You know, to be totally honest about the darkest shallowest part of my personality I have to say this.

I like to own CD's. I like to hold the liner notes in my hands I love to look at my collection and finally I love everyone else to look at my collection. I don't think I will ever stop buying CD's. Love it. Love getting a knew one, and love filing it in my collection.
Now CD's with only one or two good songs on them on major labels? I will continue to work my way around that all day long.

I am saying that even when CD's become "obsolete" there will still be a way to collect them and there will still be people making them. Much like vinyl. And I will continue to buy. My love for music takes precedence over my enjoyment of collecting it so of course if the only way to get a hold of a song or an album is to buy it and download it then of course I will do that. But I don't really see myself ever losing the bug of buying that CD and holding it and looking at it.

Well, I'll say this. I love physically owning the medium. I won't say I collect, but I buy both CDs and vinyl and love having the physical object. I don't like having burned copies of things or electronic information copies. I'm sure when cds go away and something else takes its place, I will be happy with that as well. I just hope the physical product doesn't get smaller. I think cds are a little too small and the album art suffers for it. There is something about having Sgt. Pepper or Blonde on Blonde on vinyl that makes it really special.

I used to collect. I probably spent more money on CDs during the four years I was in high school than I have in the subsequent eleven years. Certainly part of this stems from the decrease in music I'd actually care to own, but there's no denying that electronic availability is the main culprit. Consumers can now dodge the shitty one-track wonder albums out there. Logically, you'd hope that this would create a backlash in which quality becomes desireable, but the industry would apparently rather compensate by engineering a small number of acts that will appeal to the lowest common denominator, and make obscene amounts of cash.

When I buy a CD now, it's almost always a conscious effort to reward the artist. In all likelihood, I've got the whole thing on MP3 already, which allows me to decide who deserves to get paid. Certainly, that's a consumer model that could be rife with abuse; personally, I think I'm fair about it.

Technology will always outmode the way we do things, and it has its upsides and downsides. How many businesses have saved money over the decades when machines were developed that could do the work of a human? Now it's working the other way around. Nobody passed any laws to ban automated assembly lines because they put people out of work.

In this case, who loses? Well, the corporations suffer because they're trying to pitch a product that can be replicated by anyone with a little knowledge. The artists suffer, because belt-tightening corporations become less likely to invest in the smaller/risky/unknown artists. But really, the artists that suffer are the ones looking to become millionaire rock stars. The rest of them, if they're any good, will use the hitherto unknown resources we have to self-promote and self-publish to make an honest living and enjoy what they do every day.

More to the point... the concept of ownership is only going to get hazier. I absolutely believe that we will eventually have limitless, on-demand access to music. What we have now will probably seem laughably primitive by comparison. The situation is really evolving too rapidly to get a fix on how this will work.

On a related note, some BitTorrent news.