Post by The Curmudgeon on Oct 12, 2007 16:20:08 GMT 2
You know, in todays digital age, its depressing how FACELESS music has become. With people having their entire record collection on an Ipod (how many kids growing up now will NEVER buy music on CD or vinyl? How sad is THAT?) music has become an invisible commodity. Downloads are becoming more and more popular and..
Sigh. You know what? I'm not going to go down that road again. I'm actually in a good mood about music today, because I visited an old haunt of mine that I haven't visited in a while - a music shop.
Now, don't get me wrong - I'm in these places all the time. But this is a second hand record shop, not packed full of the latest releases, but full of the long forgotten obscurities, the long deleted singles and those treasured items you thought you'd NEVER get your hands on.
True, ebay and the like have made these places fairly redundant (is there such a thing as a genuinely "rare" record these days?) but just browsing through rack after rack of old CD singles and albums looking for stuff was a joy.
Sound banal? Hey, trust me - it's a dying passion. There wasn't a soul in that shop under 20, and isn't a large chunk of music bought by teenagers? Well where the hell where they? Sitting at home pumping thier money into I-Tunes, that's where.
Now I buy stuff from I-Tunes (well, it's more my wife to be honest - downloads have totally changed her way of buying and listening to music) but for me it's more .. REAL this way. How many new albums are going to be heard through "random shuffle" on an I-Pod? How many people are going to download an album and not even know what it's supposed to LOOK like? Man, I hate sounding old fashioned but that SUCKS.
So what CD did I come away with? The very first album by 70's masters Sly & The Family Stone (I first got into them through Prince and have loved them ever since).
The best thing? I had never even heard of the album. And I bought it, read the inlay sleeve on the way back home and its playing right now.
And damn it all, isn't that the way music SHOULD be experienced?
Sigh. You know what? I'm not going to go down that road again. I'm actually in a good mood about music today, because I visited an old haunt of mine that I haven't visited in a while - a music shop.
Now, don't get me wrong - I'm in these places all the time. But this is a second hand record shop, not packed full of the latest releases, but full of the long forgotten obscurities, the long deleted singles and those treasured items you thought you'd NEVER get your hands on.
True, ebay and the like have made these places fairly redundant (is there such a thing as a genuinely "rare" record these days?) but just browsing through rack after rack of old CD singles and albums looking for stuff was a joy.
Sound banal? Hey, trust me - it's a dying passion. There wasn't a soul in that shop under 20, and isn't a large chunk of music bought by teenagers? Well where the hell where they? Sitting at home pumping thier money into I-Tunes, that's where.
Now I buy stuff from I-Tunes (well, it's more my wife to be honest - downloads have totally changed her way of buying and listening to music) but for me it's more .. REAL this way. How many new albums are going to be heard through "random shuffle" on an I-Pod? How many people are going to download an album and not even know what it's supposed to LOOK like? Man, I hate sounding old fashioned but that SUCKS.
So what CD did I come away with? The very first album by 70's masters Sly & The Family Stone (I first got into them through Prince and have loved them ever since).
The best thing? I had never even heard of the album. And I bought it, read the inlay sleeve on the way back home and its playing right now.
And damn it all, isn't that the way music SHOULD be experienced?
Hadn't he HEARD how awesome that album is?! I ranted to my wife all the way home about that one. Now, the prices for used CD's have been jacked up to levels usually associated with new CD's, there is more modern crap cluttering up the racks due to the fact that people burn themselves copies and sell the original, and the internet has made it so easy to bypass these headaches that I seldom go out of my way to check out a music store these days. Sad, but true. 
