I've Stopped Buying Music.

The following post is a comment I left in response to a Mashable post, Why Are People Still Buying CDs? by Todd Wasserman.

I've stopped buying music, full stop (with one exception). I used to be a collector of music and would look forward to buying CDs of favorite songs as well as trying out the full albums of bands that seemed to consistently appear on my radar. I must be one of the few that enjoys buying a band's album not knowing if I'll like the songs that weren't singles. I haven't bought a CD in years with one exception... David Bowie can put out a CD and I'll buy it - don't even need to listen to the songs prior to purchase.

I grew up with Bowie but all the other music it was fun to collect bits and pieces of bands from here and there as they drift in an out of view.

For some reason I stopped buying CDs and collecting music as a tangible product. Other priorities I guess [or maybe because they stopped selling CD singles where you could sample 'B sides' and non album release versions of songs?].

The idea of paying to download music has no appeal to me. Curating my own 'cloud' of music just isn't the same as collecting CD's. All you can say is "I've got that song" and the immediacy and cheapness of it gives no sense of excitement to owning a copy. Downloads especially have ruined the concept album where cover art and book inserts are part of the experience.

Owning music is no longer the experience it was. In many ways it's gone the way of photography where the photos you took used to be more considered because it would cost to get them developed. Now you can take a picture of your lunch, before, during and after as well as what they're eating over there, the waiter, the view etc. All images that you'll forget once you've shown them to people... if you even remember to do that.

I listen to podcasts now because they're mostly free and once you've listened to them you can delete them. Music is all around us anyway. I'm happy to leave my music on the radio and maybe watch the occasional music video clip on Youtube. I don't really need to own it... except for Bowie of course.

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TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

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