Momus on modern-day music collections

Reviewing a thread on ILM, of all things, Momus writes

“What might . . . have looked like a dizzyingly diverse and contemporary world of future listening possibilities now looks like some kind of enormous obligation imposed on us by the past, an obligation we will never begin to fulfill (by acts of listening which would devour the rest of our lives) and don’t have any intention of even trying to.”

He’s talking about that classic totem of hipsterdom, the record collection.

I find that it’s increasingly hard to justify buying a “hard copy” of the music I love, though I still pick up CDs (or vinyl, on occasion) if whole album is good, or if it demands to be listened to as a whole. The rise of Amazon’s MP3 store has been great for me. Even when I just buy the digital version, though, I notice a pang of guilt if I don’t buy every track on the album.

I don’t know how apt Momus’ analogy about the MacBook Air is. When the first iMac abrogated the rule that every computer must have a floppy disk drive, pundits rightly recognized that this reflected the end of the era in which 1.44MB was a useful amount of storage. The fact that the Air doesn’t ship with an optical drive, on the other hand, reflects only the practical necessities of creating a laptop that fits into a manila envelope. As regards CDs and DVDs, they’re clearly still indispensable for a lot of non-musical applications (I just shelled out for a particularly pricy, Apple-approved one this week). Even for music, Apple won’t turn away from CDs entirely until it changes iTunes’ iconic, er, icon. Additionally, unlike 3.5″ disks, music CDs are often if not primarily played on devices other than computers — even if Apple, Dell, and all the rest colluded to get rid of them, a separate market would exist.

Still,  I agree that music will look a lot different a few years from now, when the average consumer decides that it’s too hard to manage so many pieces of plastic. I mean, it really, really isn’t. For a while, I justified picking up the odd CD on the grounds that I could play it in the car. Now, I realize it will be at least five years before I own a car, and more if I can get away with it, yet still I’ve bought six CDs this week. For his part, Momus has been ahead of the curve in recognizing this aspect of consumerism: be sure to see his piece, “The Curse of Storage,” on Wired from 2006.