I’ve been around a long time, dating all the way back to the days of the 8-track tape. Indeed, I remember playing the everlovin’ hell out of the second(?!) Foreigner album in that format, when I was in Jr. High. I also had a lot of Beatles music on 8-track, as well as Out of the Blue by ELO. In fact, they’re probably all boxed up and in our basement right now.
But during the 8-track era, I was also buying LPs. I can’t recall how I decided which format to buy. But it was the same thing when cassettes came along, and I would buy an LP when it was something I thought I’d mostly listen to at home. And if it was something built for blasting in the car… I’d go with the cassette. Like 5150 by Van Halen, for instance. Maybe I did the same with 8-tracks? I can’t remember.
In any case, various configurations co-existed in my world for many years. Vinyl LPs were always king with me (I still own hundreds), but I certainly mucked around with the others, as well. The first time I faced an actual dilemma as it pertained to music formats, was when CDs were introduced. Would I now abandon my beloved LPs and take up with the rabid CD cult? This is how it went:
- Are you kidding? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
- This is actually catching on? Seriously?! Suckers!
- Well, it wouldn’t do any harm to just check it out.
- I am fully on-board with the new world order.
The same pattern played itself out with MP3s (to a lesser degree), and finally with streaming. The one I embraced the least was mp3, but I was a member of eMusic for many years and purchased and downloaded many full-length albums. It was difficult for me to not really own the music, though. It didn’t sit well with me and still doesn’t. I’m programmed for PROCUREMENT, always trying to build the best music library possible. Tiny bits of code on an iPod just felt phony-baloney to me, and not at all legitimate. But, again, I dabbled.
I hated the idea of streaming the moment I heard about it, for the same reason. Hell, in that case, you own even less! And, more importantly, you’re putting yourself under the thumb of Spotify or Apple, or whatever streaming service you’re using. What if they get into some pissing contest with a favorite artist, and all their stuff is removed temporarily, or forever? If you own the CD, it doesn’t matter. But if you’re relying on Spotify, you’re screwed.
But what am I listening to right now? Spotify! I freaking love it. It’s one of the greatest things ever invented. It’s an international database of every song ever recorded, more or less. I still have trouble with it on a philosophical level, but use it daily for its incredible selection and convenience. You’ve got nearly every album in the history of mankind at your fingertips for $7.99 per month, or whatever. It’s fantastic.
Another streaming delight? The Xtra Channels at Sirius/XM. They used to cost extra (xtra), but are now part o’ the regular package. Also fantastic! I put one of those channels on and let it play for hours, sometimes. No commercials… interesting and fun music. It’s great!
So, I have no integrity. That’s what I’m saying, I guess. I start out by taking a righteous stance, then promptly cave. I’d be horrible in a hostage situation. Oh well. I am still buying-up CDs though. I’m constantly filling holes in the physical sound library. However… it feels like we’re on the verge of everything becoming expensive. Over the last six months, I’ve sensed a change. Six months ago you could still buy most like-new used CDs for less than five bucks, but the prices are going up. Soon, it’s going to become a problem. So, if you’re plugging holes, do it now!
Anyway, here’s how I listen to music in mid-to-late 2019:
In the car
Sirius/XM 80%
CD 20%
I cannot Bluetooth music in my Chevy Cruze, only phone conversations. And I’m not running goddamn cable to hook up my phone. So, no streaming in the car for me.
At home
Spotify 60%
Sirius/XM 30%
CD 10%
What do you have on this? Is it all streaming at this point? It bugs me, but I’m part of the problem. Please bring us up to date on it.
And I apologize for being gone so long. I wrote half of this update on Saturday or Sunday, planning to post it on Monday. But the site has been up and down. On Tuesday it was more down than up. But the issue seems to have been rectified now. Yesterday I contacted my hosting company and they miraculously admitted there was a problem with the server. They NEVER do that. So, I considered it a victory of some sort. You know, a victory where my site doesn’t work even though I’m paying a pretty penny to someone to make sure it does? Hey, I’ll take the wins wherever I can get ’em.
I hope you guys have yourselves a fantastic rest of the week.
I’ll be back soon.
Thanks for reading!
Now playing in the bunker
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I still buy cds. I don’t do streaming or listen to music on smartphones.
Oh – speaking of 8-Tracks –
That’s how I heard that great first Cars album.
I still purchase CDs by my favorite artists to always have that hard copy even though I can snd usually do stream the hell out of it on Spotify. The collector in me just cannot allow streaming only unless it’s a typical hits collection with nothing new or rarities.
Truck
95% CD
4% streaming with adapter
1% cassette
Car
50% CD
50% streaming
Home
100% streaming
I have a similar ratio to Jeff, just sub Spotify with more SiriusXM. I will always have my LPs and CDs and listen at home. If I love a new release, I might buy the CD. But mostly I stream, in the car too. Just plug a bluetooth audio receiver thingy into your Aux input. No wires.
In the car – 90% Sirius/XM, 10% CD
At home outside – 60% Pandora, 40% local FM radio
At home inside – 90% CD, 10% Vinyl
I don’t do any streaming at all, and I buy CDs when possible. Although I’ve encountered two albums so far that weren’t available on CD or any other physical form, just as downloadable mp3s. I’m OK with having them in digital form, but I’d prefer a lossless format (e.g. flac) over the variably-shitty mp3. Even if it’s just a download, I still have it in my possession and it still works regardless of internet outages, lawsuits or ShitTalker going out of business.
In the car, 75% local FM stations and 25% USB thumb drive. At home, about the same except it’s a computer rather than a thumb drive. I’ll also fire up the turntable now and then.
100% streaming via my phone where I have pretty much everything I own loaded. I too have the bluetooth plug in thing (no cord) in the car and a bluetooth JBL speaker in the house/garage/yard or bluetooth headphones. All my lps and cds are in cabinets or on shelves in the basement collecting dust.
I do buy new music from old time favorites if they put it out or new stuff my daughter recommends. Since my ears are shit anyway, I don’t mind mp3 that I rip from cds or that I youtube to mp3 for individual tracks.
Am I the only one who’s sat and thought of the most obscure bands they can think of then streamed them off Spotify so the band gets a check for 0.7 cents next month? Spotify doesn’t have everything recorded, I have some albums that are not on Spotify.
I still buy a few CDs, usually when it’s something I really want to LISTEN to, so want the best quality. Or they sucker me with a signed copy or whatever.
100% USB stick in the car, or no music in the old car that has an actual cassette deck (and a CD player that skips).
Yes, I realize Spotify doesn’t have everything. It’s why I qualified it with “for the most part.” But they have almost everything. I put missing albums into the cloud, so I can access them through my phone. Between the two, I have access to it all. For the most part.
Bought my last CD in 2013 – have been streaming since either on Pandora, Spotify or iTunes/Apple Music (in that particular order). I absolutely love Spotify, but their ‘shuffle/random’ player sucks ass. Did some research and it is blamed on an algorithm or something that causes the same group of songs to be repeated (like the same 10 will cycle when you have 100 in your playlist). Switched over to Apple Music about a year ago because of that (their shuffler algorithm actually randomizes), but still like everything else about Spotify better. Gotta have my shuffles, though…
Car: 99.9% FM radio
Office: 50% radio; 50% stream
Home: stream or CDs.
I have my eye on the 50th anniversary set of The Rolling STones Let It Bleed. I can’t help it, I love vinyl AND album cover art.
I’ve undergone a similar progression as you. I started in the tape days and recorded a shit-ton of mix tapes that I still think back on fondly. I used to buy blank tapes at Costco every few months and then fill them with stuff recorded from friends or whatever.
Then I moved to CDs and managed to amass a pretty big collection with my brother. In the hundreds, I don’t think we ever cracked a thousand. I had a portable CD player and then got one for my car. I had one of those folders with dozens of CDs inside. My buddy even had a changer in his trunk so he could listen to 10 CDs whenever he wanted.
And then iPods came out and I was fully on board with MP3s. I remember marveling that I could carry in my pocket about 10 CDs of music – amazing! I burned all my CDs onto iTunes over the years and connected my iPod to my stereo via the aux port. I found myself listening to actual CDs less and less. And used CDs were getting pretty cheap. At that point, I started turning over my collection buy burning the CDs to the computer and then trading them in 3 for 1 to the used CD place. Rinse/Repeat. After a few years of that, I got rid of all my CDs and was just listening to stuff I had burned onto my computer. If I wanted new stuff, I would get the digital download and if I wanted old stuff, I’d get the CD from the library, burn it and return it. That phase lasted a long time.
And about 2 years ago, I got Spotify and haven’t looked back. For less than the cost of one CD, I have access to all the music I could ever want every month. Plus, it curated, so I’m discovering new stuff all the time – way more than when I was finding new stuff through articles or friends or whatever. And Spotify lets me download something like 10,000 songs to my phone, so I don’t need to ever be streaming over my cell plan.
My ratio is:
Streaming mostly new stuff at work – 90%
Listening to downloaded stuff at work – 10%
Listening to downloaded stuff at home – 90%
Listening to new stuff at home – 10%
Listening to downloaded stuff in the car – 100%
But, it’s all through Spotify. It’s been a huge game changer for me.
I buy a CD and/or LP a few times a year.
During the 80s and 90s, I went through a period of buying an LP and immediately dubbing it to cassette for listening at home or in the car. As a result, I have a lot of LPs that are 25+ years old and have only been played once or twice.
I bought a few prerecorded cassettes in the 70s, but they are of course long dead. LPs of the same age are fine.
I bought my first CD in 1985 and I still have it (I will keep to myself what it was, although it’s not THAT bad), and I think I still have nearly all the CDs I bought. I have several thousand, I used to buy a handful a week in a *gasp* actual record shop. Some of those early CDs can be surprisingly valuable for some reason, the first Rolling Stones CDs were last time I looked. And I was a sucker for those weird Japanese editions with the tracks you couldn’t get anywhere else…
Now everything, well “for the most part” everything, is just a click away. Takes some of the sport out of it 🙂
Breathing the air in a used record shop was, as I recall, like breathing the air in the tomb of a pharaoh: dusty, but dusty with meaning and a sense of the passage of time.
John
When I lived out on your coast I spent so much time in Amoeba and Rasputin’s that I think I could identify that distinct smell today, ~20 years later.
I can still feel the smell. I’m old, so I lived on top of Queen Anne Hill in Seattle in a decrepit apartment in the mid-’70s. I had saved enough money to take nearly a year off work. I was 24 or so.
I could fall off the Hill to the north, and hit the record shops in Fremont and north Seattle; I could fall off to the east, take the shortcut under I-5, and be on Capitol Hill in 15 minutes and the U district in 20, covering about four good record shops. I could drive down the counterbalance and be in lower Queen Anne in 10 minutes, and be at and around the Pike Place Market and downtown in 20. Many record shops there.
Stacks and stacks of Seattle-produced and national 78s, big band, jump jazz . . . amazing stuff, and 45s from local labels, Dolton Records with many sides produced and arranged by Bonnie Guitar e.g., Little Bill and the Bluenotes; Seafair Records with the Frantics, the Dynamics and much pre-1960 rock, with a few sides produced by Bumps Blackwell. Ray Charles had cut a couple of sides during his year-long stay in 1950 (after a Greyhound bus ride from a gig in Miami to absolutely nothing in Seattle [he had a gig within 24 hours]). There are acetates, now long gone, and a couple 78s, also gone, but in the mid-70s a shop rat had a small chance of finding one.
Anthropology isn’t a chain of overpriced contemporary glitzy junkstuff stores: it’s the pursuit of the meaning of our lives as revealed in artifacts our culture produces and their rediscovery and contextual interpretation. If we love music, we find our meaning and our mission in used record stores. And there is joy in the seeking.
John
My first CD was ‘As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls’ by The Pat Metheny Group. I still have it. It’s an odd choice. Who the hell knows?
I think mine was Offramp.
Just saw Pat in concert two weeks ago at Memorial Hall in Cincinnati. Great show, his playing is as good as ever.
I saw Pat in concert at the Student Union when I was in college. I remember him playing Phase Dance, so it must have been 1978 or 1979.
I’ve been late to streaming myself, but jumped on MP3’s right away. I have a huge MP3 library, but now that I get Amazon Music with Prime, I have Apple Music, and I have Sirius XM I’m much more likely to stream. I have Sirius subscriptions in all 3 of my cars that are about to renew. I’m thinking of paring that down to 1 subscription and I’ll just stream in the other two cars since I now have streaming built in. I’m wondering how many other people have had the same thought.
I just upgraded the whole house to Sonos, so now that’s even more geared toward streaming. I can have different or the same stuff playing by the pool, or any room in the house. All the streaming services get built into the system and anyone on your network can control it with their app using your services. I tried it for the first time at a company beach house exactly a year ago and have since sunk a few thousand bucks into getting my system in place at home… and I’m 100% converted.
Vinyl records are on track to outsell compact discs for the first time in 33 years and prices have risen 490%.
Vinyl sales increased by 55.8% from 2010 to 2011, and then 131.8% from 2011 to 2012. Furthermore, there was an 18.5% year-over-year increase in sales of new vinyl from 2016 to 2017.
While sales have gone up, prices have as well. According to data from eBay, a new vinyl record cost an average of $4.80 in 2007, and in 2017 it had gone up to $28.40, an increase of over 490%.
CD sales have fallen 34% to $698 million, the first time it had totaled less than $1 billion since 1986.
A couple of months ago I bought three LPs at a record store, and 28.40 apiece is about what I paid.
Jesus, Chill, I assume you’re not talking about a mint 1963 copy of James Brown & the Famous Flames at the Apollo. These were NEW LPs? I hope they came with a blow job. Unless the cashier was a guy. In that case I don’t know what to hope for. I am without hope.
John
Sadly, Robert Hunter today joined John Perry Barlow in a shallow grave while Scarlet Begonias, Truckin, and Uncle John’s Band played on. Shallow or deep, it don’t matter: but his music will continue for a time, and not many people earn that extension. Mr. Hunter was also a fine musician and a nice gentleman by all accounts. His lyrics certainly informed my life.
John
Once in a while
You get shown the light
In the strangest of places if you look at it right
I still buy CDs from time to time. Most recently Springsteen’s Western Stars.
I miss vinyl and still have everything I ever bought from 1967-1990. Add to that a fair to middlin’ CD collection and I am overall happy. Not many cassette tapes – mostly bootlegs of live shows.
I do buy mp3s from time to time but I like holding music in my hands. There was always something special about a new album.
And as an aside on the Springsteen CD, I cannot get my head around it. Orchestral arrangements for country songs? I’m struggling, especially since it is getting rave reviews.
Pandora….all i listen to. Especially the soothing sounds of the Motown channel. Sometime 90s alt, but Motown helps me fall asleep and motivates me at work!
I still get my box scores from the local fish-monger. What was the question again?
I haven’t given up on the Brooklyn Dodgers and I haven’t given up on reading this blog. I don’t have a single doctor who thinks I can survive for another decade, but that seems like enough time.
John
everything runs it course
Really enjoying listening to Dobly Atmos discs through my PlayStation 5.
The 50th anniversary remix of Abbey Road is well worth a listen, the extras CDs of demos and practice sessions are an interesting listen too. Can you imagine being the person who told The Beatles to stop being so noisy, as happens on one track?!
Elvis freed our bodies, the Beatles freed our minds, and the show goes on forever. Abbey Road is the best album the Beatles produced: your mileage may vary, and that’s fine with me.
John
What happened to Jeff? It’s been weeks since the last update.
Is it the Russians?
Russia is last week’s banana: it’s the Ukrainians.
jtb