In a recent conversation, it was brought to my attention that Apple has now become the third largest retailer of music, right behind Wal-Mart and Best Buy. This revelation displays the evolution of the distribution of music (and the whole cultural shift to the information age, but I’m not really here to talk about that). I have a few qualms with becoming a member of the music downloading mob and let me tell you why. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to have a physical copy of said purchased music. I mean, how many times have you or your friends hard-drive crashed and life as we know it ceased to exist they lost a bunch of fairly valuable files (I don’t particularly prefer to use the words “lost everything” because that’s just not the case, computer files aren’t “everything”). OK, so you tell me I can just back up all the files on my computer and then I won’t have anything to worry about, but how many of you back up all of your files? It’s a pain, your library is too big to conveniently store on a CD, your wireless network won’t let you store a back up file on someone else’s machine, you’d rather be watching videos on YouTube, whatever the reason, it just doesn’t happen. Sure, Bill (Gates) and Steve (Jobs) have some fancy softwares to help you recover your lost files but I’m talking about massive hardware failure. In any case, I like to have that CD so I can still enjoy the music for which I paid.
This discussion is intended to open several cans of worms, and I am prepared to deal with it. For example, CDs have a bit of a problem with lifetime as well, I have several that seem to be falling apart, or have a acquired a lethal scratch. You can’t scratch an mp3. Also, my car already has a CD player in it and I have a stereo. The culture I grew up in just happened to proliferate devices to understand these shiny, flat donuts. Yes, you can BUY devices to play your mp3 player through most any means, but those cost food money. And what about album art, lyrics, and goofy credits? Are those to be lost in the transition? Well, I have may ways, and I will continue purchasing CDs for the time being, sorry. Perhaps you can persuade me otherwise.
What do you think? Do you buy music files? Do you think CDs are obsolete? What do you do to secure your files?