At the moment, I have a trash bag full of CDs hidden under my desk at my father’s house, hours away from my dorm in Orono. They play no active roles. Their contents have been ripped onto my laptop. They can’t be seen or heard, and accessing one would require being at a place I’m not at most of the time and digging through a pile. I tend not to buy music new, meaning I don’t do it to support the artists. So, what purpose do they serve, and why do I keep buying more?
To understand their role in my life, let me describe how music can be accessed. Streaming services offer a large amount of music for a small monthly fee, and they have been how I regularly access new music. I don’t mind sound quality, so they offer an acceptable experience. One might argue that’s all I really need to access music. That’s true, except that they lack a ton of music I’d want to listen to. Say you enjoy the latest Desert Sessions album and want to check out all the project’s other work, then you’d be out of luck. The first four albums are stuck on an abandoned record label and were unable to come to any streaming service. If you want to listen to those albums, then your options are streaming from unofficial uploads on YouTube, hunting down expensive copies of each album, or piracy.
YouTube offers almost everything when it comes to its library due to people being able to upload music they don’t own the rights to, but as a streaming service, it’s a mess. Unless you pay monthly for YouTube Premium, you’ll be unable to turn your mobile device off while listening to music. Even if you do pay for it or use a cracked version of YouTube’s app, what you’ll get will be far from the ideal music-listening experience. Some albums will be their own video, others will be in playlists. Some playlists will be fine, while others will have deleted videos and missing tracks. The interface is severely lacking. Most of the time you can’t link songs to their albums. You can’t multiselect. There is no gapless playback or customized playlists. Plus, there will be tons of stuff that isn’t music polluting your search results. Often there will be stuff that looks like what you want but isn’t, such as the infamous Pink Floyd Endless River tribute. And there is still stuff that isn’t on there, such as King Crimson’s entire discography or the even rarer stuff. I can’t imagine using this as your primary music platform.
When YouTube and expensive collector’s items are out of the question, the third option is piracy. Fortunately, rare music is not at risk of carrying viruses the way more popular stuff is. The issue with piracy now is that it’s a time investment to get what you want. Most of the time you can just find it on ThePirateBay in one of its many forms and that will suffice. Other times will require searching the ends of the internet to find that one foreign website that will carry it. I recently found out about the peer-to-peer music-sharing website Soulseek, which has fulfilled my rare-music needs, but someone newer to music collecting with a more lacking library would get banned for having nothing to share. So, piracy is an effective solution, only requiring some online searching and the willingness to create a music library on your computer.
Of course there is stuff easily available, but just not on streaming services. Bandcamp offers tons of exclusive music that can be bought straight from the artist, and that’s much fairer than piracy and will benefit the artist you’re buying from. Sometimes there are CDs of unavailable music which aren’t expensive, and that’s more fair than piracy.
It’s totally fine to keep it this way, having your main library on a streaming service and a rarities library on your computer. This begs the question, why do I buy CDs? The answer is simply for the freedom of the ownership of my music. When I find an album I like on a streaming service, I’m essentially borrowing it. It can be taken away at any time, whether it’s due to it being removed from the streaming service, or because I stopped paying for it. When I buy it, I have permanent access to the true lossless files. They can’t be taken away, and it’s nice having the freedom to manipulate the audio if I so choose. Plus, it enters my computer’s music library in which it is more easily accessible and can be there alongside the many other albums I love. It’s rewarding to me to have a great music library, even though it’s digital. An album reaching this stage means it has completed its journey into my possession,
I prefer CDs over digital downloads because it translates that music library into something tangible. In addition, each one comes with a little booklet, offering extras bits to the music listening experience such as artist notes and lyrics. One of my favorite albums is David Bowie’s 1. Outside, and its CD includes a series of diary entries which give context to the album’s story. Additionally, CDs are often the cheapest way to obtain music and tend to hold a value that doesn’t diminish over time. Unlike digital music, used CDs are valued based on supply and demand, rather than consistently being around $10, so I can often find them for much cheaper physically. This allows me to hunt for bargains, which I enjoy and find rewarding. There’s always the idea that I can be done with an album for good and eventually sell it, gaining back the money it took to obtain it, so buying an album for cheap means I could profit off of it in the long term. I’m having doubts about if I can ever be done with an album in my ever-expanding library, but it is possible.
One could argue that buying used CD is no different from piracy in how neither one supports the artists creating the music. Morally, however, there is a large difference because piracy is essentially getting for free what you should be paying the artist for, while buying used CDs is a completely legal way to obtain music and does good in that it transfers an item from a person who doesn’t want it to a person who does. Plus, there’s always the idea that by buying a CD you’re decreasing the supply, increasing the value of a used CD, eventually resulting in people deciding that price isn’t low enough to buy it used and buying it new or digitally instead. I don’t know much about economics, so I don’t know if this works out in practice. This could also be just an excuse for getting more bang for my buck, and I can’t deny that I’m cheap in that way. I just think it’s not worth paying more for the same product but in slightly better condition and after manufacturers and the such, a small amount might reach the people who made the music. I’d rather just buy their music used and support them through donations once I get a good enough job that I feel they deserve my money more than I do. I’ve still bought my fair share of digital music and new CDs regardless.
The final question is “Why not vinyl?” and my reasons are price, quality, and accessibility. Vinyl tends to be pricier than CDs, can often come with annoying crackling (could just be my player, though), and they require a record player to play. This last point severely impairs my experience because I listen to music all the time and can’t be limited to one place. For me, they are a nice novelty, but not something I’ll spend serious money on.
Transverse Being 