The music collection is building up. Rather later than much of the rest of the population, I have also now tried acquiring some more songs via iTunes.
Recently I read a music journalist talking about converting his prized collection into digital format. Having it all neatly amassed, and no longer vinyl, or CD, to hold in his hands, he suddenly felt like the process of collecting was no longer what it had been.
What happens when it’s suddenly easy to find the items you want – even the obscure ones? Does the thrill of the chase diminish? What does it mean to collect when you just find and pay for tracks in a bundle, separated from their original ‘packaging’ as part of an album?
Others have written about the loss of the homemade tape as an initial sign of intent from a boy to a girl. We may not put together a ‘mix‘ in our own way, but on the other hand, we can keep mixing and remixing our sets of favoured songs. And we can avoid buying the whole album for the sake of the one track we’re actually bothered about.
Another shift is removal of the need to do your own cataloguing. A feature of my childhood was my dad’s homemade logs of music, films and so on – the indication of careful collecting. Now the programmes for buying and assembling collections do that for you.
It does save the writings and transcribings, the noting down of tracks and times and even dates you made the recording. Perhaps some of the ‘romance’ is lost, setting out and staking down your own musical territory. But the gains of arranging and rearranging playlists, and above all, listening again to treasures that were forgotten, seem to outweigh the changes.