Player:
Usually: Apple Music, despite a lot of annoyances
I like its Flipped playlists (rap songs from a single artist with the songs they sample), and "Radio" for individual artists.
Rarely: Spotify (I keep an account despite everything I hate about it)
Even more rarely: Bandcamp
Occasionally for music videos: YouTube. It does pretty well for film scores.
Drastic action: Finding an MP3, though I can't think of the last time I did that. My brother is even pickier than me about music. He'll find MP3s of songs with skits in them and delete the skits, and upload them to his online music player. He will "ban" artists he finds are morally reprehensible. He has even more honour than I do.
Devices:
iPhone
Mac
Volume Control smartly (whenever I'm playing music) adjusts the volume from my keyboard on the speakers the music is playing on
AirPods Sound Quality Fixer And Battery Life Enhancer (for when I used my AirPods)
Headphones:
Sony WH-1000XM4. Surely there are better headphones, but these ones are pretty good, and they're the reason I started listening to so much more music starting in 2021.
Sonos speakers (two at my desk, one below my TV, but I don't use that for music much)
Apple's wired EarPods. I had tried AirPods but I had a bad first (and second) impression with them. Wired EarPods, circa 2025, sound pretty good, and they're not expensive.
Tracking: Last.fm [my scrobbling stack]
Concerts: I track artists that I know about using Songkick and, to a lesser extent, Bandsintown. I track the concerts I've been to with Setlist.fm and Concert Archives.
Reviews: I rely pretty heavily on Pitchfork (as of January 2026, I pay for a subscription) and, to a lesser extent, The Quietus (I take their yearly top 100 albums list, shuffle it, and try to listen to them over the course of the next year). I'm trying to branch out to Hearing Things and other sites.
Music news: Pitchfork's news has been good in alerting me that a band will go on tour or will have a new album out soon. I usually find out about a band touring on Pitchfork way before Songkick. Songkick lets me track individual artists a bit easier. I don't really care about recommendation algorithms, so I try to ignore them.
I use Shazam a lot, but I hardly ever look back at it.