One thing that really hit home when I was boxing them up, though, was all the price labels and stickers from the various used stores I’d built my collection over the years…seeing the Amoeba, Wazoo, Etherea, et al stickers really brought me back to the place and time I bought them…

I switched to the mp3 format early on– December 2000, right out of college when I got napster. I tossed all my jewel boxes, uploaded everything into the computer, and moved my cds and their accompanying artwork into a couple of 150 cd binders for posterity. CDs I discovered I didn’t love as much as I thought became art projects (I have a cd beaded curtain that still remains from that time period that I would upload a picture of if I knew how), and thought I was so cool and mod and trendy for doing so.

Four years later I left my SO and in doing so realised the computer was his and I couldn’t take it. I ran out and bought 3 100-stacks of CDs and spent nearly a week wall-to-wall burning EVERYTHING off of it to take with me. Album details were lost, cds labeled with hastily scrawled descriptions, artists lumped together in an effort to make every minute of each CD count. Every original CD I could round up was herded back into the 150 CD binders, artwork and CDs rarely paired properly in an effort to keep it all.

Five years later the collection still hasn’t recovered fully. I bought, along with my laptop, an external harddrive and uploaded everything into it en masse. Some of it has been edited and abeled properly, but much remains “lumped” I discovered this week in going through my Michael Jackson that everything (Everything–three 72minute cds worth!) is still labeled as being off the Thriller Album, despite only owning the four main songs from Thriller, and some of it being other Janet’s, requiring an hour of research and editing to artwork and label each song properly in the harddrive and iTunes, before I could then purchase what songs I discovered I was missing.

Even with everything uploaded and safely housed in a small metal brick that I can carry in a backpack, I still have the CDs, as badly labeled and incoherently collected as they are. There’s no way to sell them, and no one would want them. And yet the idea of losing them seems as bad a short term idea as when I first discarded the jewel cases nine years ago and started using CDs to make silly statements on the 20th century being passe.

But nearly everything I’ve bought since is all mp3–either iTunes or other. (Seriously, the last physical CD I bought was Annie Lennox “Songs of Mass Destruction”–totally on impulse at a Starbucks because I had no idea she had an album out.) And buying music from the comfort of my living room with a click of a mouse and boom, there it is is just so…easy. I don’t ever listen to CDs anymore anyway–even my car has an mp3 jack for an iPod.

That being said, I should probably buy a second harddrive and make backups…

Vinyl buying is up, though…. so I am keeping some physical attachment. vinyl buying is WAY UP actually.

I also believe that 90% of the people who say they love CDs for the artwork/liner note never look at this stuff after they buy it.

Interestingly, one of them is in fact “Resident Alien” by Spacehog.

I used to have a CD player in the car, as lately as my Fever Ray/Bat For Lashes/Yeah Yeah Yeahs/Merge Covers Album/Other Things I Don’t Remember Right Now spree in March. But then the car died, and with it my only reliable way of listening to CDs. So now I mainly listen to mp3s, although I don’t actually have a ton of albums on there, so I spend most of my time doing things like ‘Let me listen to 11 different versions of Windmills Of Your Mind’ in a row,’ or ‘Hey, I wonder how many songs I have dated 1989.’ Which is actually getting pretty tiresome.

I actually boxed up around 3-400 of the albums that I got when i was younger that had fallen out of favor for me and was looking too offload them on the local Zia’s out here in Vegas.