look at the iPods because of DankPod's video which he often mods the iPod. I did tried to mod it but it was annoying to do and I have ended up damaging it which is easy to do when you are trying to mod the iPod to use an SD-Card adapter instead of the hard drive which no longer works. Instead of doing a second try and buying another iPod which can cost around £30-60 depending on the model in question, I just brought a SanDisk's Sansa Clip Zip which has MircoSD slot and also can have Rockbox flashed. I mainly have Rockbox just for the themes and last.fm Scrobble plugin. It's bit clunky the menus but you do get used to it and it has a lot of options in the settings which I recommend reading the manuals on their website about it.

My experience with it is that I used my phone less for listening to music has I have more storage for my .flac music library. It hasn't replaced any of the music streaming services for me as I used two of them for different purposes. For my MP3 Player, it's music I already owned and at least liked the song so I got an album if I have already got it and streaming services to discover music I hadn't listen to or got just yet.

I have been trying to think of some stuff to post and also how to keep the momentum going to make it remain active. One of the things I do want to say as it's a rough idea and this has not been fully thought out as I want to know IF there's enough people that do want to do it either weekly/monthly basis, what the sort of topics they want to discuss or be more a causal drop-in chat.

If you interested in any of the two, please let me know which one you prefer. Any feedback and suggestion, as long as it is constructive, is welcome! I want to make this community not just what I want to see but also other people want to see on the Gen-Z Community as well.

That being said, I want to thanks everyone who joined this community, even ones that interact with post and leaving a comment. It's less then a week that I made this community and already, I'm seeing it being quite active. I hope that I can keep the momentum going and see it grow to be so much more beautiful!

I'm 2001 though so I guess slightly older gen z.

It's been awhile since I last brought a CD and it was Meteora by Linkin Park. I'm very late when it comes with listening to music, flim and TV-Shows in general but I did really enjoy that album so much and need to listen more to their music. Feel free to suggest me some music from theirs to check out. There's something nice about actually owning the physical media instead on hoping various streaming services wouldn't have them removed. I tend to rip my CDs and store them in .flac format which is little overkill but I see it as if I want to play it on my phone, I can convert it to .mp3 to save storage on my phone which I can hear the difference if I'm focusing on the drums but otherwise, it's does the job done and sound alright.

One of my favourite things about collecting physical media in general is bonus content, even if it meh at best. For example, 'Oops... I Did It Again' is 'enhanced CD' which has wallpaper, crappy Flash screensaver for Windows and highly compressed Lucky music video. For DVD version of Tomb Raider, there's demo for Tomb Raider Chronicles.

I been looking for a decent PS2 Controller for a while as I brought the cheap third-party controller which wasn't nice. Red is one of my favourite colour so seeing it on eBay made me really happy and I know I wanted it.

One of the Mac computer is my favourite looking transparent tech which screams Y2K

I used to play alot on the PlayStation 3 which I love playing Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing. One of my favourite character is BD Joe which I love how happy he is and wish I could be like him. My parent notice I love playing as him and brought Crazy Taxi on PS3 which not the best port ever but it made me into bit of retro-gaming as well as have music taste in some rock/punk music.

sorry for being like the annoying yt comments yelling "FIRST".

Also I want to ask - Am i even gen z?

I was born between 2000 and 2005. looking up online says that genz is born in mid to late 2000s, and i can get to that by technicalities, but year of birth does not really reflect on one's nature.

So if i want to know if I am gen z or not, what do i do (and i do not want checlists, etc).

If being unable to find employment despite graduating with good grades is one, then I a guess I am one.