Is the Compact Disk (CD) Dead?
April 6th 2009 01:15
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I ask this with a little bit of sadness. The recent 20th anniversary of the CD has got me thinking about its rise and fall. Ironic, really. The birth of the CD (digital music) leads directly to its downfall (MP3).
As one born in the 1970s and coming of muxical age in the 1980s, I grew up with cassette tapes (I kinda miss the FFFFfffffffff hiss in the backgrounds … oh, wait a minute. No I don’t) and CD long-boxes (remember those? Made to fit into LP shelving?). As such, I loved the physical apparatus of music – the associated packaging was artwork to be inspected and appreciated. Not only the cover art, but think how cool the CD’s themselves were often designed. Don’t laugh, but I decorated my dorm room with cut-outs from long-boxes. How many of you studied the cover of Sgt. Pepper or Physical Graffiti for hidden clues and (what we would now call “Easter Eggs”)?
At one point, I became an avid vinyl record collector. This hobby often has more to do with the objects associated with the music than the music itself. Some records are valuable because of labels and sleeves and physical condition. Again, the death of the CD will ultimately be the final straw of music as a collectible hobby, no?
Sure, digital music is godsend, of sorts. We are free to explore music much more thoroughly than before. No longer having to decide what records to lug around in a CD wallet, we can expand our horizons with our 80 gig iPods (My entire collection of music fills my iPod about half way – wow). This is a positive consequence, no doubt. But part of me longs for those days of having a physical connection to the music, as well as, the audible.
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