I Still Buy Compact Disks

I don’t buy many compact disks, mind you, but a pack of four just showed up today:

These came from Kinesis, one of the progressive rock sites I’ve been buying from for years. While I do buy most of my music online these days (mainly from the iTunes Store), I still buy a few CDs for two reasons:

1. There are a few artists whose work I have more-or-less complete on CD, and I enjoy them enough that I want to keep buying their physical albums. There aren’t many of these: Jethro Tull, IQ, Jadis, and if The Who or Pete Townshend ever release another album, I’d buy that on CD, too.
2. There are also some albums I want which I can’t easily find online (meaning, for download from iTunes or Amazon). The Jack Yello and Landmarq albums in the picture are two of those. There are even a few albums I can’t even find domestically on CD, which is weird, especially in the case of Presto Ballet, whose whole catalog save one album is available on iTunes. Strange. I could probably hunt around and find them for legal download somewhere, but I don’t really want to kill myself, not when I know I can get the CDs from stores I’ve used before.

One of my projects for later this year is to go through my CD collection and decide what I want to keep and what I want to get rid of. I’m sure I’ll get rid of most of it in the long term, but in the short term just culling the marginal stuff is a good start. Get down from 4 boxes of CDs to 3 or even 2.

It’s a far cry from my college and grad school days, when I was buying 1-2 CDs per week. On the other hand, I have fond memories of marching through Jethro Tull‘s back catalog in 1989-90. Making mix tapes to listen to on the tape player in my car. I spent a lot of time on that stuff, but it was fun at the time. Not all wasted time is actually wasted.