The Best Way to Stay on Top of Your Digital Music Collection: Or, How the Cloud Will Reign

Like any music fan growing up in the 70's, I used to have a huge music collection. It consisted of Vinyl LP's mostly, but there were a few 45's handed down from my brothers and sisters. There were pre-recorded cassette tapes, home-made tapes of albums borrowed from friends, tapes of radio broadcasts like the "The King Biscuit Flower Hour." I never owned any 8-tracks. I didn't understand the point of something that couldn't hold an entire album, but that was probably because I was too young to drive when they first came out. In the 80's of course came CD's, falling like rain. Depending on when you were born, the mix would be different. Assuming you kept all your old stuff. Here is what your collection might look like depending when you started your collection.

1950's and 1960's: 45's, LP's, Reel-to-reel

1960's and 1970's: 45's, LP's, Reel-to-reel, 8 tracks, cassettes

1970's and 1980's: 45's, LP's, Reel-to-reel, 8 tracks, cassettes, CD's

1980's and 1990's: 45's, LP's, Reel-to-reel, 8 tracks, cassettes CD's, Digital Devices

1990's and 2000's: 45's, LP's, Reel-to-reel, 8 tracks, cassettes CD's, Digital Devices, Online Libraries

As you can see, the older you are, the longer the list of media you remember having. I suppose I could have gone back even farther to the days of the 78's or wax cylinder recordings.

This way of collecting is like archeology to young music fans of today. Imagine you're a kid today and just getting interested in starting a music collection. Things are way different. You don't think about buying the CD, or anything tangible at all. You just download the songs you like your phone or your computer. Seemingly overnight, music collections exist on massive hard drives somewhere in the cloud. Gone are the days when you needed to "store" your music on real shelves, or orange crates, or the countless contraptions known as CD cases. Jeez. You could start a museum of CD cases and have rooms filled with the crazy contraptions designed for that purpose!

What does it even mean to "buy" music anymore? The new digital music "stores" sell you the songs or albums you want, but if you buy the album you don't get any artwork (besides the tiny batch of pixels they call "cover art"). You also don't get any lyrics or background information about the musicians on the recording or any of the fun stuff we used to enjoy on the tangible media we used to buy. There are feeble attempts by the industry to reproduce some of this but they haven't figure it out - or don't want to. What we are buying is the "right" to listen to the songs on one device or another and to have permission to copy that song onto our various devices. But even this was temporary - streaming subscription services will soon take over.

Music now exists in the cloud (the wireless internet). You can buy rights to listen to songs or albums and store your library in this cloud. For all practical purposes, this means any song or any album ever recorded! On the one hand, this is miraculous and amazing. In the 70's I never imagined (from my bean bag chair with headphones on, next to crates of alphabetized LP's) that I would one day be able to roam the planet and have the entire world of recorded music at my disposal over the ether. Alas, it has come to pass. Yet there seems to be something missing. Maybe it's the tangibility. Maybe it's nostalgia for a time when music somehow existed as something you could hold in your hand. Maybe that was a mirage too; since you really can't hold music in your hand.

Anyway, I'm not bitter about it; far from it. As a matter of fact, I am "way into" this new way of experiencing music. I could go on and on detailing myriad online sites that offer this or that feature for managing music collections, but that just sounds exhausting. They are changing daily. They will continue to change. In a strange way, music has morphed back into itself. It has gone primal. It is out of its cage. It exists where it all began - in the air.

PS. Go ahead and substitute the word "book", "magazine" or "movie" for the word music and re-read the article.