All My Music Is Right Here

For people of a certain age, say 50+, the amount of physical space needed for a music collection was something one had to think about. Most music fans begin collecting their favorites around the age of 11 or 12. It is at this age, I argue, that one’s musical tastes are solidified. In the age of RADIO ONLY as a source of daily music, one had to wait until one of their favorites hit the airwaves. If you really couldn’t wait, you had to somehow get the money needed and then haul your butt down to the record store and buy the record.

Vinyl Albums

Now the record store was a very special place. A common feature of record stores that was lost, for the most part, by the time I was a frequent visitor, was the booths where you could put headphones on and listen to any record in the place before you purchased it. In my experience, one had to ask the guy behind the counter to put on your record to be played over the store’s loudspeakers. Often, one had to endure the condescending comments from the record store employee. Oh by the way, record store employees, have the tendency to be music snobs but that’s to be expected. I love their passion for music but, in the end, it’s all about personal preference.

The fun starts when you get the album home. I am one who likes to listen to the whole album in the first sitting. The first listening is always the most important one. It could determine whether you have wasted that hard earned allowance or maybe, you have discovered something that will last you your whole life. The more details listed on the album cover and inserts, the better for me. I would comb over those album covers, looking for clues about my favorite artists. Something that would open a door for me or answer that age-old question: “What is hip?”.

I repeated this action over and over again in my life. The result being a large amount of vinyl records that needed to be stored in a way that could be easily accessed. Alpha by artist. Shelves, wooden cubes, book cases were filling up, taking up a lot of room. A few things were developed while I was a youngster that allowed people to take their music with them easily. This also allowed the collector to save space. The first I can remember were 8 track tapes. 8 track tapes were magnetic tape. An 8 track collection would take up less space than the vinyl album collection. And you could play 8 track tapes in your CAR. GAME CHANGER!!

Tape worms

Luckily, I was not a driver when 8 tracks came out. I did not buy any but had some given to me , along with a player. If I had been driving at the time, I would have re-bought my favorite albums so I could cruise my neighborhood with the windows down and the radio blasting. 8 tracks had a strange process when they automatically switched tracks, often time in the middle of a song they would click loudly as the tracks changed, cutting the music off for a few seconds. What DID become popular was the little cousin of the 8 Track, the cassette.

The cassette was much smaller than the 8 track and record companies quickly made the switch to cassettes but the BIG thing about cassettes were that you could buy a blank one and tape anything you wanted on it. Cassettes had two sides, similar to albums and if you had an auto-reverse cassette player, you could play a whole record, front to back, without having to get up and turn the tape over. With the advent of cassettes, came the advent of “The Mix Tape” Mix tapes could be considered a personal ‘Greatest Hits’ album. You became your own program director. A perfectly built mix tape could be the catalyst needed to bring that special relationship to the next level.

Like the 8 track, the cassette allowed your music to be played portably. Boomboxes sprung up all over the neighborhood as the need for bringing the inside to the outside overcame all the kids. My first car had a cassette player and I quickly filled up a cassette storage case with home-recorded copies of my favorite albums. I was completely freed from listening to music ONLY at home, usually by myself. If I had started to collect music in the cassette age, my storage issues would have be solved, almost. Cassettes also made it possible to share music with friends. Effectively, cutting into the record company profits. While the impact of cassettes on the music business was, most likely, a positive, the recording of albums onto cassettes was a foreshadowing of what was to come. It was the beginning of the end for high-flying record companies.

Running out of room

The other issue is that, as you get older, this music collection only gets bigger. Anyone who has moved or helped someone move can attest to the fact that the boxes marked “Albums” are usually the heaviest ones in the bunch. It can become a real life issue. However, things were about to monumentally change with the advent of digital music. The technology that (temporarily) killed the vinyl record was the Compact Disc or CD. The CD is a 5″ disc containing a thin layer of pitted polycarbonate with a thin layer of aluminum for reflecting the laser that reads the data.

For me, personally, my original CD collection is larger than my original vinyl collection. That is just a factor of when in history I was born. This is where my collection starts to double up. I purchased plenty of CDs of albums I already owned. The BIG selling point for CDs was the absolute convenience they afforded. Storing them was simple, playing them was super easy. Just press a button to open a tray and place the disc on the tray. Push in the tray and START ROCKING! For me the CD is still MY preferred purchase however, I believe, I am in the minority.

Now I am an old guy. I cling to the old technology of CDs. Not really, I have embraced the latest in music listening; the streaming kind. Having ownership over a collection of music is a foreign idea to today’s listener. Today, one can STILL purchase music, however there is nothing physical that comes with that purchase. You now have a data file that you either download to some storage or you have ‘air’, nothing, just a promise that when you press the button to hear your song, it will be sent to your listening device via the magic of the airwaves. This development has rocked (no pun intended) the music BUSINESS. Digitizing the music has allowed the sharing of music among listeners. Similar to the cassette era, music was now being purchased once and shared multiple times for free. The process is extremely easy. Much less work than taping a cassette. The cash is not flowing in the music business like it used to.

Back to my original point: When I began collecting music, my collection took up a whole wall in my room. As technology advanced that footprint got smaller and smaller. That footprint disappeared almost entirely with digital music and digital music players. What took up a whole wall now fits in my pocket. NOW the thing in my pocket can also call my baby and tell her I’m on the way home as well as hold a lifetime of music.

Being the packrat that I am, I saved all those vinyl records even when my turntable broke. There was no need to replace the turntable at the time so I lived with the fact that I could not listen to some of my music because vinyl was the only medium that particular album existed on. All that changed when vinyl records made a comeback. I bought a new turntable and brought the albums back into the house. I have added many more to my collection since then and it’s developed into an extremely fun hobby.

My workflow is much easier these days when it comes to music. I still buy CDs because I like the physical disc but everything I buy goes into the computer where my song list is easily 5 figures long. From there it’s sync’d to my phone along with all the albums I have physically digitized and all the music I have purchased digitally. Its ALL portable and with me at all times. I am seconds away from playing anything I own at any time. All my music is right here!