i’m still not quite sure of this digital music thing.
no, of course i’ve got my ipod and i love it: i can’t live without it!
i’m not talking about finding free music on kazaa or whatever; i gave that up long long ago as being too frustrating, since it was too hard to find complete albums, especially in whatever i was actually interested in. what i’m talking about is buying purely digital versions of music, say, on the itunes store.
i’ve bought the odd song here and there online, but didn’t really believe in having the only copy of something that i bought be a digital version somewhere. somehow i want the hard copy, the actual disk, which seems to me as a more tangible and secure entity.
granted, this may seem odd for someone who makes his living selling in the data storage industry, but then again, that just reinforces what i know, which is that 3% of all disk drives are expected to fail and thus you need to take extra precautions around that anticipated possible data loss. that’s how we make money, right? otherwise companies would just store their stuff on cheap ass hard disks from fry’s. which is essentially what this boils down to, right?
but, i’m slowly getting over it, and have bought a few albums, mostly stuff that it’d be hard to get used, or just stuff that was just as cheap as finding a used copy somewhere.
and it’s worked out all right, except for that last album which i bought, which was sort of ok, but then is maybe kind of sucky at the end.
and then i realized that buying digital versions mean that you have no out: if it sucks, you can’t sell it back. even if you only get a small percentage back of what you paid, at least you get some value out of it, and the tiny catharsis of getting it out of your house and out of your life. taking an aesthetic stand. with digital, your money’s just gone gone, and all you can do is delete it. and feel like a stupid spendthrift.
on the other hand, i just listened to some tracks from the savath+savalas album that i hated and sold back, and it didn’t sound so bad anymore. (ironically, when compared to the albums by mus that i bought on itunes.) so maybe all it does is help you practice opening your horizons? or living with the crap that you paid for…
meanwhile, at least you can keep entering the itunes 100,000,000th song contest for free.
Posted at July 9, 2004 7:22 AMsigh. now if only i’d get off my ass and sell back all those copies of The Eagles Greatest Hits that have been sitting under my bed for a year.
Posted by: xz at July 9, 2004 10:31 AMi think you need both ed. for those albums that you *know* you want, you can buy online and then burn copies if you need a hard disc somewhere to fling at someone’s forehead.
but then there’s also the experiments - the store buys that you can sell back for mere pennies.
but i think the bigger picture is that you have a music purchasing disease. you know that you could never move to LA b/c there’s no chance in hell you could ever pack up all those CDs! i wonder if you ever have nightmares that they turn into animate objects like little Mikas and terrorize you for not listening to them. you do, don’t you? hmmm? admit it! one of these days you just might find yourself walking into an intervention and then you’d have to join the MBA (music-buyers anonymous) which, I’m afraid is very very different from the NBA.
Posted by: jason s at July 9, 2004 12:20 PMhello, my name is e and i have a music prob—hobby. i have a music hobby.
according to my inventory database (i love readerware! http://www.readerware.com ) i have 1647 cd’s. this has already exceeded normal storage space, and forced me to go to using these great plastic sleeves by discsox (http://www.discsox.com/products/dj-sleeve.htm ) to store a lot of music. which makes it very easy to move if i want.
and more than that, the sleeves keep not only the booklet, but the back art as well, which is important to me. i like seeing what the design is of the disc and the packaging, because those things are (should be) important. and that’s probably why i want hard copies after all.
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