About
October 10, 2007.
A few weeks ago, I was going over my CD collection with a friend of mine, paging through over 500 (check this number!) CDs packed into three book-style cases. As I went through the pages, I kept realizing how many CDs I didn’t have anymore.
Part of it is my own fault: I’ve always stripped my CDs out of the crystal boxes, preferring the thin mylar DJ sleeves. I started doing this when faced with the prospect of either reducing my collection greatly or leaving it all in storage while living overseas. I opted to make my collection as small as possible with minimal attrition so I could take it with me. This meant that the CDs were highly portable–before the iPod era, I carried a stack of CDs with me everywhere.
Who knows where these things go? Some, I lost. Some, I gave away. Some were stolen. Some were owed. Some were traded in (mostly at Zia Records in Tempe, Arizona), and others were flung into traffic. I estimate that I’ve lost as many CDs as I have in my collection today–it’ll be interesting to see if that turns out to be true.
The reality is that CD loss is just one form of attrition that my music collection has taken over time. There’s been lots of format death: at one point, I had over 300 cassettes. Of course my collection began with vinyl, but when I got serious about music and got my first Columbia House subscription, I got the cassettes.
The point being here that I am a lifetime consumer of the music industry. I have given over tremendous amounts of time and money to the purchase and enjoyment of its products. Moreso, my friends count on me to find out about new bands–I do a lot of the music industry’s business for it, at least within my miniscule sphere of influence.
That’s ok, because if I ever tried to directly promote the music industry’s products on any larger scale than the small personal network I’ve built, they RIAA would come and sue me into oblivion.
They may still come anyway, when they find out how I consume music nowadays.
I am a downloader. I have over 120 gigs of music stored in my collection, and I’m a dilletante.
Much of my digital library is actually rips of my own CDs. (This will be another interesting assertion to confirm.) But virtually all new music put out, pretty much since Napster, I download first, and decide whether or not I like it before I buy it.
And really, I do go buy the CD if I like the stuff I’ve downloaded. But most of the time, it’s crap, and I delete it.
There’s other stuff I want to talk about, too. The artists, especially the ones that have impacted me, I’ll be talking a lot about them, and how some acts are interrelated.
I also want to talk about the music industry at large, over its history. I have some special insight into this, because my Dad ran a record store in Philadelphia, called Record Museum. At its peak, there were seven stores spread out over the tri-state area (Pennsylvania, Central/South Jersey and Northern Delaware). As his stores peaked and died, the various cycles of the music industry were spelled out in my father’s dreams.
The music industry is not nice, and it really never has been. Even today, it is assiduously bludgeoning its customer base even as CD sales continue to plummet. There is a deeper pattern here that I hopes emerges over time.
Anyway: onward and upward. This is a work in progress, but it always starts here.