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 browsing 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 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 Setup

I needed to get the music into a format that could be played. I've long since surrendered to streaming, but I still have my MP3s organized via 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 images from Google, but....

The Aspect Ratio Goof

I was quite far into this project when I remembered the obvious fact that album art is square but trading cards are rectangular. Trading cards use a 2.5:3.5 aspect ratio, which is...not a square! Oops.

I looked at what they did for cassette tapes (also rectangular) back in the day, but their solutions were all over the place, from just cropping the square into a rectangle (gross) to having a giant white space and ISBN codes surrounding the art. That wasn't gonna cut it.

So, I used an AI diffusion model to extend each album's art into a trading card aspect ratio. The AI was (mostly) able to extend the artwork while maintaining the original style and composition. Not perfect, but a pretty fun solution not possible just a couple years ago.

After ordering a bundle of blank NFC tags from Amazon, I learned that PlexAmp oddly has first-class support for zapping NFC tags to specific albums in auto play mode. A strange feature, but perfect for this project. Easy.

The process was simple: open PlexAmp, navigate to an album, tap the three dots menu, then Share, and there's a "Write to NFC tag" option. Hold your phone over the blank NFC tag and it writes the deep link. That's it. The tag just contains a URL that opens PlexAmp and starts playing that specific album when tapped.

I printed the cards on our crappy HP inkjet printer at home. I used label paper that exactly matched the dimensions of trading cards, but after the fact, I realized it was kind of unnecessary. You can just print on cardstock if you have a digital template file. I cut them out and glued them to blank playing cards, but not before wedging the NFC tags between.

For placement, I found a trading card display model from Makerworld and 3D printed it on my A1. It turned out alright!

Once it was all working and in decent shape, I presented them in a nice neat arrangement to my son. He flipped through them like Pokémon cards, examined the cards that were the most visually interesting. Daft Punk's Discovery was his first pick. He grabbed it, flipped it around, tapped it, and that One More Time loop dropped throughout our entire house. Boom.

I was happy to see that the physical cards encouraged active listening and ownership. Instead of music being background noise, it became something he could choose, hold, explore, maybe even trade with his sister!

It was all worth it for her reaction. And yes, I know she's just giddy about the naked baby.

I think we're unintentionally teaching our children to consume music passively. My goal with this project was to teach them to discover it actively, to own it, to care about it at the album level. I think it kinda worked!

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