In Defence of the CD :: Wessex Scene Online

In Defence of the CD

21st January 2008
Philip Reynolds

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A year ago I lost everything. All my hard work, my years of obsessive collecting, alphabetising and arranging all for nothing, as the computer repair shop wiped my hard drive back to digital oblivion. Three and a half thousand songs were lost on that fateful day - my entire music collection eradicated in a single blow.

There are few things more personal, or more prized than a person’s collections. From a bibliophile’s bookshelf of classic tomes, to a film lover’s catalogue of amazing movies – people’s collections are centrepieces of their homes, even extensions of themselves. A person’s taste in books or films can reveal as much about them as can be gleaned in a conversation.

Yet, the same is no longer true of music. 2007 has been the year the digital revolution touched us all. From Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows entirely online to Universal Music’s decision to release singles (and subsequently albums) by artists such as Hadouken! Matchbox 20 and even Ringo Starr on USB memory sticks. It was even the year that digital music downloads were allowed to be counted on the national top 40 each week. And why? Because, according to Brian Rose, Universal UK’s commercial director, ’16-24 year olds no longer believe that the CD is as cool as it used to be.’

Uncool? Absurd. The acquisition of rare, imported or hard won editions of albums is surely as important, and as personal, to any collection than the music itself. When we buy music, we’re not buying a cold, manufactured product, we’re investing ourselves in an artist’s work

More than that, we’re buying into an experience, completed by album art, inlay booklets and the way those images reflect and inform the music. But with the millions of digital downloads (both legal and illegal) occurring every day, music collections have devolved into little more than carefully maintained lists. As I handed over the wad of notes to pay for the destruction of my precious music library, I realised that less than half of my songs I even owned in physical form. Friends of mine have acquired music collections of well over tens of thousands of songs, but have only listened to fractional amounts of their music. It is no longer theirs – they haven’t chosen it, or even listened to it – it’s just another addition to a growing list of tracks they happen to have stored on their bursting hard drives, and no longer reflects them.

Worse still, by ripping our entire music collections onto laptops and computers, we’re reducing them to nothing more than a vast playlist of tracks; picking and choosing our favourite songs from our huge databases without any thought for the cohesion that an album provides. Artists never intended their music to be listened to a single track at a time – we should be enjoying them in the context of the rest of the album, treating it as a single piece of art, rather than dismissing the bits we don’t like. After all, few of us read single chapters of books at a time, or single chapters of films on DVD, so why should the way we enjoy music be any different?

So next time you’re in town, do yourself a favour and invest in that CD you were thinking about downloading, and keep it away from your computer. Your ears will love you for it.