I read an interesting article the other morning about the rise and fall of CDs, and it got me thinking about physical media as a whole. I began collecting vinyl LPs when I was in college in the '80s, got my first VCR just before the end of that decade, bought my first CD player in 1990, and my first DVD player in 2004. To this day, I tend to accumulate music and movies more rapidly than I can view or listen to them. And while I do make use of streaming technology, primarily for TV viewing, I have never been tempted to rid myself of physical media.
Like many people of my generation, I focused primarily on vinyl in my adolescence and early adulthood, but I also made extensive use of cassettes, transferring favorite albums to that more portable medium for in-car listening, and copying things for and from friends. And of course, there was that ever fun pastime of creating mix tapes. I fell for the snob appeal of high bias cassettes like the Maxell XLII and TDK SA, and thus I would seldom buy prerecorded cassettes. For the money, I always preferred vinyl.
I saw my first CD in the summer of 1983, when a classmate in a business writing course gave us a presentation on this new technology. He was also a part-time DJ for a local radio station and was very enthusiastic about how CDs were poised to revolutionize music, but surprisingly, although I saw them in stores over the following years, I didn't know anyone who actually had a CD player until after I had graduated from college, and I didn't get one until several more years after that. Frankly, I was afraid it would lead to yet another obsession, which it did.
I was still living with house mates back then, and when one moved in with a Pioneer six-disc CD player, and I quickly came to appreciate their clean sound and convenience in a diminutive package that seemed to embody the best of an LP and a cassette.
Within a year or two of acquiring my first CD player, I made the conscious decision to close out my vinyl collection to concentrate on the newer, shinier medium. I didn't get rid of them and didn't replace most of them with CDs, but I stopped acquiring any additional vinyl. That was the spring of 1992, as I finished my second semester of graduate school. It was also at a point where CDs had surpassed both vinyl and cassettes in popularity.
A few years later, I acquired a CD burner for my computer, and around the same time, I got a 12-disc CD changer for my car, which together virtually eliminated the need for cassettes. It also was greatly convenient in that I didn't have to swap out discs going down the road. I could play through all twelve discs a couple of times before I got tired of them. A few years after that, I went through a period of financial struggle, during which I fed my music habit by checking out CDs from the local library and burning copies. Later, I began to discover online repositories like the Live Music Archive, which gave me even more access to fresh music without having to shell out for CDs. For several years, I was primarily burning my own discs, and ultimately branched out to doing the same with DVDs. For more than a decade, my purchases of prerecorded music dropped to almost nothing.
During this time, the music industry was changing. CD sales were slumping, both with the rise of streaming and digital downloads, and the unexpected resurgence of vinyl, sales of which have now slightly overtaken those of CDs. Ironically, this trend has led to a resurgence of CD purchases. I began frequenting a used bookstore that also sold music and movies. In the age of Spotify, many people were jettisoning their physical media, and this store was continually overrun with slow moving inventory. It wasn't that it was bad stuff, quite the opposite, there was just too much for them to handle, so many CD and DVD titles are sold for a dollar or two, making it possible to buy a whole stack of discs for the price of one new one. It's probably a good thing that the store has moved out of town, and I can only visit it once every few months, instead of averaging three or four visits a month.
I've slowed down on my media acquisitions these days, and that's probably for the best, and while I do subscribe to SiriusXM in the car, mostly for safety reasons, so I don't have to change out CDs while driving, I definitely prefer a physical disc over a digital copy. Without that commercially packaged physical artifact, I just don't feel like I truly possess it. That disc is mine and no one can take it from me. The disclaimers on Amazon's Kindle books tell the full story. All I have there is a license to access that content. It can be taken away at any time. Compare that to my late father's 78 rpm records that I have inherited, some of which are now more than a century old. Now, that's staying power!
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