As we slowly adapt into the digital world.

The analog ways are slowly being left behind.

It seems strange to me to have a conversation with a young person these days, about how many CD's he or she owns, only to find out that they have no collection of any format of music. They own no vinyl records, no cassette tapes or CD's. All the music they listen to comes from their smartphone.

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I was never a book reader, and yet, I have been learning how to become a practicing writer. I can read just fine. I just don't have the attention span to read books. For some reason, my brain has never functioned well in that capacity. I have always been easily distracted when it comes to reading. I find it fascinating when people tell me that they're reading a book that they simply cannot put down. They have a tangible piece of literature in their hands that allows them to read the words and turn the pages with their fingertips. They become engulfed in the story. The words paint pictures for the mind to create. The weight of the book holds firmly in their grasp as they finish each chapter.

Okay, so let's apply those same fascinating, tangible qualities of books to a vinyl record albums.

I remember as a kid, looking closely at the grooves of my Led Zeppelin IV album. I used a magnifying glass to see close up, the bumps and staggered lines where the stylus of the turntable met the vinyl record. Music really comes from those jagged lines? How is that possible? I'd investigate the tape head on my cassette player and try to comprehend how magnetic signals from a cassette tape floating past that tape head could somehow create music. The digital compact disk came along and I initially had no clue how any of that worked. All I knew was how much better it sounded than the analog formats I had grown up with.

Vinyl records, cassette tapes, reel-to-reel tapes were all like books to me. They were tangible things I could hold in my hands and feel. The record album came in a cardboard jacket cover. That album cover had pictures, artwork, strange graphics, liner notes, lyrics, names of the members so the band, producers, engineers, guest musicians, where it was recorded, when it was recorded, and on and on. To me, this was like reading a book. This was the kind of information you memorized and studied so you could compare notes in conversations with your friends. This was important stuff.

Having a record album cover meant that everyone else looked at it while the music was being played on the stereo. This was a sort of right of passage to understanding and appreciating our music. You got to know the bands. You knew the names of each member of the band and which instrument they played. Who sang, who played keyboards, who played the bass guitar? Cassette tapes usually had liner notes in the cartridge. It was much smaller print, but it was legible. CD's were the same way. You got a fold-out liner note with all of the information about the music, fit neatly into the case of a CD. I have a medium size collection of vinyl albums and 45's. I have nearly 600 cassette tapes and about 150+ CD's. I am a collector of music. Being a musician, this is to be expected. Most musicians have been collecting music all of their lives. 

Then one day, everything changed.

About twenty-some-odd years ago, this new format called the "mp3" became all the rage. Nobody really knows where it came from or how it grew to be such an iconic game-changer in the music world. Most people don't even know what "mp3" even means. Do you?

[Source Google]: 'MP3' is the abbreviation for 'MPEG Audio Layer III' ('MPEG' stands for 'Motion Pictures Expert Group'). It's a compressed digital audio file. A player stores these files on a memory chip so that you can play it back at your leisure.

So, now you know.

Okay, so I had to learn what this mp3 thing was. I also learned about another online thing that was happening online in 1999 called "Napster". This Napster thing was a file-sharing program you could download for free and store and share all of your digital music, movies, documents, photographs, codes, etc., and it wouldn't cost you a thing. Add hundreds of millions of other subscribers to this concept, and you suddenly have access to almost anything digital you can imagine - for free.

Yes, I jumped on board. However, at the time, I still had dial-up internet service and an extremely slow Windows 95 H/P desktop computer with only a one-gigabyte hard drive. Anything I downloaded, I had to dump to a cassette tape. That's how creative I was. I simply didn't have room on my computer to build a catalogue of thousands of stolen songs. As time went by, I owned bigger, faster computers with a lot more hard drive space. I learned how to dump (rip) all of my CD's and put them onto my computer hard drive as mp3 files. This way, I could listen to my own CD's at my desk when I was on my computer. I learned to back up everything onto burnable CD's. Back then, external hard drives were notorious for crashing. This meant that you would lose everything that was on that hard drive. Having backup CD's meant that restoring thousands of songs back onto a newer hard drive would only take a few days.

Twenty years ago, taking this much music with you meant that you needed a portable mp3 player. Sony made some nice ones. These were my very first playlist CD's. I could fit hundreds of mp3 songs onto one CD. I made a few dozen of these playlist CD's and kept them in my car. No more cassettes pouncing and skipping as I drove my car. No, I had CD quality in my car. I eventually installed a CD/mp3 player in my car. Then one day, I heard about this thing called the Apple iPod. It was a pocket-size mp3 player you could carry with you. So, I got the 80 gig version and crammed it full with tens of thousands of mp3's. Now, I had my entire collection of music with me at all times. 

I still had my monster home stereo system in my living room. I still listened to vinyl albums and CD's when I wanted to simply listen to music on big speakers instead of headphones. I sat on the floor and flipped through my vinyl collection, reminiscing about the old music, remembering who I was with when I was listening to that particular album. I managed to learn to appreciate the convenience of the new digital world while continuing to embrace the analog days gone by.

Then, the smartphone changed everything...again.

When the music industry missed out on the digital revolution of the early 2000's, they lost billions in music sales due to piracy from online programs like Napster. Something needed to change. So, the smartphone was created around 2007. Apple tried to maintain Apple iTunes, but it was just too complicated. If you tried to use iTunes on a brand new computer, you were almost certainly going to run into trouble trying to get your account back. You could use YouTube, but by then it was filled with commercials. So, they invented alternative streaming options.

Just about everyone you talk to these days, uses Spotify. I don't use any streaming services. I still have my 50-60k mp3's on my computer. I dumped all of them onto my Galaxy S-22 Ultra. I have my entire collection of music with me at all times. I purchased a portable JBL Bluetooth speaker for the beach and for when I go do guitar lessons.

Here's the difference between me and the younger generations of today. I grew up with record albums, tapes and CD's. I know entire albums. The playlists I made came from those albums. I know the history of the music I have on my phone. I know album names, musicians, dates, song tracks, etc - because I wanted to have a sort of ownership to the soundtracks in my life. My music has always been incredibly important to me.

Today's youth listens to music as streaming service playlists that someone else created for them. They don't know who they're listening to, which albums the music comes from, what years the album was released, or who the musicians are on the songs. All they know is that they are listening to a song they like from a playlist. If I ask any of my students under the age of 30, they know almost nothing about the music of the 1950-1990s. They weren't even born yet. How could they know that music? To me, this is not a valid argument. I was born in 1963, and I know music from the early part of the 20th century, 30-40 years before I was born. I know it because it was important for me to learn it.

In many ways, I am a novice music historian. I just don't see much of this history as being important to the youth of today. I don't mean to categorize an entire generation, but the apathy or indifference I have been witnessing for the past several years, is alarming. Is the music of yesterday doomed to fade away with the dying artists who created it decades ago? Will the art of listening to vinyl records and cassette tapes become nothing more than dinosaur relic thinking?

I can't imagine not owning my collection of music. My music is as important to me as books are to someone who owns a library of books in their den. The old analog ways are the ways that history was recorded and archived. It is incredibly important that these archives remain part of the social understanding of music history. The convenience of music on your smartphone is a wonderful, amazing piece of modern technology. I still have my old records and tapes. They are my books and my archives to the soundtracks to my life.