I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

Summary

Album Cards: Rebuilding the Joy of Music Discovery for My 10-Year-Old by Jordan Fulghum, October 2025 Albums you can hold again. When I was 10, I blew every dollar I had on CDs. I remember sitting cross-legged on my floor, flipping through jewel cases, memorizing liner notes and lyrics, and most importantly developing my own taste for music. My 10-year-old doesn't have that. Music just sort of... happens. It's like it's infinite and invisible at the same time, playing from smart speakers, car stereos, my phone. Endless perfectly curated playlists, designed to fade into the background. The default listening experience has become both literally and figuratively formless. So I thought: what's the modern equivalent of that CD binder experience? Maybe what's missing is something tangible that he can flip through, or even collect. I could combine my old CD-collector brain with today's tech: take something fun and collectable (trading/Pokemon cards), dress them up with album art, and add NFC tags so they can be tapped to play the album on our home speaker system, all without a screen. Away I went. The finished product. Pick a card, any card. The Setup I needed to get the music into a format that could be played. I've long surrendered to streaming, but I still have my MP3s organized in Plex on my home server. Funny to think that these files are the same MP3s that I've been collecting since the late 90s. I wanted the NFC tag to be deep-linked to those same files instead of a streaming service. But which albums do I pick? I had the idea to create themed "packs" of albums. The first pack is obviously "Albums That Dad Wants You to Listen To", and it's just a bunch of dad rock. But the idea is that each pack can be a different theme or genre, and he can build his own collection (and develop his own taste) over time. Making em I found a PDF template that matched the dimensions of trading cards, hopped into Canva and got to work. It was easy enough to find high-quality album cover...