The end of owning music

[Alan Howe]

Nothing heavy, mind. No Mahler...

[eschiss1]

Any of the pieces I -want- played at my funeral would be too long (and even though one of them written around the year my father was born and in a definite enough B minor, too "modern" for some who might possibly come...)

[Ilja]

Thank you for all your reactions. For me, the problem is that the CD is just a very attractive object. Quite apart from the fact that a couple of them died on me, a CD booklet is simply a horrible way to present information: the letters are far too small generally, the awful glossy paper isn't very inviting, and if the booklet is even slightly thicker it won't go in the case properly. Say what you will about LPs, but that aspect was handled a lot better.

These days, I prefer a download and read the notes on my e-reader (if they're in epub) or screen (PDF). I'm still not entirely convinced by streaming, but I'm very aware that the "it might stop working tomorrow" argument is not entirely realistic and not unlike that used by people preferring to travel by tugboat because "those train things might be gone tomorrow".

[matesic]

Contrary to the tendency for listeners to eschew CD ownership in favour of streaming we have the retro fad for vinyl - not just old discs but new pressings of 21st century music. However, there seems to be no appetite for this in the classical world. Why should this be so? Surely not just because nobody wants to play classical music backwards-forwards-backwards..?

[Mark Thomas]

  Mind you, that would improve many 20th century works.

[Santo Neuenwelt]

There seem to be, for those who do not wish to keep the physical CD, two solutions. In my opinion, those who think streaming is the answer need to realize that not everything that appeared on CD is going to be streamed by the various services, not to mention the other concerns other posters have raised. It is worth remembering that not every work (forget about the question of who the performers were), to be clear, not ever piece of music recorded on LP has appeared on CD.

The other solution being to transfer contents of the CD onto a hard drive, the downside to which can be, depending on how many one has, extremely time consuming and tedious.

I started collecting LPs in the late early 1960s spending my hard earned allowance money on them. They are probably worth a fair amount now to some collector. I stopped buying LPs around 1985 and have stayed with CDs since only occasionally plumping for an MP3.

From my perspective, I can't see why one would bother getting rid of either LPs or CDs. The main argument here has been space considerations...really??? Okay, if you are living in a one room studio apartment, perhaps, just perhaps, it makes sense...but even then. I give you the example of one of my Oxford tutors, long dead now, The Rev. Dr. Thomas Parker who crammed over 30,000 books into the two rooms in which the college allowed him to live. When I became one of his students, it was toward the end of his life and he was getting on in age. To say that books were everywhere does not do justice to it. Beside all of the walls which were lined with book shelves and filled, books were piled three feet high on the floor with no place to walk, and with only a pathway to an armchair where one read one's tutorial essay and further on to his desk and then to the back room, similarly filled except where his bed was. He seemed to have no problem with it. Never heard him complain...So, unless your wife, husband etc is threatening divorce, and even then, or your landlord is threatening eviction, why get rid of them. As a final word on Dr. Parker, he used some of his salary to have the College reinforce the floors underneath his rooms.

[matesic]

Santo - with respect we seem to live in quite different circumstances as regards space - really!!! Mine consists of two large rooms and one small which over the years have become cluttered to a remarkable degree with discs, books, instruments, "art" works and the general paraphernalia of 21st century living, like beds. Amongst all this we need to be able to create space for at least a string quintet to play. I really don't want to end life like Dr Thomas Parker, and over the last few years we've cheerfully sacrificed a lot of stuff. In the case of books this was sometimes a bit of a wrench, particularly for my partner - after all, when they're gone, they're gone - but the CDs and LPs were no great loss when they're available to stream or backed up on hard drive. Even when they aren't, do we really need to have access to every work ever recorded?

A welcome side-effect of the decluttering process is that I've started to value items in terms of what they contribute to my life now and are likely to contribute in the future, rather than what they originally cost or might presently be "worth" in monetary terms. Rather than wait an indeterminate time for "some collector" to come along (he's currently in great demand, or maybe like an anti-Santa Claus he doesn't actually exist at all), my LPs all went for peanuts to a strong man with a van who was only interested in the rock albums. Like yours, they went back to my early collecting days in the 1960's. Now my only vinyl keepsake from those times is a set of Bruckner symphonies, and I recently downloaded the same set from youtube.

[Santo Neuenwelt]

I hear you Matesic. Far be it from me to suggest that we should live like Dr Parker. Truth be told, I always wondered what the point was with the floor entirely covered with books, in order for him to get to a book some distance from the little pathway he cleared, he would have had to have taken his substantial girth and walked over a bunch of other books precariously stacked on the floor, and most likely would have wound up under some...

Certainly, life in its autumnal phase, is about letting go. Just last month I donated my ski instructor sweaters along with some other items to a clothing charity. Parting with the past is a poignant thing if the past was pleasant. But CDs and LPs as you so correctly note can often be downloaded and streamed so parting is not sweet sorrow since it is the music in which we are interested and not the physical object which contains it. 

So, by all means, go for it and keep those string quintet sessions going....I do have more room than you. I am fortunate to live in a house which is probably too large for two people, although there are also three German Shepherd Dogs as well. I am lucky to have a dedicated music room in which to play quartets and quintets, though not anything larger. CDs and LPs are in other rooms.

As a parting thought, it occurs to me how lucky we are with regard to being able to listen to works pretty much whenever we want. Think about composers and performing musicians, living before the phonograph. How often could they get to hear a Mozart quartet for example...