Jared Linder

Now, I’m also not going to sit here and tell you that it has anything to do with the way the music physically sounds. This is where the real audiophiles come from the woodwork and start bantering about analog receivers and vinyl platters. I can’t compete with that, and I don’t want to.

But it does have everything to do with owning, and possessing, an album: a small work of art.

My shelves overflow with CDs and tapes from that long-gone time—the 20th Century—and I can’t imagine it any other way.

I have stood in line for hours with hordes of other fellow music fiends, waiting for the stroke of midnight to be able to rush into a store and get our impatient hands on the newest release of our favorite bands.

Now you can just go online, enter an account number, and after eliminating tracks 5, 8, and 11, buy the remaining songs you want.

Great. Art, a la carte.

I remember the way the paper smelled on the first cassette I ever bought. And pulling out the paper insert and unfolding all the secrets that my $6 had brought me: liner notes, lyrics, songwriting credits, photos, publishing detail. Heck, Ozzy used to even include a couple of stick-on tattoos. And CDs continued this trend.

It was like being part of the club. I would immerse myself for hours listening to newly-purchased music and perusing the included printed material. I still do. And, if I didn’t like a song, I skipped it. But it was still part of the whole. It must have been on there for a reason. And it all meant something to me.

As much as I love technology, I can’t help but think this is one area that could use some rethinking. I love the portability that digital music provides. But, I can’t help but think this makes music even more of a commodity subject to transiency. What happens to all of these files? How do you give them to your children? I am not awaiting the day when I receive (or give, for that matter) a hard drive full of random singles as a gift.

The Library of Congress has spent decades identifying, sorting, and cataloguing stores of music: some of it merely novel, yet all of it worthy of note, and definitely worthy of our keeping. Hopefully, we are not eliminating vast chunks of our 21st Century artistic heritage by condemning it to spending its entire life in a database cage. Or, hopefully still, they don't decide also to exclude tracks 5, 8, and 11.