Actually I buy CDs for bands I like and download individual songs. I tend to rip my CDs onto my iPod and buy a few tracks singularly, those rare ones or one offs. My CD purchasing has gone up in the last couple of years rather than down - but that might relate to the fact that I have slightly increased disposable income/rid myself of debts!

I cry when I think of the songs I lost when I sold my old record and tape collection to cut down on the cost of a long distance move a number of years ago...

I went through a stint of downloading...through Napster in it's early stages...looking for obsolete golden oldies (I am very conscious of not breaking the law...when I was in high school...we had been told that you are not supposed to make tapes for anything other than personal use (ie...not to sell mixed tapes)...(luckily, at the time...I had an "English"  friend with a nice grandmother...and my knowledge of British hard-to-find songs became phenomenal...that would have been the heyday of my music education...and made me somewhat of a music snob...being on the "inside" of something for once in my life...)...

...I would not download newer material because I'd had it beaten into my head that it was wrong to deprive the artists of the income they'd otherwise receive from you having purchased the album instead....

I'd long since given up downloading via Napster...I'd only gone "looking" for a few key songs...and some seasonal favourites....(our only record store in the isolated town I lived in back then was "Columbia House" and I'd ordered everything I could from them already...the actual store we'd had was now gone...turned from 'words and music'....to 'words and fabric'...to simply 'fabric' (sounds a bit iron curtain....and it was...I grew up in the Iron Ore Capital of Canada...shoot...of the world...how much more iron curtain do you want to get?)...

Along with this relatively small but extremely meaningful computer assortment of downloaded songs (Don't Like Monday's among them...along with other harder to find songs..."All We Are", "We Belong" (ouch)...,"We Run" (my personal favourite)..."Living Doll"..."Buster" (I'd been given the latter two in a bizarre exchange with a friend one day when attending university in St. John's Nfld...he was good friends with the girl who lived in the same boarding house as myself...but he walked up to me in the street one day...and handed me this cassette containing two of the prettiest songs I've ever heard...unfortunately somewhere along the way the tape disappeared...and i didn't even know who sang them, at the time...so I was VERY happy to find them online...now they are gone again)..

...we also lost all of the hard work "we" put into copying our own fairly extensive CD collection to the winamp program on our computer...

...a couple of years ago, when our computer went through some "troubled" times...and we had one hard drive crash after another...until we finally gave up worrying about the music collection being saved in those very expensive recovery outlets...and let it all "go"...intending to forget the "napster" hard-to-finds and download them from one of the payper sites (as I'd done with Alphaville's-Forever Young ...just prior to the last crash)...and reenter ALL of the other CD's again...

Still not done...

I'd like to say go ahead and make CD's obsolete...but I can't take the trauma of not having a hard copy...

(oh...and I LOVE the concept of making CD/DVD's...the ones that hold the songs and some video too...what a neat place to put all the old videos...and some old concert features and day-in-the-life pictures...interviews then and now...it is never too hard to sell an album if you make it a little more desireable than the easier, seemingly cheaper, 'hit song'-download...)...


Goodnight world...



-- Edited by LindaDoreenHicksLoder at 05:51, 2007-04-05

-- Edited by LindaDoreenHicksLoder at 00:55, 2007-04-06

I think Linda is right - if your computer crashes, loose a CD, iPod stolen,etc. you loose recordings you may not be able to recover. ArrGee is also right; with all the technology, we might see CDs disappear. That may not be for a while, however.

I'll keep my vast collection of LPs and CDs for now, thank you very much!