Death of the CD?

Rolling Stone Magazine recently wrote about the death of the CD and I was instantly hit by this wave of sadness – no more CDs?!?! It is still one of the few indulgences I give myself, unwrapping the plastic, reading the liner notes from cover to cover, listening to the CD over and over again until I’d memorized the sequence of the songs.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my Zune as much as the next person but the sequence of an album is a dying art. It used to be about how one song would flow into the next, why the artists had put the songs in that order. now it’s about how many downloads a throwaway pop song has on iTunes.

Without CDs how does music become tangible anymore? The music writer, Chuck Klosterman, put it best when he wrote: “I have more CDs than 99 percent of America, but fewer CDs than 40 percent of my friends; if an acquaintance has more CDs than me, I feel intimidated and emasculated. I think about my CDs a lot. I find it oddly reassuring to look at them when I’m intoxicated.”

As do I. I know CD retailers are closing (Virgin announced this week that they’re closing the final megastores in the US) but I’m hoping that as long as there are people like Chuck and myself out there, there’s still hope that I’ll still be reading CD liner notes for years to come.

Image courtesy of www.slashgear.com