Music Distribution circa 2009

I am coming to a crossroads of sorts lately with my music purchases. There is starting to be more and more choices of what to buy. Let me discuss a little…

For the past twenty years, CDs are the big thing. Now, you can also get a digital copy of an album (or in most cases, buy single songs off the album…boo hiss). I personally don’t care for this option as I have this fear that one day my hard drive will crash and I will lose these ‘digital copies’ of an album and not have a proper backup. Wait…did that just happen to someone? However, on the other hand, it’s quite easy to simply get in the habit of backing up the digital files onto a recordable CD as soon as you download it.

So, as you may or may not know, I’m enjoying the idea of collecting vinyl again. Vinyl is neat-o. I don’t have much, but I’ve also noticed a resurgence of vinyl being released with new albums. At first, I didn’t really bother thinking about buying TOO much vinyl because I thought “Why would I buy the CD as well as the vinyl?” But now there are tons of bands releasing digital copies of their album for download along with the vinyl.

If I really look at how I listen to music, it is in the following manner:

– my iPod, which contains digital copies of music
– on CDs in the car
– on vinyl when I’m at Vero’s place where her record player is handy

If I started solely purchasing vinyl copies of music, I would then have a digital copy and the vinyl copy. But of course, if I really wanted to listen to the album in my car, I could easily burn it to a CD, or simply plug my iPod into the car and voila! I suppose I would still need to back it up onto a CD in case my hard drive crashes. It’s not like the vinyl will be easy to rip onto the computer. There’s also the option of simply finding it on the Internet. Now, this is a good idea in theory but have you ever tried to find some obscure band’s music on the Internet 10 years after an album was released? It’s a little bit trickier. The Internet is a wondeful place for new and popular things…not out of print stuff that the majority of people don’t listen to.

I think I’m going to try the process of buying a vinyl record instead of a CD for awhile and see how it treats me. Part of my brain is screaming “Wha? What are you thinking! Don’t you love grabbing that CD in a quick grab towards to the car? Won’t you have to think about burning this album?” but the other part likes the vinyl movement. It hearkens back to the old days which I can only imagine is like in the movies where you would throw an album on and stare at the artwork for hours while you listened to the music.

Face it, I’m a romantic. A romantic for music.