As a music lover, I can't decide whether technology has improved my relationship with music or simply sanitized it.Call it the MP3-era hangover, but even as online music providers are finally offering the DRM-free downloads we asked for years ago, I'm starting to realize that my fascination with the MP3 is starting to wane. Why do we hang on to these antiques? Is it nostalgia? Is it the fear of losing something we can't regain? Or are we just lazy?Programs such as iTunes perfectly sort my digital music collection, but also homogenize artists into a spreadsheet of flat, impersonal squares. For instance, when was the last time you had to special-order your music at a record store and wait a week or more for it to arrive? When was the last time you wanted to hear an album you know you own but couldn't locate in the mess of your apartment? As the music in our lives has evaporated into noncorporeal ones and zeros, the troubled memories of acquiring and maintaining a physical music collection are quickly fading into the past.Despite the advantages of the MP3, I'm willing to wager that somewhere in your home you have a shelf, closet, or box filled with CDs, records, or cassettes (maybe even MiniDiscs). In fact, there's tons of antiquated annoyances we no longer worry about in the age of the MP3. After a lifetime of warped LPs and worn-out cassettes, CDs seemed almost magical.Today, most of us take for granted that our MP3s won't wear out or skip.
Sure, they would skip like crazy, get scratched, or even break, but compact discs were the first medium to usher in the idea of "permanent" music-albums that (if treated kindly) would never degrade over time. I never use it, but I like holding on to it because it reminds me of how amazing I once thought CDs were. Hell, some of us still listened to cassettes.The Sony Discman pictured above belongs to me.
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With the first iPod still three years off, most of us were in the heights of our compact disc addiction 10 years ago, content to hear our music on portable CD players. Today, the results of the MP3 revolution are starting to show, and I sometimes wonder what we won.It's fitting that 2008 marks the 10-year anniversary of two of the first MP3 players, the Eiger Labs MPMan F10, and the Rio PMP300, but chances are you didn't listen to a first-gen MP3 player in 1998. In the '90s, when the MP3 was new, it was difficult to predict the medium's effect on the music industry and our culture.
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