The End of My CD Addiction

A little while ago Apple announced that iTunes would be offering music DRM-free.

Cool, I thought. I’d heard that it can be tricky to migrate to a new PC with iTunes purchases intact, and I already had a new PC on order from Dell. Anything that would make migration easier was good news to me.

Then last weekend I realized that they’d just changed how I buy music. Actually, it was me that had changed.

A little background.

I bought my first iPod less than a year ago. Not my first iPhone. My first iPod. Really. She’s a beaut. 80GB, matte black, with a silky click-wheel. Had it about 6 months. My youngest brother, a teenager at the time, had nagged at me for years to get one (he thought he was offering enlightenment to his aging brother with the mountain of CDs) but I’d always protested that the only reason to change the hardware you use for listening to music is to get music you can’t otherwise listen to. I have a good stereo at home, a computer at work I can play CDs on, and a good CD player in the car. On public transit I like to read. Nothing had yet been released in digital-only format (even Radiohead’s digital experiment became available on the racks of the music stores eventually) and I still believe in one of my dark itchy places beyond the reach of reason that if you can tell the difference between a CD and a digital audio file ripped at 128 kbps that the CD will sound better.

What made me buy an iPod?

Believe it or not, podcasts. Video podcasts. I had been enjoying This American Life and BBC Documentaries on my desktop PC and borrowed iPod Shuffle (juicy-fruit first-gen) but was interested in the late Moblogic.tv and Bill Moyers on the recommendation of some friends. I started to see the advantage of having these and other podcasts on my person, especially while out walking the dog which for me takes up about an hour a day (2-3 hours on weekends). If I could carry my music collection around with me as well, so much the better.

I’d planned on buying music in 2 streams: digitally for things of interest to me, not my wife; and in CD format, for things of interest to both of us (or for music where remastering made all the difference and iTunes wasn’t clear about which version they were offering). I didn’t know exactly how iTunes locked down its music, but I knew that it did and that I didn’t much like the idea of employing some klunky work-around just so wifey and I could enjoy music together as we always had.

Maybe the workaround wasn’t sloppy. Maybe I’m just lazy.

But that’s the point. The idea of DRM’s restrictions were possibly more restrictive than the restrictions themselves. Buying music on CD was a habit for me, and because it was easy and required no DRM-dodging it’s what I kept on doing. The only new habit I’d picked up was ripping music to my PC (at 256 kbps), but for me buying music still meant going to the store and picking up a CD.

It was still cheaper than buying the same album twice on iTunes. But typing that now I know that wasn’t really something I’d have done. I’d certainly have gotten around to figuring out how to crack iTunes’ lock if it came to buying the same digital product twice. But it never did come to that because I had an old habit to fall back on. CDs were easy and reliable, and iTunes was cheap, dubious quality (not really), and inconvenient. And there was always the sense that music bought from iTunes was like a leased car: in the day-to-day it felt like yours, but out on the horizon was a day of reckoning where the limits of your ownership would come into sharp relief.

With iTunes’ move to DRM-free music, digital music became just a bunch of files in my computer the way books are just things on my shelf. I now have to ask myself why I’d pay more than iTunes’ price for an album the same way I ask myself whether I need to own the hardcover or paperback (this seldom comes up: it’s always paperback).

Sound quality vs. CD? Seems they thought of that, having upgraded the whole store to the iTunes Plus standard of 256 kbps. Liner notes? What’s in there that isn’t on allmusic?

Last weekend I spent a $50 iTunes giftcard that I’d been given for Christmas. I’d made a couple of purchases here and there on iTunes in the past few months, but never more than 1 album at a time. Going on a $50 spree was a revelatory experience. Not only was basically everything I thought I might like to buy available (quite the opposite of the shopping experience HMV provides, unless you need a new cellphone) but $50 on iTunes went a lot further than 2 or 3 CDs. And one of the albums is something wifey would enjoy running to.

I haven’t bought a CD since and I wonder if I ever will again.

Update: I started arranging our CDs by artist Sunday afternoon. (They’ve been shelved in a jumble since we moved.) This is miserable work. And we’re almost out of room (again). I really do think this is the end of an era.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.