I took my monthly visit to Fopp at the weekend, on the scout for cheap CDs. Cheap CDs there were.
They now seem to have reduced their lower-end price point to only £3 so I managed to get Nebraska (Bruce Springsteen), Kitty Jay (Seth Lakeman) and Sign ‘o’ the Times (Prince) for only £9. Really good, notable albums all. The days of music costing money (or serious money anyway) seem firmly to be over. In Fopp today you could buy pretty much the whole Pearl Jam, or Rage Against the Machine or hell, Tori Amos back catalogue for about £25 each.
Between the cheapness of CDs, services like Spotify (which delivers streamed music, on demand, for free) and other forms of downloading it’s all there, all the time.
I’m undecided if this is a good thing or not. The magpie part of me revels in the sheer quantity of material that is available, but at times it feels like I’m just drowning in content (8964 songs in iTunes so far).
I’ve been working my way through my CD collection and getting rid of the jewel cases as a prelude to moving house. And what have I discovered? That the CDs I like best are those I bought before 2002, when I bought them one at a time and actually listened to them all the way through, sometimes many times.
When I became able to buy as many as I wanted (and the availablity of music online increased) my listening became an awful lot wider but far more superficial. Now I have about 600 albums but some I’ve only listened to once.
