Throughout the 80s and 90s in most cases the mixtape had ruled all but now CD writers came as standard with most computers and writable CDs were cheap. The romance of sitting down with your double tape deck and following your carefully planned out lists of songs for an hour or two was dead. Now songs were merely 'tracks' and 'tracks' could be burned in mere moments. Taking a moment to make a mix cd could never speak volumes of how you felt about the recipient. The only thing it said was that you were a potential pirate selling your wares down the market.
Then along came the Ipod and other MP3 players and all of a sudden you could pretty much take your entire CD collection with you anywhere you liked. So then there was itunes and napster and peer to peer music sharing and Radiohead supposedly giving their album away. This all seemed a long way away from my 17 year old self deciding whether or not the very little money I had should be spent on OK Computer. Of course it was and rarely was a better investment made. The point being that then buying an album was taking a chance. There were multiple others that didn't quite pay off. Bands you saw play one track on Jools Holland that seemed fantastic and then after parting with your cash you discovered that was their only decent song. Now I fear less the album gamble. Now I fear the move of digital music from one PC to another and the bloody hours it takes moving fifteen odd years of music collection from one hard drive to another. This doesn't have the romance of the mixtape either this is just joyless stockpiling.
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