Hurry up and die already, CD!

It's only a matter of time.

With rare exception these days, I do not buy nor acquire music CDs anymore.  There's just no reason for me to do it, not when my beloved iPod took over the CD deck in my car long ago, as well as any shitty portable disc players I might have been carrying around.  I used to have a fabulous, huge collection of discs.  When I lived in Pittsburgh and had the house with the nice big basement in which they all fit, it was a cool site.  But when I moved out to Philly to an apartment and my bedroom closet was filled with nothing but boxes of those very CDs that were not doing anything but gathering dust, I decided to sell the whole lot to the Princeton Record Exchange.

I made a couple grand off the deal, which was fine.  And it was freeing, too.  For it had been a long time at that point where I had sat down and listened to CDs in their own format.  Basically, I would buy one or get one for review, automatically rip it to my external hard drive, and then shelve the damn thing.  So the space the discs were using was was ridiculous after a while.  I came to the conclusion that, for me at least, the digital format was certainly it and I no longer needed the hard copy.  I didn't need the plastic cases, or the little booklets.  I loved the music, not the packaging.

Bow down before the one you serve.

Now, I know a lot of folks who were of the vinyl generation (I was at the tail end of its popularity, growing up with it and then seeing it get killed off, along with the cassette shortly thereafter) really bemoan the loss of that format, for both the sound of the LP and the packaging.  I have to admit that LPs often packed a lot of cool shit in the way of extras like posters, gatefold sleeves and the like.  But my ears have never begged to go back to my own days of listening to ye olde turntable, and god knows I had enough of a vinyl collection as well, so it was no small happening in my life.

I like how the musical format has progressed.  It's just turned into thin air.  And because of this, I keep wondering when CDs as a musical format commodity will cease to exist.  Shouldn't they have died at least three years ago?  I suppose it's sort of like when broadband Internet service was first introduced and there were still tons of people using dialup connections.  It just took some time.  Now I'm curious to know what percentage of the population doesn't have some form of mp3 player, because I could probably tell you of one lonely soul that I personally know who still uses dialup to get online.

As I said at the beginning, there are rare exceptions for me regarding the purchase of CD.  The last exception was when The Beatles' catalog was finally reissued and remastered.  I wanted hard copies of those albums, along with all the packaging.  The next exception will certainly be for the Billy Joel remasters.  But the point is if CDs went away tomorrow, I wouldn't be saddened that I couldn't have those on a physical format, because the music would still be there.

Not completely gone.

Progress is a funny thing.  I remember in my teen years getting absolutely excited to find a new or funky record store that had all sorts of things available to buy that my usual haunts did not.  The Internet and online shopping has basically done away with that experience as well.  Do I miss that feeling?  At my age, not really.  I still get excited and have a sense of wonderment whenever I find a CD that's been out of print that's finally going to be reissued again, or an album I loved that is going to be issued for the first time in digital format.  That the entire world has become one giant record store is nothing to complain about, I don't think.

The last CD I personally recorded and handed out was made back in 2004.  Even then I decided that when and if I ever recorded again I would strictly go digital files with the distribution.  I still feel that way.  CDs are going the way of the music video.  Yeah, they still make 'em, but for whom?

And I still have a shitload of old tapes sitting around in the basement at mom and dad's.  Yeesh.