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Paige Maguire also blogs at her personal site.
Mallory O'Donnell is discussing a subject near and dear to my heart: the problem of music collecting in the digital age. For most of us nearing the end of our 20's or slipping quietly into our 30's, there are memories of vinyl collections, dusty crates and boxes of Maxells lingering around to remind us of the days when our experience was music actually involved some sort of physical interaction with it as a product.
These days, however, it's harder to manage our love for music. The younger generation does everything digitally, and the rest of us fight off urges to digitize our albums to perfect our iTunes playlists, all while Soulseeking to find the new things we want to try out. We've come to an impasse: we need to bridge the gap between the way we used to listen to music, and the way we have to do it now. We know we can't always rely on the radio to show us what we like, and MTV has long been obsolete when it comes to showcasing new, great music. We turn to the internet, as we do so often, to help us muddle through the rising tide of sounds.
We have to pick our battles, that's the main thing-and the selection of what to really pay attention to and what to blithely cast off into the night is a highly personal one, based on ephemeral criteria. For the overwhelmed listener or critic, one hour of time in which we scarcely pay attention is a cast-off, but for the artist we've taken all their hours and days and wadded them into a missile aimed straight at the rubbish bin. Unfair? Well, sure-but no more so than any other aspect of the process of natural selection in our media-crowded world. And it's only getting more and more jam-packed, day in, day out-just think, 300 years ago it was possible to have read every book ever written in English. Today, I doubt one could read so much as a list of all their titles. The same applies to music.
So how do we manage all of this? Do we give up and just stick to what we like? Or do we keep trying to discover new things to turn us on, get us excited, make us want to put in the effort necessary to truly enjoy our music community?
O'Donnell's persepctive is decidedly depressing for the music obsessive:
There are a million records to be heard and enjoyed, each one as deserving of your attention as any other. You will never get to hear 99% them.
Get over it.
