This is something that happened to me recently. I have an one hour drive to and from work each night.  Two hours in the car five days a week is a lot of time. Talk radio is fine, but for the most part I have my iPod plugged into my car stereo.  I have a 160GB iPod which is way too big for me. At first, I had it completely full of music.  I like to listen to my entire library on random and having so much music on there was not working. See here. So I cut it down quite a bit. After a while, I started getting sick of my new music selection. I just flat out didn’t want to listen to any of it. This was a problem.  I had two hours in my car without anything I wanted to listen to. Screw the radio, I can’t stand it. Here are a few pointers to get yourself interested in your music again.

I decided that I was going to completely clear out my iPod. I erased the entire thing and gave myself only 5GB of space.  I found that this actually worked pretty well. What this does is it forces you to stop listening to everything you own all the time. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.  I would be listening to some Pig Destroyer and think to myself, “Man some Misery Index would be great right now.” Then get all pissed off because I took it off my iPod. But that was the point.  I found myself yearning for music that before I would constantly skip over. Or how about some Cut Copy after listening to Chromeo?  Nope, sorry. Over time I would give myself 5GB more. And then maybe 10GB next.  You get the idea. I found this to be very successful in getting me interested in my music again. Slowly over time the amount of music grows as I desperately need it in my life again.

There are many other ways to listen to music then just your music library. Internet radio is pretty awesome. Pandora.com and last.fm are two of the better options. Another thing you can try is to focus on whole genres of music instead of just artists.  Reggae was a genre that I was completely unfamiliar with and I wanted to learn more about it.  I download reggae podcasts, researched artists, and listen to as much reggae I could that was not Bob Marley.  I discovered that I didn’t get as into it as I thought I would. O’well, I’ll try Klezmer next.