2025 ALBUMS

Because actually thinking about this for ourselves is kinda waaay more fun

Daniel Jasper Parr
December 30, 2025

If you want to skip my short diatribe, you can scroll down to see the albums and other media that was most important to me this year :)

ANYWHO, Since I cancelled my Tidal subscription this year, I’ve been going back through the process of re-discovering many of the albums that I got to know during my three or so years of streaming music instead of owning it.

I really don’t want to come off all high-and-mighty about this, but it has been a genuinely wonderful experience to do this and I think that everyone who cares about music should give it a try.

If you’re worried about the cost of getting access to all your favourite music again, I believe it is substantially more beneficial to the artists you love for you to pirate all the albums/songs you want to listen to, and then dedicate the monthly cost of a streaming subscription to either buying it back, or buying new music. This is not a blanket endorsement of piracy per se - but a recognition that us continuing to pay for music streaming without supporting artists directly is substantially worse for artists!!

With Bandcamp on its second or third giant corporate owner, its future too is uncertain. This is why I’ve joined Subvert as an artist member/owner - and if you release music, I encourage you to do so too! It’s a worthy experiment in scaling the cooperative model to insulate ourselves from the late stage capitalist antics of the “music” industry.

Anyway, let me know what albums were important to you this year!! Here’s my lists:

The 8 New (to me) Albums That Were Most Important To Me This Year (not in any order):

Some Older (to me) Albums That Came Back Into My Life

Podcasts: