Vinyl Albums

I bought my first album when I was in sixth grade — Wings Greatest Hits. I had saved up the money and went with my uncle to a record store to buy it. It was followed by The Beatles White Album and then hundreds more. By the time I was a teenager I had built a respectable collection of vinyl albums.

Compact Dics

When the CD player hit the mainstream I was skeptical. I had a large collection of albums — I didn’t see the need for compact discs. And I preferred how the music sounded coming from a needle pulled through the grooves in the vinyl. But CDs didn’t scratch, they were smaller and more portable. Once cars started having CD players I was all-in and switched. Over the next 15 years, I built my CD collection and my old vinyl albums were sold to fund my CD collection.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that the true game-changing impact of CDs was the digitization of music — storing music in zeros and ones was the big deal.

iTunes

The first iPod was released in 2001 but I didn’t see what the big deal was. I had a CD player in my car and a portable CD player that had “skipless protection” that was so good that I could run with it. I liked listening to entire albums and saw no need for an mp3 player. Then in 2004, my wife bought me an iPod with a really meaningful inscription on the back. So I tried it out and realized what all the fuss was about — it could hold 7,500 songs so I could have most of my music library with me at all times. I spent weeks importing my CDs into iTunes and I don’t think I bought another CD after that. From then on I bought music as digital downloads. All the music on iTunes was intoxicating. You didn’t have to drive to a record store and buy a CD – you could just download whatever you wanted whenever you wanted. Like a junkie, I was hooked, and it was expensive for me — I usually spent over $600 a year on music downloads.

By 2011, my iTunes library was over 20,000 songs. iPod capacity had grown so that I could fit nearly all of them in a single iPod. I could plug my iPod into my car and listen to whatever I wanted. No longer did I have to switch one CD for another. I figured we had reached the pinnacle of music consumption technology.

Spotify

Spotify, the music streaming service, was founded in 2006 in Stockholm, Sweden, and was introduced in the U.S. in July of 2011. Not long after Spotify launched in the U.S. a friend said “Spotify is amazing, you should use it.” I read about it and wasn’t interested. I had a huge iTunes library that had cost me thousands of dollars to amass. Why would I want to switch? And I liked the idea of owning my music – not renting/streaming it. I didn’t think that Spotify would put a dent in iTunes — I was sure it was a novelty.

Then in January of 2013, I tried a free trial of Spotify. After a few days of using Spotify, I was dumbfounded. Nearly all of the world’s music was available to me. And for just $10 a month! In a typical year, I listen to over 1500 different music artists. Much of the new music I discover is through the Spotify algorithms suggesting to me what I should try out. I rarely listen to the radio because I find that Spotify is a completely immersive experience. Once again, I feel as if we have reached the pinnacle of music consumption. LOL.