Thank You for the Music

Here are a few thoughts for all those people who say that depending on streaming from Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music is so much better than actually owning the music and having it take up valuable space on your hard drive and/or mobile device...

I'm old. I remember having a stereo system with lots of components. First it was the receiver and turntable. Then the cassette deck. Then the double cassette deck. Then the CD player. Then the five-CD player. That's a lot of equipment to have in your living room all wired together.

I also remember records...over 1000 45s and 300 albums also taking up space in my living room. I remember the cassette mixtapes I made from them. And then there were the CDs.

Oh yes, and I remember buying records...and the fact that for the 79¢ you paid for a 45, you got one song you wanted and one song you probably didn’t. That meant about 40¢ a song...in 1966 money. I’ll let you calculate the adjustment to 2017 dollars.

And as much as I tried (and I tried really hard), I could never come up with a good, easy to use, cataloging and filing system for all those records. And even when I did, there was no guarantee that I’d put the records right back where they belonged when I was done playing them.

Between the equipment and the media, I was begging for someone to invent something that would allow me to put all the music I owned into one small place so I could get my living room back.

And in 2001 it happened, with the introduction of the iPod. “1000 songs in your pocket” they said. That was pretty much the equivalent of the “A side” of all the singles I owned. But soon the capacity went up to more and more and more. My 64gb iPod Touch could theoretically hold 15,000 songs.

Better yet, though, came the ability to store even more music on the hard drive of my computer...provided I had a large enough hard drive. I didn’t have to keep all the music on my iPod, just my favorites. It took a while for me to replace all my vinyl with digital versions, and yes, in many cases it meant buying again; but I got my living room back, and my stereo now consisted of an iPod and a portable set of speakers.

But my point, my real point, is that all you people who complain about how much disk space it takes and how much it costs to buy music as opposed to renting it through streaming is this: It’s still less physical space, even if I buy an extra external hard drive for it, to own all that music digitally than to have all that vinyl sitting around the house...uncataloged and unorganized. And it’s still cheaper, at $1.29 per song that I want in 2017 money than it was for a double-sided single at 79¢ in 1966.

So from my aged perspective, that hard drive full of music that I’ve paid for is a vast improvement over that living room full of equipment, records, cassettes, and CDs.

And...I’ll always have the music because I own it. The day won’t come when some record label or artist decides that they don’t want me to be able to play it anymore...as they might with Spotify or Pandora.

Now don’t get me wrong…there are some great things about those streaming services. In an era when radio is increasingly specialized and you can no longer find a station that plays a little of everything, I use Pandora for discovery by creating a bunch of stations with different genres, and then shuffling them so that a song by Ingrid Michaelson could be followed by one by Ray Charles, Bert Kaempfert, the Beatles, Benny Goodman, Kathy Mattea or some artist I haven’t heard of yet.

And then…when I hear something new that I like…I’ll buy it.