Our Editor Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: The New Digital Revolution continues
So after discovering how easy it is to buy music online, the time now comes to upload all of the old music into one place and then give away the CDs.
(I would sell them, but who'd want them?)
So I now find my music collection providing a fascinating window into the past.
[Do you want to import Touched into your iTunes library?]
The past is, as we know, a distant country, and they do things differently there. It was a time, apparently, when a CD single - with two tracks on - could be legitimately sold for £4.49 on 'import'.
Don't misunderstand me, I remember vinyl (kind of) and cassette tapes (yep) and minidiscs (...) and then CDs.
But when did I buy / receive (bless Student Journalism) so many of the damn things?
Today's efforts, so far, have yielded 120 albums (mostly singles, however) uploaded. Of which one has proved to be so obscure as to now be known by iTunes -
[Would you like to import the CD The Everlasting into your iTunes library?]
- and of which at least forty so far have necessitated me ferreting out the artwork myself and asking iTunes to pretty please accept it.
And when it's done, the CDs go - to charity shops, I should think, because selling this many to CEX would be sisyphean, to say the least - ~And there'll be that little bit more weight off of my metaphorical back.
I say it again; I envy the digital download generation, because physical media will have a new kind of cachét that it rarely did before. Alright, there were special editions and limited editions and promos, but once you remove the necessity of the physical element of a piece of music, or a movie, or a book, then its' presence becomes, by default, something interesting. And won't that be nice?
Of course, being old-school with regards to media, I'm going to have to back all this up somewhere in case something happens - nothing like good-old-fashioned paranoia - but...
... It's a little strange.
It's strange because music mattered to me so much ten or so years ago that owning these CDs was like a prerequisite for existence. Compared to the modern world, actually listening to them - physically finding the CD, putting it in a player, waiting for it to load, finding the track you want - would take longer than loading up this computer and going to Youtube or spotify. (This is primarily because my laissez-faire attitude to CDs being in their right cases meaning finding the right CD could take hours if not days, to be fair - it's an admission of untidiness rather than a boast of speedy ability.)
[Would you like to import the CD Big Night Out into your iTunes library?]
If you're reading this now and you're, well, under 20 years old or so, try and understand just how far things have come in the last ten years. When I was at university for the first time, mp3 players were just starting, and they were a pain in the arse. Technically, I'm from the pre-iPod generation, which is kind of nice, but it was CDs all the way. Now, you can torrent hundreds - if not thousands - of mp3s overnight, but...
[Would you like to import the CD See this through and leave into your iTunes library?]
... I'm going to deploy the excuse the previous generation applied to CDs instead of vinyl. Downloading is - and it pains me to use this word because it sounds so oddly patronising - soulless.
I get it. I really do. I was on Napster back in the day, with all the old p2p networking and such meaning free music. And then, like that, I stopped, partly because Napster stopped but also partly because I thought it was the right thing to do.
And I know this sounds like preaching, and that taking any sort of moral stance is frowned upon in the world of downloading, but... I just don't get it.
Then again, I worry about The Law - capitals intentional - because of the way I was brought up. Like everyone else, I happily mock the You wouldn't steal a car anti-piracy adverts because they're so histrionic - but, sadly, they're true. I wouldn't steal a car. I wouldn't steal anything. This is primarily because of the belief that if I did, there would be a policeman waiting behind me at just that moment, rather than some sort of social commentary.
I'm surrounded by torrenters - and I get it, because being a student means, functionally, having no money. But the scales aren't balanced - back in the day (another phrase I don't really like using) file-sharing, p2p and torrents were in their infancy, so I really didn't have the option of Mass Downloading. If I were a student today - more accurately, if I were an 18-year-old student today - I would be downloading things, I suspect, like a hyperactive bastard.
[Do you want to import the CD Under Rug Swept into your iTunes library?]
But I'm not. So I don't. This is because I'm really, really old-fashioned. I know what an album on CD looks like and how much they cost to buy, and in my head I equate downloading with going into a shop, picking up the CD and leaving without paying. You may see it differently, and, if so, more power to you - there's always the Bruce Sterling way of looking at it, whereby music is, now, functionally data, and data wants to be free. And there are plenty of arguments to state that people wouldn't hear a musician's work if they couldn't get it for free. And there's spotify, and youtube, and all manner of places that show stuff for free. (Or, at least, for advertising revenue, a portion of which is then fed back to the record company.)
So please, go ahead and download. I'll not tell you not to, and I'm not taking the moral high ground, but if it's all the same to you, I won't do it...
... And in return, I have days of uploading ahead of me. And fairly soon, a nearby charity shop will most likely curse the day I walked in and dumped a bag full of CDs on them. And eventually, the songs I like out of all of this uploading will find their way to my iPod, and my past will catch up with me. In a good way, I hope, and I kind of hope my iPod has enough room for all this history. But for now...
[Do you want to import the CD For Your Ears Only into your iTunes library?]
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