Janie Boschma

It has been said numerous times in this paper, but it is amazing to see the number of people who move about this campus oblivious to the world, drowning out the outside experience with the little white cords dangling from their ears. Through them flow the binary zeros and ones that make up the new top single in today’s music scene, an old classic that everyone knows the lyrics to or an up-and-coming musician who still plays music for the right reason – passion.

But when you follow the cords down a bit further, you find yourself running into the portable hard drive deep within the pocket or backpack, more commonly referred to as an iPod. And for those who don’t have the brand name gadget, an mp3 player.

The advent of the iPod, or portable digital music player, has brought with it a spike in digital media, particularly music. It wasn’t so long ago that in order to hear your favorite band, you needed to go out to Best Buy or Circuit City and pick up their latest CD for $12 or $15. Now all you have to do is jump onto your computer and download the newest single that you just heard on the radio in seconds and pay 99 cents for it on iTunes (or you can steal it illegally from your favorite peer-to-peer sharing site, such as Kazaa, LimeWire or the university sanctioned Ruckus).

Point being, digital music has grown to the point where CDs might become obsolete, just like vinyl records, eight track tapes and cassette tapes.

My guess is that if you were to ask the next person you meet, they won’t be able to tell you the last actual tangible CD they purchased. I know the last one I purchased was more than a year ago. There’s no doubt that people have been purchasing CDs; they just do so in digital format from Internet sites and programs such as iTunes.

The digital music trend has been both embraced and shunned by the music industry. The number of bands and musicians who offer their newest albums as digital downloads is increasing, as well as the number of copyright lawsuits being filed by the Recording Industry Association of America for illegal downloads from peer-to-peer sites. Recently, as noted in previous issues of The Spectator, the band Radiohead released its most current album as a digital download and allowed fans to pay whatever price they wanted for the album. This was a smooth move to get people to listen to the album early. The true fans will buy the album twice, even if the first time they didn’t pay much, they’ll more than likely go out and get the actual CD from the store when it is released. In preliminary numbers, more than half didn’t pay for the digital version of the album with those who did pay spending on an average of $6 for the songs.

I have very mixed feelings about the digital music boom. On the one hand, I enjoy having my iPod, and the embarrassingly low number of songs on it, tag along with me when I ride down to class or during breaks while on campus. Being able to select more than just one or two CDs, which could be scratched while carrying them throughout the day, is a luxury that I’m not sure I could give up so easily. I also enjoy the fact that rather than having 200 CDs taking up space, the music is compressed into this portable player, making it much more efficient in terms of space.

On the other hand, however, I enjoy having the tangible aspect of the medium, much like I enjoy having the tangible newspaper over reading the news on the Web. I also enjoy the sound quality that comes from a CD. The direct cut on the disk is much more crisp, clear and original. It has an unaltered, seemingly perfect sound quality unlike the muddled, foggy quality that the songs get when they’re compressed into an mp3. You’d be able to carry 10 times as many mp3s as CDs, but the reduction in quality is something I don’t find justifiable to get rid of CDs completely.

Also, having a CD is almost like a memento, something you can collect and something that, if history repeats itself like it often does, will be a valuable item when it eventually becomes obsolete like its predecessors. There will be a day, my guess is in our lifetime, when people will ask, “What the heck is a CD, besides a coaster and a sharp frisbee?” and we’ll just look and smile.

In any case, music is music. I, like much of the world, have fallen victim to the digital music boom. I am guilty of downloading a few songs here and there, but I would much rather have the actual disc with the high-quality sound recordings.

Dostalek is a senior print journalism major and editorial editor of The Spectator. Dishin’ With Dostalek appears every Thursday.