As mentioned in Musical Mayhem amongst other things, I gave my sons a bunch of CDs this Christmas. Actual physical CDs. Which, when I thought about it, was strange.
Buying and giving real CDs was strange because both of the boys have iPods. In fact the whole family has iPods or other MP3 players. Moreover, all the current digital music devices we have actually represent somewhere between our second and fifth such device (and that is not counting things that are primarily something else but with music ability - such as PCs, Phones, Palm Pilots, PSPs etc.).
Personally, I originally went digital because I was traveling between the US and UK and it was a lot easier to carry 10 MP3 CDS than it was 50 or 60 music CDs. I had my mega expensive 32mb Rio Diamond; that thing would run out of songs before the plane even taxied to the runway but damn it was cool for 1999. Once I had my Rio I pretty much stopped listening to actual CDs. I stopped buying them completely and started buying my music electronically when iTunes and Napster et al got their act together a year or two later.
So being a digital family when the boys received their gifts this past Christmas morning, the first thing they did was rip them to MP3. This enabled them to listen to the songs on their iPods, in my car (it has iPod connector) or from the main music PC in my house. And that was the point that it hit me and I asked myself.
“Why didn't I just buy them the songs on iTunes or Amazon.com in the first place?”
Legal questions aside (and that’s a lifetime of blogs), I guess that it is just that we still need to give something real – something that can be touched, wrapped and unwrapped. I guess computer files are fine for presents to ourselves but when we give a gift to someone that we love it has to feel like it has a value and an MP3 file is not acquainted with the same value yet - even for geeks like me.
<Enter stunningly witty and clever tagline here>
Bazza
No comments:
Post a Comment