I just carried out two big boxes. All music CDs have been banned from our house, starting immediately.
No more music?
Nope. Just the realization that all our CD collection still does is collecting dust and taking up space. I don’t remember when I last inserted a CD into the stereo. It must have been years.
The precious, precious collection … has long turned into an ugly dust collector.
All 75GB of it are now sitting on a RAID array, with local copies for iTunes, iPods and iPhones, from where it sings.
It’s a bit of an emotional event. So many of these CDs come with emotions when holding them in my hands. The first three I ever bought, together with the first CD player. The one that was a present from a dear friend when we were in college. The ones that made it to every party. Just having music in the cloud is not the same thing. But it’s time to say good-bye and move on.
I shudder at the amount of money we must have paid the music industry over the years. These boxes are heavy! iTunes says it’s more than 19 days of 24 hours a day of music. But they all fit on 5% of a hard drive Amazon sells for $90 today. The $4.50 of disk space is when you know the music industry has a real problem.
My son won’t ever have the emotion of holding a disc of music he relates to. He will have other emotions that I can’t even guess.
The end of an era.
5 responses to “The End of an Era”
[…] few months ago, I banned all music CDs from our house, because all they did was collect dust. We had not touched a CD for years as iPods […]
You can resell them under the “first sale” doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine) just the same as books…
Won’t the RIAA treat me just like an illegal file sharer if I give them away?
Or if I destroy them, because I can’t prove any more that I actually did pay all that money for them?
What’s really funny is that as I’m reading this my wife is cataloging real vinyl – some old Glenn Miller 78’s from the 1930’s.
Those CDs are probably valuable, by the way – they still sell for $5 to $20 each in flea markets.
My CDs have been boxed up for some time and I’m now slowly moving all my DVDs over to hard disc too…
What’re you gonna do with the old CDs? I was thinking it’d be great to have a BookCrossing style service that allowed people to dispose of their old collections, but enabled others to enjoy them too. eBay’s too much of a hassle, ‘DiscCross’ would be a great social app :)