A B CD

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12151157

Oddly enough, and unlike many of my peers, I was a latecomer to the music scene. It wasn’t until a couple years into my junior high experience that my repertoire expanded beyond  “Yellow Submarine” (and various amusing variations) and “Hey Jude”. It was around this time that I discovered two things: that topics of conversation were increasingly being centered around music, and, more importantly, a pile of unused CDs that I had received as gifts over the years. I popped the CDs into some newfangled program on the family computer called iTunes, and voila, a couple dozen songs yet unheard by my virgin ears lay before me. It was these CDs that provided me with the momentum to start refining my musical tastes and to find other music.

Now, however, CDs have no appeal to me. Mr. Manzoor talks in the above article about the experience of a material CD; this holds no pleasure for me. Lyrics are available online, allowing me to copy and past them to my iPod so that I can read them while the song plays, which makes the lyric book in a CD case quite obsolete. In addition, I find it extremely rare when I like more than a couple songs from an artist or band, making material CD purchases hard to justify. Very rarely have I found I enjoy an artist enough to warrant the purchase of an entire CD. By downloading songs, not only do I get the convenience of online shopping, but I also am not forced to purchase thousands of unwanted songs which share the album of the few songs that I do want.

I do believe that Mr. Manzoor has a point when he says that something is lost when music stores disappear. Although I am not one who is able to appreciate the music store experience that doesn’t mean there isn’t some beauty in it. As a self-proclaimed board game aficionado, I love to browse board game specialty shops and I would be heartbroken if I was only able to buy these games via online shopping. It’s the same idea.

Although so far I have been quite agreeable to the points made in the above article, I must now take offense to: “We listen to [music] on the same machines that we use to surf, tweet, call and text; music is just another form of distraction and these days we prefer our gratification without delays”. I do not believe that listening to music on a multimedia device makes it a distraction. For me, calling and texting have definitive purposes and are not aimless endeavours. I call when I need to talk and I text when I need to communicate without the length of a phone conversation. I play music when I want to be human again: to experience the emotion of a song. These acts fulfill needs, not random desires for gratification.