Today marks ten years
since I posted my first review on this blog: Morrissey's 48th birthday concert at the Pageant in St. Louis, Missouri.
It's hard to believe that I've managed to write almost 200 posts on
this blog in the meantime. I have no plans of stopping now, but as I
mentioned in my previous post, I'm in the process of moving to
Berlin, where I expect to continue growing my tastes and expanding my
interests. I will miss the wonderful festivals and the plentiful
concerts by local and touring acts that grace the Austin music scene,
but I suspect that Berlin has its own treasures to uncover.
Quite a bit has changed
in ten years, both personally and in terms of the music industry at
large. Ten years ago, when I was at the peak of my collector's mania,
I was living in St. Louis and second-hand vinyl was plentiful and
cheap. Hence, I amassed a huge collection of vinyl often purchased as
cheap as a dollar per record. Online retailers such as iTunes were
already growing in popularity at that time, and CDs were already
clearly on the way out, so they were generally also plentiful and
cheap.
Now I'm in the midst of
packing my things in preparation for an international move. While I'm
considering what to take, I'm substantially trimming my physical
music collection. Those cheap 90s CDs with terrible packaging that I
criticized in one of my first posts were some of the first things to go. As previously
mentioned in my post about selling my old Devo records, my tastes have also changed
somewhat, which made getting rid of some things easy. However, my
preferences on how to collect have only continued to evolve, and
since that post I've even gotten rid of the Hot Potatoes
greatest-hits album that I advocated for.
In
that case, I at least kept a digital copy. Since hard drives are so
cheap, it's an easy choice to keep a lossless copy of a CD whose
packaging is unimpressive but whose musical contents are still
worthwhile. (I've written about that before, too.) Even vinyl records have started to lose
some of their appeal to me. At
this point, I only want to
keep my absolute favorites, the prized rarities, the limited presses
from my friends, or the ones with the incredible artwork. Considering
how expensive new vinyl is, especially compared to lossless digital
downloads, it's rarely worth it for me anymore.
Ironically,
I still love record stores, even as they continue to transition to
selling more and more vinyl and there is less and less that I
actually want to buy in them. There's still an appeal to the hunt and
the random chance that leads to a new discovery. And anyway, I no
longer feel obligated to indefinitely keep everything I buy: I can
always spin an album for a few months and then decide to pass it back
into circulation. This gets
to the heart of a complicated issue: the matter of collecting versus
curating. The reality is that there is too much good music to
possibly own it all.
Streaming is a
convenient middle ground, but I'm not entirely sold on it. On one
hand, the low royalties associated with it are well-documented and
the source of much consternation. On the other, it does make music
widely accessible in a legal manner that was never possible before.
Some royalties are better than none, and the discovery aspect is
real. Despite my hesitation, I can't deny that Spotify is incredibly
useful at times. I still love SoundCloud, too, even if I'm concerned
for their long-term stability.
The increasing market
share of streaming services reinforces the question of the
ephemerality of music. For better or worse, I still cling to the
notion of possessing music, but now I accept digital possession as
valid in a way that I never let myself before. However, even that
concept of possession is changing for me. Do I really need to have a
flac or mp3 of every song I like? Is it really worth tracking down
every obscure b-side of a new favorite band? Why bother, when I can
just find those tracks on a streaming service on the rare occasions
that I actually want to hear them?
Obviously, I haven't quite made final decisions on these matters, and I suspect my preferences will continue to change. In the meantime, I'll still be going to concerts and writing up reviews when I can. After ten years, I'm happy to report that I still enjoy live music and critical analysis thereof. I'll still be listening to as much recorded music as ever in one format or another, and I will probably continue to occasionally get inspired enough to write about that, too.
