Is the Digital Music Revolution a Good Thing?

There are many reasons to appreciate the move toward digital music, of course. One of the first reasons to spring to mind is storage capacity. No more taking up a wall of space for your album collection when you can hold infinitely more music on a disc drive of one sort or another. In concert with that is portability. If you're going on a trip you can literally bring every piece of music you own with you. Try doing that with vinyl. And, let's not forget the advantages of cataloguing. As anyone who has ever watched the movie Diner can tell you, nothing is more irritating than a misplaced record. Some other things about digital music that spring to mind as preferable over the older format is accessibility. With just the slightest outpouring of effort, you can pretty easily locate just about any recording. As long as it's been digitized by somebody, of course. I spent over a decade trying to track down a copy of a song called "Kinetic" by Hillary before finally lucking upon it on a compilation album. There have been any number of other songs or albums that I had no luck finding. Until the internet came along, that is. And in concert with that is another advantage that is a subject of contention. Not only can one track down rare recordings, but often one can get them for free. Not that I'm advocating "illegal" downloading, but it's there.

Even with all these advantages to the digital music revolution, however, I have to admit I prefer the old way. The current methodology of booting up your computer, conducting a search and downloading music is, to be perfectly honestly, rather soulless. And it's a process that, despite its many and obvious advantages, also contains some pretty major if not quite so obvious disadvantages. For one thing, there's the pleasure of browsing. One of my favorite pastimes during the 1980s was to take a half day and do nothing but browse through the used record stores throughout the Atlanta area. From Wuxtry to Fantasyland to Wax and Facts to the record collection that used to be at the back of the Book Nook, discovering new music or adding to the collection of your favorites became a kind of social ritual. Not only did it require interacting with other people, but it exposed you to music you may not otherwise have found. Whether it would be overhearing a conversation, hearing a great song being played by the guy working the counter or just coming across a fascinating album cover, going to a used record store was like going on an adventure. It became an urban exploration. Most of those used record stores I mentioned were decorated with enormous posters of album covers or singles covers, which were also offered for sale. There was a shared feeling of the love of music that permeated them. It didn't matter whether your tastes differed, what mattered what your passion for music. Since the albums were barely separated by categories-I think there was maybe only rock, country, classical and soul, if you were there to see whether the Cure or Husker Du had released a new single, you were forced to flip past the Carpenters or Huey Lewis and the News. The great thing about that, of course, was that occasionally you would flip past an album cover that caught your attention and maybe it wasn't for a band whose music you would normally listen to. But since it was only two or three bucks, you'd go ahead and get it anyway. What the heck, if you didn't like it you could go down to Little Five Points later and trade it to Wax and Facts.

I keep mentioning album covers. That's another big disappointment about the digital revolution. The transition from vinyl to CDs tolled the death knell for a bona fide art form. Album cover art was probably responsible for more exposure to unknown music than anything else. A great album cover could be enough to inspire a purchase. Sadly, the glory days of this art form was mercilessly short. Truly inspired album artistry really only began to take shape during the 1960s. Sure, there had been interesting album artwork before then, but for the most part little attention was paid and even when it was it more often than not resulted in photographic art, usually involving the artist. It was the Beatles and their groundbreaking album art that really paved the way for the revolution. From Revolver and Sgt. Pepper sprang a seemingly bottomless well of artistic inspiration that covered the gamut of artistic media and produced masterworks that could make you gasp, laugh or gag. One of the joys of looking forward to the latest music from your favorite artist was the expectation of what the album cover would look like. Vinyl albums afforded enough space for worlds to be created and explored. The introduction of the CD spelled doom; the covers were just too small. Sure, the record industry could have adjusted by including larger, folded posters of the CD covers, but that would have cut into profits so why bother? One would have thought it couldn't get any worse, but here we are stuck with a music delivery system in which no art is necessary because there's nowhere to put it.

Logically speaking, the advantages of digital music far outweigh the disadvantages. It requires less storage space, it can be personalized through remixing technology, and if your local record store doesn't have it you aren't out of luck. The advantages of vinyl records are few. Without question, they took up a lot of space. And unless you handled them like a CSI technician they quite quickly developed skips and pops and other unwanted extraneous sounds. But they were more than just the music on them. They were a way of life. You looked at the cover art while listening to the songs. You read the liner notes. You enjoyed the photographs of the singers and musicians. They made the music more real, somehow. Today's MP3s simply don't have that. Digital music is missing something. As I said, it's soulless. That's a term that's tossed around a lot when discussing technology and most of the time it's meaningless, but in this case I think it's very apt. What we've lost in the transition from vinyl albums to music that is-literally-an abstraction that can't be held in your hand is greater than what we've gained.