An Elegy For Music

For people like me, it is a very exciting time.  I collect music.  I don’t just play it, I study it.  I take the album art out, unfold it and read every last credit in every album I purchase.  I’m not sure which is more startling, the fact that I read the credits, or that I actually still purchase music.  And I don’t mean from iTunes.  No, I still like to hold the real thing in my hands.  I like to look at a CD from all angles; I turn it sideways to look spine-on, arrange the disc so it sits straight in the jewel tray, and arrange it with other albums from the same artist on my shelf.  I dig out my laptop and actually research the artist and album, usually following through with other titles by the same artist.  By the time I’m done, I could tell you what the singles were, who produced it, what year it was released, and what critics thought about it.  That’s a far cry from just having the radio on in the background.  I am, and have always been, an active participant in my music listening experiences.  Perhaps I am slightly neurotic.

The fact is, I’m a hobbyist.  If you were to examine it in that context, it doesn’t sound quite so fanatical.  Hobbyists devote themselves to something wholly.  They learn all they can about it, invest their leisure time in it, and spend their money on it when it is feasible to do so.  It becomes obsession when you do it at the expense of relationships or necessities like food or lodging.  If the day ever comes when I have to choose any hobby of mine over paying the power bill, I know my hobby spending has to stop.  But until then, I’m quite content with my most coveted pastime.

Why is it so exciting for music collectors these days?  Surely these must be the worst of times.  Fewer record stores exist.  Fewer quality albums, it seems, are available for us to ingest.  Everything is more expensive today, and the cost of living is sky-high.  It must be awful for people like me to practice our search for new titles.  As it turns out, it’s actually a great time to purchase new music.  With the arrival of the mp3 format, people are uploading their favourite music to their computers or portable devices, then pawning off the CDs and records.  No one pawns cassettes anymore.  They sound awful, and it is almost impossible to find a decent cassette deck anywhere.  What has happened is that a glut of discarded CDs is beginning to clog up the shelves of thrift stores.  Digital World in Fredericton, on any given day, has dozens of milk crates full of discs just piled haphazardly around the aisles, and that’s aside from the CDs they have actually catalogued and organized on the shelves.  I have literally spent hours sitting between the aisles pouring through these crates looking for rare or unusual finds, or even just to find that elusive title I need for my collection. 

What I like about Digital World is that they don’t put stickers on the jewel cases.  The rule of thumb if you shop there is that if the disc is actually in the case, it’s $3.49, and all at that price qualify for the perpetual 4 for $10 sale.  The rest are usually around $8, which is still reasonable for a good album.  I believe that in 2013, it is unnecessary to pay more than $12 for a new album.  I bought a CD player a few months ago for $27.  If the machine you play them on costs as much as the album, the album is way over-priced, unless it is a boxed-set or some other commemorative release.  The disadvantage of Digital World is that most of their inventory is disorganized, so you have to invest your time (not to mention get the backside of your pants a little dusty) if you’re going to find any hidden treasures.

I enjoy shopping at Spin-It in Moncton, when I’m passing through and there’s time to sift through their immense selection of both CDs and vinyl.  I rarely purchase records there, because I find them a bit expensive, but there is also a perpetual sale there for CDs.  They have a ‘buy two, get the third free’ policy, and while their CDs are between $8 and $10, it’s worth it if you find some hard-to-find titles.  I find their selection turns over quickly, and they have a wider palate than Digital World, generally.  It also helps that they sell toys there, which is my second-favourite hobby.  If I come across both music and toy finds, it can be an expensive day.  Usually, I try to keep my purchases responsible though.  I try to cap a CD purchase at $20.  I also only make it to Moncton about five or six times a year, and even then I don’t always make it out shopping.  It’s a good thing.

By far my most frequented location for second hand goodness is Value Village.  It is addictive, and I am most likely hooked on shopping there, not just for music, but for just about everything.  How great is it that people willingly give away their things, fatigued from generations of yard or garage sales, toiling for only pennies.  Yard sale-ing is a cold business.  People who would have no trouble paying forty or fifty dollars for a gourmet meal won’t pay more than a quarter for anything in a yard sale.  And they’ll be rude about it.  I remember we once held a yard sale, spending hours labeling and laboring over the price of our soon-to-be-departed treasures, only to have a parade of complete strangers turn their noses up at our wares.  “Hmmph!  They actually want a dollar for that?  It’s only worth fifty cents…”  We made just over $30 at one yard sale.  That’s when I realized it wasn’t worth the bother.  No one is snobby to me when I donate a box of clothes or unused Christmas ornaments at Value Village.  I know, they’re a business that profits off a charitable venture, but if I learned anything from running my own yard sales, these folks deserve to earn a living if they’re willing to sift through the junk.  It’s kind of like people who pick up beer cans on the road.  They’re making the roadside beautiful, earning a little money, and most importantly, not sitting around waiting for hand-outs.

The downsides to Value Village are many, not least of which are the stickers.  They insist on placing these big, ugly stickers on CDs and tapes which are notoriously difficult to peel off.  Whenever a space shuttle falls apart upon re-entry, I often think of writing to NASA to suggest they hold future space-bound craft together with Value Village stickers.  They’ll last forever that way.  And they apply them right on the spine.  I refuse to have these grotesque labels visible on my CD shelf, so I painstakingly rub them, digging with my nails and polishing with spit until no residue from the offending sticker remains.  It’s really annoying if you buy ten or more at a time.  At only $2 each, it is entirely possible, and has happened to me more than once.  I remember years ago spending more than $20 on a single album.  If VV can sell them that cheap, and given that no pawn shop will give me more than a buck or two if I try to sell to them, it seems to me that it’s indefensible for a new album to retail for more than $10.  I’ll accept $12, but would prefer a toonie.

There is no real value in my collection, other than my own personal satisfaction, and that I like to think of my music library much like an actual book library.  There are several key differences:

Ø  I own far fewer books than CDs, but I can honestly say I’ve played every single CD front-to-back at least once.  Some I like more than others, but I can generally say I like most of my albums.  I have many books I’ve never even read.  Indeed, in most libraries, people have multiple titles they haven’t nor will ever read.  But the books look great on the shelf, and that does matter.

Ø  Music is a medium I can enjoy while doing other things, like driving, house cleaning, grading papers, or working on my other hobbies.  Books are pretty hard to read while driving.  And books on CD, while a great idea, aren’t as great if the person reading isn’t very convincing.  Reading for audio-books is a very difficult job.

Ø  CDs are smaller than most books, and easier to arrange.  They are usually the same size.  Books come in all shapes and sizes, and aesthetically arranging books can be a chore, especially if you have multiple titles from the same author, and you want to keep them near each other, yet the sizes are completely different.  No library should look like hell.

Ø  For now, I can still play my CDs pretty much anywhere.  I know that time is running out, though.  I’ve heard that newer models of cars are starting to be made without a CD player in the dash.

The fact is, music doesn’t fill the same spot for people like it used to.  Some might say that music hasn’t changed at all, and that it’s just the generations that change.  While I can’t for the life of me understand why artists like Kanye West and Miley Cyrus are actually popular, I am fully able to understand that in my late-thirties, there are pop acts I will never understand, simply because it’s a generational thing.  I’m okay with that.  For as much as there is on the market I don’t like, there are all kinds of current music I really love.  In terms of why we listen to music, there has been a huge shift.

Back in the old days (the ‘80s), we had no internet to depend upon.  You discovered new music in the following ways:

Ø  Music television:  Much Music or MTV, for those lucky enough to have cable or satellite, was your daily fix for music.  Today, these channels don’t focus as much on music programming as they do reality TV and movies.  Reality killed the video star.

Ø  Radio:  It was still a staple in the ‘80s to listen to the radio, either in the morning, on the bus, or in your room.  I used to tape songs off the radio.  God, they sounded horrible, but sometimes it was the best you could do.

Ø  Trading:  One of the reasons why I believe file-sharing shouldn’t be illegal is because we’ve been trading music as long as they’ve been making blank tapes.  If the music industry was that concerned, they should have banned blank cassettes from the very beginning.  Compiling mix-tapes and swapping with friends built up a network of underground tape-traders, not to mention fan-bases.  Sometimes people traded through the mail, spanning thousands of miles.  No one appreciates the time and effort it took to make a proper mix-tape.  The modern playlist or mix-disc just isn’t the same thing.  The advent of the ‘skip’ function, introduced with CDs, was the beginning of the end for mix-tapes.

Ø  Record clubs:  Whether it was Columbia House, BMG, or other mail services, the poor high-school kid could acquire lots of new music for minimal cost.  You had to wait four to six weeks for them to arrive, of course, and the titles were at best six months old when the clubs picked them up.  I used to ‘chain’ memberships, joining under my own name, then enlisting my poor grandparents next door, so I would receive the four free tapes as incentives for enlisting new members.  I’d then cancel my own account, only to chain off my grandparents’ account back to my own name, and so on.  The record clubs were a hassle, but there remains no greater satisfaction than receiving an anticipated order of music through the mail.  The closest I get to that now is Amazon, but the clubs were cheaper.  With albums so cheap, you could take a chance on a new selection with less risk.

Today, we access our music differently.  Artists post their music on social platforms.  YouTube and Vevo allow you to see videos on demand, as long as the record company hasn’t pulled them, and you want to endure the increasing amount of advertisements.  Prime time dramas have become a showcase for up and coming talent, the same way college radio used to be in the ‘80s and ‘90s.  Otherwise, the radio has become a background drone of a dozen or so songs prepared to be your next favourite tracks, whether you realize it or not.  That and inane DJ banter, which is usually based around celebrity gossip.  No one watches videos anymore.  Maybe the medium is tired, or just uninspired. 

More likely, it’s because labels won’t spend the money on videos like they used to.  The fact is, music just doesn’t sell like it used to.  Sure, people are buying songs digitally, but the return from album sales versus single tracks just can’t compare.  According to Billboard magazine, album sales drop on average by about 10% every year from the previous year.  Twenty years ago, albums were entering the album charts in the top five with sales in the five to six hundred thousand in units sold.  Very few sell over a hundred thousand per week in 2013.  There have been albums at the number one position with less than eighty-thousand sold.  To me, that’s shameful, and as an artist, it must be demoralizing to put that much effort into your art to only see a fraction of the traditional audience even care.

I really think that the problem is that music as a hobby just isn’t a priority anymore.  You don’t have to put any effort into finding music; by the time I finish typing this paragraph, I could have two or three new albums downloaded, and at no cost.  When it was more difficult to acquire, it was more appreciated.  If you pay twenty bucks for a cassette, damn sure you’ll play it a lot.  I have no emotional attachment to a bunch of data files on my computer.  If the memory got wiped, I’d just download them again, and it would be only a minor inconvenience.  Someone stole a case of my cassettes in university, and while I’ve long since replaced them, I’m still hurt by the initial loss.  And all those mix-tapes I spent hours putting together?  I still actually play most of them.  If I took the exact track list from my favourite mix-tape and had it burned onto a CD, it just wouldn’t be the same.

While an entire generation of changing music listeners shed the remnants of their old collections in favour of their mp3 players, people like me are there to gather the shards.  I imagine a year in the not too distant future where my collection of CDs, tapes, records, and even 8-track cartridges will be less a library and more a museum.  It will stand as testament not to the artists contained within the various media, but to the fans, young and old, with their records spread out on the bedroom floor while they sang along with their heroes; waiting by the mailbox for the brown mailer with the Columbia House logo; hanging on every breath from their favourite VJ, whether it was Erica Ehm or Martha Quinn.  Music hobbying has receded, gone underground, regressed to the point of near obscurity.  That’s where I come in; I figure there is roughly a five to ten year window where second hand CDs will be readily available.  Beyond that, they’ll have been mostly sold or thrown away.  Until then, if you want to unload any of those physical copies gathering dust, feel free to drop me a line.  They will have a good home here.