When you buy a CD, you are making a one time payment to the label (or artist if self released), pressing plant, print shop, warehouse, distributor, mail carrier, and maybe a few cents left over for the artist once recording costs are recouped. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re doing the artist a favor in buying a CD. Helping artists is going to performances, buying merch. Streaming payments, while tiny, keep paying the artist over and over again. As I’ve stated previously l my collection is over 10K records. I want to continue to hear new music, and with streaming on Apple I can do that, in full resolution, for $10 per month. It’s way off base to say that it’s used by casual music fans only.
Ah, no, I never did that. CDs were too expensive and cherished for me to treat them that way. I taped them and played the tapes in the car. Later, when the Discman came out, I’d put the discs in a special piece of luggage for long car trips or one of those folders/wallet things. The iPod changed that, thankfully. I also don’t have people who think that way in my home. I can’t say I know any either.
Distribution is meaningless, as a giant LP collection can invoke the same option anxiety. Maybe stop treating music like wallpaper?
Personally, the CDs I was once concerned with displaying have now been in boxes for nearly ten years. I had ripped them, and, after packing them to move from my last apartment to this house, I just did not have a reason to unpack them, or a place I particularly wanted to put them. CDs I have bought since then are out, but I haven’t unpacked anything that was packed up. I just play the files, or, more often, stream them, because it’s easier. I’ve only been re-collecting vinyl for the past six years or so. I have more records than will fit in the shelving in our living room, and that shelving will not be expanded, for aesthetic reasons, because having the whole space taken up with records is not appealing to anyone involved, even myself. My solution has not been to get rid of records (I’m still buying them at a pretty good pace), but to sort of archive the ones we’re not as likely to pull out for a listen on a regular basis. When I do want them, I know where they are, without them cluttering up all of our main living space.
My son, who never showed any interest in music, is now, at 16, going through the rateyourmusic.com top 100 list. I told him, he was welcome to play my CD's, but he's not interested. He streams them.
Honestly, as a music lover, I'm so incredibly excited that I don't need to buy and hold hard copy of every piece of recorded music I'm interested in hearing. My primary interest has always been in hearing new and different music all the time. Not that I don't go back to old favorites sometimes too. But the only reason I ever wound up with like 4K LPs and many more CDs than that was because I had to buy them to hear the music. And, both due to cost and space, it had gotten to the point where I was hearing less and less new and new to me music every year and that was dismaying. Streaming is a music lover's incredible boon. But I don't have any particular interest in ownership of a library of music, my interest is in hearing the music. As a kid and young adult, a lot of the music I heard was as the public library or my college's music library. Even as a middle schooler I used to go to the library on the weekend and listen to music and read about music, and it wasn't because I didn't love music. Quite the opposite. Now, if you have a network connection, you can have access to the library wherever you are. In my experience music loving and owning hard copy of recordings aren't necessarily the same thing and one isn't a requisite for another. Same with books, btw, many of the most avid reader and literary fans I know don't necessarily buy anywhere close to all the books they read but are inveterate library users.
Good thing mental health professionals (and this seems more like quackery) aren’t in charge of museums, archives, or any repositories of artistic expression. My goodness, what do they want us to do? Live in sterile cubes with nothing on the walls, shelves, or in our CD players? If you think collecting things is a mental illness, you’ve got issues. Big ones.
Theyd get kicked out of my house right away. How rude could somebody possibly be? People love to pore through my cabinets of CDs, the same way I love to see what people display in their shelves when I visit their homes. It’s basic respect.
There is nothing stopping anybody who *wants* to listen to an entire album via streaming, from doing so. If there are people out there who literally cannot do so because the choices offered by streaming are so great that they become an unavoidable temptation, then either 1) they didn't actually want to listen to the entire album in the first place, or 2) they are mentally weak. I really don't know how else to describe that. It doesn't take a large amount of mental resilience to listen to a particular album of music while other options are also available, if that's what one actually wants to do.
I said mostly, not only. Re payments, keep telling yourself that to assuage the guilt (talk about mental illness, this is a great example of rationalization). I know many artists who constantly tell people to buy the CD or the download if they like or want to hear an album. It’s the only real source of income they get for their music. Many artists don’t want to be in the “merch” (when did that become a word?) business and don’t want to or can’t easily tour. Buying “merch” makes me look stupid and I don’t need more crap around the house taking up space that could better be filled by more music.
I always felt the jewel cases were better protection for the discs than those wallet things that required sliding them in and out. I did keep a visor holder thing in the car once we got to the point of being able to burn a CD-R. And I did end that entirely once I got an iPod. But there was a good period of time when the ability to take a CD along in the car was one of the main benefits of the format; it was one of the reasons I was willing to pay so much for them, as opposed to an LP that I could only play in one place.
Really cool article. The specifics of the people profiled are kinda like they climbed into my head. I have an MP3 player with stuff built up over time. My own playlist I use for walking. I use You Tube to check out stuff I don’t know. But I buy CDs and LPs and build my own hall of fame. I don’t hate streaming or people who use it. Just does not fit me at all. I love going to my church, Aomeba. Streaming is casual and background. Music is in the foreground for me. Streaming is the preferred and will be. But if your hobby and obsession is music you may need more. Well written interesting article. Not just another repeated bait type argumentative surface us vs them thing
I'll always want some streaming available but it is more for discovery and for listening away from the stereo. Since I don't have a DAC yet I don't really stream into the stereo, only into the car, bluetooth speakers (which I almost exclusively use outdoors), or on my phone through headphones.
Good point. Not only that, in fact, Spotify's churn rate has actually declined over the years, so people who sign up are actually staying longer than in years past.
Agreed; also, it helps keep things "apples to apples." I don't think it's appropriate to compare buying and owning albums with Spotify's (or another's) free option. There are paid streaming services that make listening to whole albums as simple (more simple, really) than accessing the same album copied to one's hard drive. I've got 6-7k albums ripped to my hard drive. That's a lot of choice. Somehow, I can manage to decide what to play despite all those options.
Good points. I guess I’m more of a music librarian than just a library user. I build my own library and use it constantly.
This is why personal libraries and public libraries are important. You kinda nailed my feelings. What I like is not there. So much of the stuff comes and goes with trends and Popular taste. I’d rather have what I like with me. Gotta say supporting the musicians is important too
I’m generally oriented that way, too. Even with my packed up CDs I never take out to hear, I like knowing that I could. And their existence in my possession does serve as a sort of record of some aspects of my life. I don’t think that is without value, personally.
Lots of excellent local radio near me. Truly curated. DJs I’ve listened to for 30 years. KPOO, KPFA,KCSM, KALW. Volunteers who love music. Listener supported. And all over the place musically.
