October 2, 2007 8:15 am I log in to my iTunes account and download the new Bruce Springsteen CD Magic. 9:30 am I am driving in my car listening to the new music.
What satisfaction a download can give to you. Not going to the store, no shrink wrapping that you have to fumble off, and no sticky tape that seals the CD case shut. What and why is that sticky tape stuff even there? It seems so cruel to torture the consumer for buying a new CD to make them go through so much frustration just to open a jewel case. When a steak knife is the main gizmo for opening new CD’s something has got to give.
Do I miss albums? Yes. The album is so cool. Just holding an album makes the music sound better. Drop the needle and play. Albums, although magnificent in their sound perfection, had their problems. They warped, scratched, collected dust and had that snap crackle pop thing happening at the song’s end. However the feeling and memories of my youth are blended right into the soundtrack of each and every album I owned.
Nonetheless, the albums passed to the cassette tape, something I never touched (the young audiophile in me new that they were just a passing phase). Next that little compact disc, indestructible, never skipping (unless you hit a really big bump in the road). I have been buying CD’s since the conception of compact discs, about 25 years now. I would use my paper route money to build my music collection. Re-purchasing old albums while watching my CD collection grow.
Today we download. New problems arise with that; transferring the music to our iPods, phones, external hard drives and then burning them to a CD for that last source of backup. We live in an age of download fear…at any moment our computer can crash and out external hard drives can be erased, and how many of us really take the time to back up to CD’s. That is what we are running away from in the first place. The colossal storage that little silver disc took up too much in our homes.
There comes new complaints with new technology. Now we have to scroll through the library of information archived on our iPod just to find that song that we originally had on vinyl. At least the circle of life has a musical soundtrack to it.
