How do you primarily consume media when on a long drive? (2025 Edition)

[ZLoth]

I thought I would ask how you "consume media" when you are traveling more than a few minutes. For purposes of this thread, I'm throwing a wide net and defining media as being either music, audiobooks, podcasts, dramas, or what have you. If you are listening to a radio station through a mobile app (e.g. RadioGarden), that is considered Streaming media, not Over-The-Air Terrestrial Radio.

[ZLoth]

Since I self-host my media including music and audiobooks and I have unlimited data on my mobile plan, I'm listening primarily to audiobooks while driving, and am streaming them from my own server to my phone.

[kphoger]

The sound of the road only.

Only if we start getting drowsy will we turn on the radio or pop in a CD.

[JayhawkCO]

Occasionally it's streamed media, but more often it's downloaded as our long drives tend to be in the mountains where we'll lose service.

[Bruce]

Podcasts and audiobooks through my phone, connected via Bluetooth, is my primary choice for long and uninterrupted stretches. For shorter hops, I'm putting on music from my USB drive that is plugged into the car, or finding a local radio station with normal music or news.

[SEWIGuy]

I have about 20 preset SXM channels and I continuously go through them. Music only.

[Max Rockatansky]

A lot of places I go are radio and cellular dead zones.  Some peace and quiet never bothered me much.  I do listen to a lot of AM Sports radio when available though.

[oscar]

A mix of music downloaded to my smartphone, and news and sports programming on SXM satellite radio. Better than having to search out terrestrial radio programming in unfamiliar territory, though I'll do that to get traffic reports when in or approaching major metro areas (something that's mostly disappeared from SXM after the Sirius/XM merger).

[1995hoo]

I don't stream anything. On rare occasions in local driving I might play something I downloaded to my phone, but as a general matter I don't have much music on my phone. I mostly listen to music either on XM radio or on CD/DVD-Audio (depending on which car I'm driving), though sometimes I'll tune in sports on XM as well. I seldom listen to FM radio except in local driving when I want to tune in the traffic reports on WTOP. For long-distance driving I generally don't know which stations have traffic reports and I'm not usually inclined to scan everything to find one.

One of my wife's cars has a hard drive onto which CDs can be ripped, but she hasn't ripped very many to it, in part because she finds it hard to select music from that system while driving (I agree with her). On some longer trips we have instead plugged in an iPod, although that suffers from the same problem many more times over.

[TheHighwayMan3561]

A mix of my personal music collection, streaming media that I can't purchase, and radio. As a radio fan I do enjoy the local flair of different stations, although obviously corporate consolidations have eliminated a lot of that in recent years.

I do have a SXM subscription, but I found on my California trip in 2023 that it started to get very stale for longer multiday trips vs. regional day trips. A lot of the news/talk channels rerun the same small handful of programs throughout the day, and by nighttime there is very little live or first-run programming airing.

[JayhawkCO]

My downloaded stuff is largely podcasts that I have subscriptions to, so Spotify auto-downloads it.

[oscar]

For long-distance driving I generally don't know which stations have traffic reports and I'm not usually inclined to scan everything to find one.

There are a few metros where I know where to get traffic/weather reports, like Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and New York City.

[74/171FAN]

Mainly Spotify these days (mostly podcasts and music).  If NASCAR is racing, I will try to listen to PRN/MRN via the NASCAR app.

[1995hoo]

For long-distance driving I generally don't know which stations have traffic reports and I'm not usually inclined to scan everything to find one.

There are a few metros where I know where to get traffic/weather reports, like Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and New York City.

In today's world, it should be easy enough to be able to find that information via a Google search or similar before beginning one's trip. I just generally forget to do so.

[Rothman]

Stream YouTube with Firefox/Ublock

[Scott5114]

It depends on where I am and who I'm with. I like terrestrial radio because it feels like I have more of a connection to the places that I'm traveling through. It's fun listening to the ads in some city I'm not familiar with, hearing mom-and-pop stores giving out addresses I have no clue where they are. If I can't find anything good on the radio, I have a bunch of MP3s on my phone that I'll listen to instead. If I'm with my wife, she'll usually try and stream something, often a podcast but sometimes music.

Now that that's out of the way...am I the only one who kind of hates the terminology of "consuming" media? For one thing, with the pedantic-AARoads-user hat on, you're not consuming anything because the media is still there after you're done experiencing it. For another, a lot of the people who put out music, books, film, etc. consider themselves artists and the thing they're putting out to be a work of art. It kind of debases the work as a piece of art to use the same terminology you'd use to describe something like a box of dishwasher detergent or a block of store-brand cheese. If I put out something for a mass audience, I would do it because I hoped people would like it and find meaning in it, not because I wanted them to think about it like something they got at the grocery store and accidentally left in the back of the fridge until it wilted.

[gonealookin]

SiriusXM music, or sometimes a live sports broadcast, streamed via the phone app.  I dropped their satellite service some time ago.  When the streaming fails (happens sometimes in Nevada or in the Sierra Nevada) I go with "sound of the road only".

I have barely listened to terrestrial radio at all since I got XM, pre-Sirius merger, fairly early on (2005 or so).

[ZLoth]

For long-distance driving I generally don't know which stations have traffic reports and I'm not usually inclined to scan everything to find one.

I have lived in Dallas for six years now, and I don't even know which stations have traffic reports. Then again, I'm relying on Google Maps for traffic reports, and I'm rarely on the road during commute hours.

Now that that's out of the way...am I the only one who kind of hates the terminology of "consuming" media?

If you got a better word choice, please let me know. The purpose of the poll isn't the type of media you are listening to, but rather the method of how you receive it. As you can imagine, certain types of media such as audiobooks wouldn't work in a broadcast situation, but listening to it while commuting to/from work that is 45 minutes away is perfect. Either you pay for the product, or you are the product (target audience) for advertising.

[Takumi]

Depends on the car.

Acura TL: downloaded music (phone connection through USB) or CDs
Honda Prelude: CDs
Lexus GS: radio currently not working, but the replacement aftermarket unit I have (but haven't installed yet) has CD and USB function.

[kphoger]

I seldom listen to FM radio except in local driving when I want to tune in the traffic reports on WTOP. For long-distance driving I generally don't know which stations have traffic reports and I'm not usually inclined to scan everything to find one.

I'm rarely driving anywhere I need to know the traffic report and, in the rare case I'd find it useful, I wouldn't really know a good alternate route anyway.  But, beyond that ...

I like terrestrial radio because it feels like I have more of a connection to the places that I'm traveling through. It's fun listening to the ads in some city I'm not familiar with, hearing mom-and-pop stores giving out addresses I have no clue where they are.

... I also kind of enjoy the act of flipping through radio stations in an unfamiliar area.  If my wife and I are getting drowsy and want to turn on the radio, we might feel like finding a station with country music or contemporary Christian music or 80's and 90's stuff, but we have no clue what stations have what we're looking for and flipping through them isn't just a keep-us-awake part of the process, but it has its own sort of appeal.  When we discover that 90.3 FM is the Acme Christian Radio Network affiliate in Anytown, it makes me feel just a little bit connected to the Anytown area, even if we're just driving through on our way somewhere else.

am I the only one who kind of hates the terminology of "consuming" media? For one thing, with the pedantic-AARoads-user hat on, you're not consuming anything because the media is still there after you're done experiencing it. For another, a lot of the people who put out music, books, film, etc. consider themselves artists and the thing they're putting out to be a work of art. It kind of debases the work as a piece of art to use the same terminology you'd use to describe something like a box of dishwasher detergent or a block of store-brand cheese. If I put out something for a mass audience, I would do it because I hoped people would like it and find meaning in it, not because I wanted them to think about it like something they got at the grocery store and accidentally left in the back of the fridge until it wilted.

But we also speak of "devouring" a good book or "tearing through" a movie trilogy.  Both of those terms are similar to "consuming", in that they hyperbolically imply material destruction.  To me, it's natural that a word closely related to eating is used for something that we 'ingest' through our eyes or ears.

[thspfc]

Spotify. Either podcasts or music.

[epzik8]

iPhone through speakers via aux cord. If I could afford SiriusXM it'd be that.

[Road Hog]

My personal tradition when making the 3-hour slog from Shreveport to Lafayette was to play a System of a Down CD the whole way. There were no radio stations of note the entire way other than the outset where Shreveport had a pretty good album rock station.

There's no way I could just raw-dog it and listen to the pavement.

[Bobby5280]

I'm almost always listening to music when I drive. I voted "physical media/tapes and CDs" -but the physical media I use is a solid state hard disc loaded with almost my entire music collection. I have several hundred CDs I ripped in LCPM WAV format. I made copies as high bit rate MP3 files; I wish the system in my truck could play FLAC lossless files. FLAC files are equal to CD quality, but have the advantage of being able to hold metadata, album cover art, etc. Uncompressed WAV files can't do that.

I still have a Sirius|XM subscription (for the time being); I listen to it most often on the daily commute and other shorter drives. The audio quality is inferior to a 320kbs MP3 file or a 706kbs FLAC file. Long drives allow listening to entire albums. The SSD gets cued up for that.

I can stream music from my phone to my truck's stereo system via Bluetooth, but it just doesn't sound as good as the SSD hard wired into a USB port. There is something about the Bluetooth connection that is altering the audio quality and I don't like it.

I have an Amazon Music Unlimited subscription, but mainly use that when I'm at work or at the gym. I would only use it on the road if I knew I wasn't going to be driving through any mobile phone service dead zones. Streaming Amazon Music while driving thru Northern New Mexico doesn't work so well.

For anyone playing music thru a USB memory stick, I think it's worth the extra money to get a solid state hard disc. The little memory sticks may be cheap, but they have serious limitations. They're far slower than a SSD. And a car stereo system may "see" only so many song files on a memory stick. I tried giving my brother a 128GB USB memory stick loaded with a bunch of my music. His stereo system would read only so many of the folders on the memory stick. Dividing it up on multiple 32GB sticks worked better. Did the same test with a solid state drive: his stereo system was able to read the entire thing, despite the SSD having a lot more music stored on it.

I like terrestrial radio because it feels like I have more of a connection to the places that I'm traveling through. It's fun listening to the ads in some city I'm not familiar with, hearing mom-and-pop stores giving out addresses I have no clue where they are.

I rarely listen to broadcast radio anymore. That especially goes for any of the so-called "local" stations here in the Lawton area. It's the same 10 songs on infinite repeat for months on end, punctuated with lots and lots of commercials.

Years ago I used to tune in the Amarillo College's radio station during my road trips from Oklahoma to Colorado; they played a lot of interesting alternative rock music -often things I hadn't heard before. The station is still around, but they play more of a mix of different genres now.

[Scott5114]

I rarely listen to broadcast radio anymore. That especially goes for any of the so-called "local" stations here in the Lawton area. It's the same 10 songs on infinite repeat for months on end, punctuated with lots and lots of commercials.

Years ago I used to tune in the Amarillo College's radio station during my road trips to Colorado; they played a lot of interesting alternative rock music -often things I hadn't heard before. The station is still around, but they play more of a mix of different genres now.

Las Vegas has a college radio station, KUNV, that plays a decent mix of jazz "and more" (which is mostly your typical classic rock fare). On Sunday afternoons they play Hawaiian music. It is an independent (non-NPR) public radio station, so it does run a few ads, but not as many as a commercial radio station.

Beyond the music, I appreciate it as a link to Las Vegas culture, as I still don't have a whole lot of friends here to experience it with. You get an interesting perspective on the city based on asides from the DJs and the prerecorded bumpers. (One easy takeaway: Las Vegas hates road construction with a burning passion, far more than other cities I'm familiar with.)