One darkish day, a fresh-faced particular person in a lab coat will attempt to coax an previous Spoon document out of my historical, gnarled fingers. And upon that day there will be a tussle.
I will not be letting go of that jewel case simply, and I sit up for that day when, with no matter energy I’ve bought left, I get to coach that youth about CDs.
Approximately 82 million individuals within the US paid for music streaming companies as of 2021. In 2022, vinyl gross sales hit a daft 43 million within the US.
Yet right here I’m, vowing to be the final particular person on Earth shopping for CDs.
This is not a lot in regards to the CDs themselves. Vinyl lovers (a bunch I depend myself as a part of) will discuss sound high quality and massive, lovely album artwork. CDs do not supply a lot allure. No one is ever going to play a CD and mutter to themselves whereas clutching a cup of sizzling tea, “Mmm, so heat.”
This is in regards to the ongoing battle for management over my very own beloved music assortment. It’s about how, in wild-eyed frustration, I selected a hill to die on. A hill made fully of compact discs.
I might now wish to take the chance in charge my dad.
Well, blame is not fairly proper. The man is a champ. He’s additionally a former radio DJ with sufficient vinyl information to sooner or later assemble the Carson Family mausoleum. The factor is, you possibly can’t put Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band — with the brilliant yellow gatefold, blood pink again and all that colourful chaos on the entrance cowl — within the fingers of a 6-year-old and never anticipate one thing to occur.
My dad’s assortment all the time felt magical. It was an enormous bodily presence that predated me and served as proof of a model of him earlier than he was my dad. It was essential sufficient to not get pitched out of assorted shifting vans as my household trekked from Texas to California to Georgia to Tennessee through the years.
I by no means thought of not constructing a group of my very own.
So I began mine two years later, at a time when cassettes have been dropping floor to CDs and vinyl was simply over. In an important second whereas shopping for my first album, I picked my format, choosing a CD of the album I used to be buying as a result of CDs, I used to be informed, have been the longer term.
Watch this:
So Retro: Recording analog in a digital world
4:15
Way back in 2007, researchers from the University of Winchester in the UK did a study about why people collect music. One of the main reasons is that people are trying to construct a cultural autobiography representing facets of themselves — the good, the bad and the boy bands.
That’s definitely true for me. I arrange my CDs in the order they were relevant to me. My CD shelving is like an Arctic core ice sample with each shelf representing an era of my life. The most crowded shelf is from college, when everything sounded important and my friends and I cordoned off Friday afternoons to go to the record store. One look at 2007’s Wincing the Night Away by the Shins and I’m back in my freshman dorm hanging a poster of (what else?) Sgt. Pepper.
Of course, there are other reasons I buy CDs. For one, I want the artists I care about to take my money so they can keep making the music I lean on for every high, low and in-between point of my life.
Remember actually going to a store and buying CDs? I do because I STILL DO IT.
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Also, liner notes, man. Where else am I supposed to learn who co-wrote which song and which obscure ’70s R&B tune got sampled on what track so I can bore my friends?
Another reason: I want to. So I do.
Pharaoh Khufu got a pyramid. Let me have a few stacks of an outdated media format.
None of which is to say I have anything against other formats. I own vinyl. I subscribe to a streaming service. And I’ll admit that it’s gotten harder to keep up the CD purchases, partly because I can listen to any album I want on the day it comes out and I have the chance to debate with myself whether a record is important enough to warrant a place in my autobiography of albums.
Plus, there are plenty of times when I walk into my neighborhood record store, trying to keep my money local, and just don’t find what I’m looking for.
As a result, my collection is imperfect. There are albums I’ve forgotten to buy. Or albums I’ve bought digitally that were meaningful but go unrepresented on my CD shelf.
But I’m trying. I’m always trying.
There’s a low-lying sadness I’ve come to feel as my music collection sprawls out over different rooms, hard drives and even servers. Nowadays, if I stumble across a new artist or band, I asked myself some questions: If I never buy it, is it still mine? Does it have to be mine? Would that matter any less to me? Would having it on CD change that specific feeling of finding an album that will probably always sound like early spring 2019 to me?
I’m not going to bother to find out because most likely I probably will buy it. And when that kid in the lab coat comes for me, I’ll swat him away with it.