Originally posted on March 3, 2010
In eleventh grade, our morning ritual before art history class involved huddling with other music-hungry classmates around the classroom PC. We'd download as much music as possible from Napster.com on the school's zippy T3 internet connection before our teacher came in to blab about the Parthenon. We never thought we were stealing. We just knew that on Napster we could get obscure songs and cool alternate takes and live recordings of our favorite artists. All of us were turned on to new music and new bands because of Napster. And we still bought just as many CD's, if not more, in spite, if not because, of it.
Years later, after many lost, stolen, or broken ipods and hard drives, we realized that we had no music collection to speak of. Our CD's, with their cracked plastic cases, look like garbage on the shelves. We're tangled in a mess of cables and we have to amass a new digital jukebox from scratch with every upgrade to our hardware. We had no collector's version of the music we love, so we turned to vinyl.
We're the new school of vinyl collector. Digital is still central to our connected, mobile lifestyle, but we relish the ceremony of putting a vinyl record on the turntable when company comes over. When we find music worth keeping, we but it on vinyl. We want the artifact and we're happy to pay for it.
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