Today is a sad day for me. I’ve finally come to the conclusion I’m never going to buy a shiny musical disc of music ever again, putting a stop to the denial I’ve had for the past decade as I’ve watched the rise of digital media and the fall of physical editions.
You might think I’ve gone slightly mad – for years I’ve been watching and writing about the rise of digital technology, and lamenting the lack of change in creative industries, particularly the music industry which still tries to hamper innovation with licencing rules from the era of piano rolls.
And yet I have to admit to a personal state of denial inspired by my obsessive librarian tendencies.
I’ve long enjoyed alphabetically and chronologically ordered entertainment collections, whether CD, DVD or videogame. I bought the books and magazines to find out more about bands and then became the guy who would research every song he liked on Wikipedia and Last.fm. My music habit runs to the £1000s in vinyl, CDs, and attempting to elevate my nerd status by playing guitar and bass, and occasionally DJ’ing to try and legitimise it!
But if you want to experience what it was like to be a scribe when the printing press arrived, or a blacksmith who saw cars driving past his workshop, go and buy a CD in the average town.
For some reason, I fancied buying a CD today. Despite the availability of Spotify, Soundcloud, Last.fm, Youtube, Mflow, Blip.fm and Myspace, I thought I’d save a little bandwith (For American readers – when you complain about bandwith restrictions on broadband – we’re lucky to get a quarter of the harshest American cable monopoly). So I thought I’d browse alongside picking up some food essentials in some fairly sizeable shopping outlets…
And CDs don’t exist any more. Outside of the ‘chart’ of 10, 20, or 30 albums, noone stocks anything. At the same time, I can buy gift vouchers for every digital music service while I’m at the checkout till.
Dan’s Tipping Point:
To get an album in even the right genre, it was easier for me to drive home, go online, and purchase music rather than journey into the centre of town to visit the one specialist music shop and be able to browse more than 30 CDs in one location.CDs are gone…
And yet…
I still belive that vinyl will continue to do well in the future, because it’s a great ‘artifact’. In the same way as I still buy print editions of books I love after reading them electronically, there’s something in the delivery of a vinyal album that encapsulates art, emotion, memories etc, and whether or not it’s an audiophile lie, there’s something in the ceremony of dropping a needle onto a record.
CD’s don’t do that. They were a luxurious convenience that arrived around the time I bought my first ‘proper’ stereo seperate system, but they don’t provide a great memento.
And now I wonder when we’ll hit on the right format for film. If print provides the physical archetype for text, and vinyl is the physical high point of music as digital is the most convenient form for both, could anyone argue the VHS or DVD offer anything to film fans? I’d hate to think the laserdisc was a good idea, or to go back to projectors, so perhaps film is still missing a medium (For videogames it had to be a cartridge!).
I wonder how many of us are writing about embracing technology, yet still get surprised when we see it passing?