Dateline Boston — A few months ago in a public place, I overheard a young man and woman talking. They looked to be in their twenties. I heard him ask her, “What do you use for music?” I thought that was such a strange question. The answer was, of course, the radio. But he started listing names like Spotify, Sirius, and Tidal. Where you can get music, apparently.
Then, last week, I was at a public library. I saw a picture of my dearly departed Prince! There was a sign that said you could get Prince music for free! This was confusing to me since I had read that he only put his music on whatever JayZ’s music station is. And you had to pay for it.
I went up to the reference desk librarian to inquire. She told me that if you signed up for this music service using your library card, you could get Prince’s music for free (the library paid to get it). She informed me that it was streaming. Streaming? Like a river?
I’ve heard of streaming. They have it on Netflix. You can watch whatever movies you want with streaming. Now Prince’s music was available by streaming. I guess I must have had a strange look on my face, because the woman explained that you could borrow the music, you wouldn’t keep it. Oh. So if I were doing something around the house and I wanted to listen to random Prince songs, I could just sign in to whatever channel she was trying to promote, and listen.
Those Were the Days
I told her that I missed the days of CDs. You could actually hold your music and pick an album whenever you wanted. To keep. She said, looking at my sleeping toddler, “But don’t the kids take them and ruin them? They get scratched and lost.” I decided not to get into how I would never let a child touch my CDs, Prince or Prokofiev.
Years ago, I consolidated my CD collection by ditching all of the plastic CD holders and filing my CDs in compact storage cases. They’re conveniently kept in one spot that takes up a minimum amount of space in our apartment. Guess what? I don’t listen to my CDs anymore. It is one of the few regrets in my life that I don’t have my CDs displayed by spine, the way I used to. I could browse my music collection and choose music I wanted to listen to on one of the two radios I got for free at moving sales. Now, it takes effort. I have to open the cases and flip through the pages to see what’s there.
I told a friend I was thinking about buying all of Prince’s CDs again so I’d have the cases with the spines that showed the name of the album. She looked at me las if I had six heads. She asked how many albums Prince had. I took a wild guess — 30? She said something along the lines of that was $300. I retorted, “Is he worth $300? Absolutely!” That way, I could display his music and play it whenever I wanted to. I won’t replace all my CD’s.
Used to be you could stick a CD in your computer and load the music onto your iTunes, which you could then upload to your iPod, and make CDs for your friends. Now you can’t even do that.
I’m not into this new way of listening to music. If I want streaming, I’ll rent a cabin in the woods, take off my shoes and socks, and stick my feet into a babbling brook.
Ms. Vaillancourt may be contacted at snobbyblog@gmail.com
