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I did something yesterday that I rarely do anymore: set foot in an actual brick-and-mortar record store. You know, the kind that sells those little silver discs? The kind that once upon a time, a long, long time ago, sold those big vinyl discs? (Or for those of us that came of age in the 80s, the lowly but under-appreciated cassette tapes.) i still buy a lot of music, but never in the years since the dawn of the ipod would I have thought that I would completely abandon the haunts of my youth were I would fight over that rare copy of some long out-of-print gem with some guy whose wingspan is twice mine. Why bother anymore when Amazon and iTunes has nearly anything a good music fan could want?And it's not only the mom-and-pops in trouble. A few months ago, New York City said goodbye to its last Virgin Megastore. Maura from Idolator:
Not with a bang: “It was the final day of business for the Virgin Megastore chain in North America, which at its peak had 23 locations but by Sunday was down to two… when the [Union Square] store opened, perhaps 90 percent of the merchandise had already been sold, leaving two tables of CDs and DVDs, a dozen T-shirt racks and a few other scattered displays.”
Carrie From NPR's Monitor Mix packed up or sold her CDs prior to a move, but refuses to part with her vinyl albums:
I've sold off or packed all of my CDs for storage; I've loaded the content of the ones I can't live without onto my computer. That's right: Not a single CD is coming along to NYC. Yet I can't seem to part with the glorious and tactile experience of vinyl.
As someone who got into music in the late-eighties and early-nineties, I've never had tons of vinyl. I'd always wished I'd built a better collection, but I'm not tidy or organized enough to be a true record geek. I've ditched a lot of my CDs, too, moving twice in the past eight years. The songs I've found indispensable, I've ripped to iTunes, while the physical artifacts were shipped en masse to whatever used CD store would take them. The cassettes a distant memory. I should feel guilty about this, but I don't. To me, it's still music, regardless of the format?How about you? Do you buy CDs still?
