The CD/MP3 War
I love owning stuff, and my music collection has been a source of continuing pride for me since I got my first job when I was 16 and had enough disposable income to start buying music regularly.
Back then it was cassettes. I had a million of ’em. I had a cassette deck in my car, a Sony Walkman, and a dual-cassette boom box in my bedroom that I would also take to the park, beach, etc.
Not long after that, the CD player started to become affordable to the middle class, but it wasn’t really affordable to ME. The portable CD player was still a ways off, and installing one in your car was deadly expensive to a guy working in a grocery store. As a result, I stuck with tapes a LOT longer than I should have, and it bit me in the ass.
I finally bought a CD player in college, sometime in the 92-93 term, and was suddenly faced with the fact that I had like 2 CD’s and a million tapes (many of which had been played so many times you could vaguely hear side 2 backwards while playing side one).
My friend the Pickytarian gave me a piece of advice at the time, having beaten me to the CD revolution by a good 3 years. He said, “You have to COMMIT to CD’s. I know tapes are still cheaper, but you have to make a promise to yourself to NEVER buy one again. The music you listen to the most is your NEW music anyway, so if you stay committed, and replace the tapes you love with CD’s as they wear out, the problem will eventually correct itself.”
That was VERY good advice, and I use that wisdom in my life to this day. ALWAYS embrace new tech as early as possible, and don’t look back when you know something is obsolete.
Still, I spent YEARS catching up, eventually amassing a collossal CD collection I was extremely proud of.
Then came the MP3 player.
I was determined not to screw myself again, and bought a phone with about 11 hours of music space on it. Sadly, I was burned, because the Nokia 3300 musicphone was a piece of crap, and a huge, expensive disappointment.
So I stuck with CD’s a while longer, until Dani got an iPod for her birthday in 2004. The Pickytarian, already ahead of me and an iPod convert, again said something insightful that day.
“I give you t-minus 60 days before you crack and buy an iPod, too,” he said.
Actually, it took a good 4 months, but some of that was just spite. How dare people presume to know me?!?
Anyway, I bought the 20GB iPod, and I swear to you, it was a life-changing device. Once I had it, I committed to it, ripping CD after CD into MP3’s. Soon after, I had every CD I gave a damn about on the iPod, literally HUNDREDS, and it was barely half full.
Imagine that. I listen to a LOT of music, and the majority of that is out of the house, on the subway, walking around town, in the park, at my desk at work, etc. Before the iPod, I could hold about 11 CD’s on my phone, which crashed all the fucking time. But 11 CD’s was still better than 1, which was all my discman could handle at a time. I had to carry a little book of CD’s everywhere. And that still beat the shit out of cassettes and a walkman.
Now, on a device that fit in my pocket, I could find whatever music I was in the mood for, in seconds, without having to plan in advance. I could put all the music I loved on random, too, or make playlists. Like I said, for a music lover, it is life-changing and liberating in a way I cannot fully explain.
I also have my apartment networked, so I can access that music from terminals in every room. 2 computers, 2 TV’s, and both Dani’s and my iPods (which can dock anywhere). Why go dig up a CD when I can just turn on the TV and access it directly through the surround-sound?
But that wasn’t what broke me from CD’s. I still loved them, and like you, wanted the liner notes, art, lyrics, etc. I also liked having them on my shelf, because they are a great conversation piece and encourage the exchange of music between friends, which I am strongly in favor of. I’m not one for downloading music from massive filesharing groups, which I consider stealing, but I’ll swap with my friends all day.
But more and more over the last year or so, I found that swap in the form of portable flash drives and data CD’s filled with MP3’s, and not actual CD’s. Coupled with my purchasing new music directly off iTunes, there was really very little need for me to bother going to the store.
The real kicker was when the Pickytarian came over the other day with a portable hard drive, and we swapped our enire music collections. After removing the dupes, that was 40 fricken’ GB of music! That’s like 725 new CD’s in one day.
With so much of my current music in digital format only, I started to question the need for physical CD’s at all. I bought the new Fiona Apple CD on iTunes, and lo and behold, the CD booklet came as a .pdf file with the purchase!
And REALLY. If you’re looking for pictures of the band, art, credits and lyrics, you can find all those things (and a crapload more) faster on Google than you can by getting up and finding the CD booklet. You can even look at the iTunes or Windows Media Player console on someone’s computer and see what music they love the most by sorting music or albums by # of times played.
Digital music is the future, and barring Terminator-style war between humans and the technology we created, that’s not going to change. If you have the means or opportunity to get an MP3 player, I highly recommend it.