Welcome to Forgotonia

My parents bought me a Kindle for Christmas.

And, ingrate that I am, I’m going to publicly list everything I don’t like about it.

I feel the need to do this, you see, because I once hated the idea of the iPod, (which I now can’t live without).

I’m aware that I’m on the brink of abandoning something I care about deeply (the book, the printed word, the future of human civilization, blah blah blah). So,

I Knock Before I Try, Because:

1. The damn things necessitate accessorizing. I dread this scenario (which I’m sure will happen in the not-too-distant future): Person 1: “What color Skin did you purchase for your Kindle?” Person 2: “I got a pink polka-dotted one to match the pink supply of Air that I purchased to breathe for this month.”It’s like taking the last decent, non-materialistic part of our culture and turning it into one more consumer experience. This is just simply wrong. (Never mind that a certain person  may or may not have added a bright pink, lighted cover to her Amazon Wish List today).
   
2. Books were the last things that encouraged patience, sitting still, focusing on one thing at a time. Now you can buy another book when you’re supposed to be reading the one in your hands. Soon we’ll see the new Amazon “Order with One Blink” option. (Amazon Prime will provide a free tube of Latisse.)
3. Libraries, which you could say are central to democracy, are already struggling. So, you’re already down, eh? Well here’s a big swift kick in the arse!
4. The way people defend the necessity of the Kindle’s existence by saying “It’s so much more convenient.” Really? Holding a small paperback in your hands was seriously “inconvenient”? I will allow this line if you are, say, Susan Orlean, or the President, and are therefore traveling constantly and reading and researching a lot. (That’s the kind of President I hope for, anyway). But otherwise, the number of books you’re reading simply cannot be breaking your back. My great-grandmother probably hauled water for the wash–which she conducted with a washboard–from the well to the farmhouse and back again. My ancestors’ ghosts laugh at your definition of inconvenience. (Take that, Jeff Bezos.)
5. Magazines don’t mind if you drop food on them. (I read at the table when I’m eating lunch. A lot.) Kindles probably cannot tolerate such abuse. (Wimps.)
6. The fact that I know I’m going to be an underdog here. Just like all those poor fools who are trying to save the U.S. Post Office from going under. (If only the U.S.P.O. had invented Blink Mail or colored Air.)

Left: books I received for Christmas. In this corner (right) the opponent awaits.

I never thought I would do it.

But a couple of years ago, I finally started making the switch over to digital music. And now I’m hooked. It stopped occurring to me to miss cover art and liner notes right around the time I realized I could get things like The Suburbs for less than a gallon of gas.

Not that long ago, I considered the shift to digital–and to actually never “owning” music–as blasphemy.

But now that I can type into a search field anything I want to hear, (and, almost always find what I’m after–are your ears burning, Black Keys?), will I every pay for music again? (Especially now that, as I’ve mentioned lately, I’m trying to rid myself of practically all of my possessions?)

Spotify My Love

I’d been hearing about this new service called Spotify from my favorite radio show, Sound Opinions. But I didn’t jump onto the bandwagon until around the same time everyone else and their dog was suddenly “…listening to such-and-such on Spotify,” according to their Facebook feeds.

And while I still haven’t figured out how to make the most of it as a social medium, (connecting with friends and sharing playlists with them), I have figured out the part that, at least for now, matters most: hearing and discovering good music.

I realized I had reached a possible no-turning-back moment the other night when I logged in to my 50-item Amazon wish list–which had consisted of CDs and MP3 albums I’d wishlisted over the last couple of years and planned to check out–and turned it into a playlist on Spotify.

How can I not take advantage of free access to music? I asked myself. Even with Amazon charging $5 or less for certain CDs–which in itself has simultaneously caused me guilt and glee, as I’ve mentioned before–purchasing everything on that would still have cost me more than $250.

When I declared to my husband, in the process of creating that list, that I might just use Spotify forever and never buy albums again, he surprised me (clutter policeman that he is) by saying he didn’t like the service. “The ads are annoying,” he said.

But to me it’s a trade-off.

I could upgrade to the paid service, of course, and skip the ads altogether. But, having grown up waiting through what felt like hours of commercials for “Garlique” brand garlic tabs and Hooked on Phonics for The Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 to come back on, I can live with them.

See Me, Hear Me, Feel Me…But Not Touch Me

I do have to ask myself, though, as a lifelong music enthusiast–one who still hasn’t been able to part with the cassingles she still owns–am I abandoning an important part of the musical experience that I’ll eventually miss?

After all, I still refuse to convert to a Kindle, because, as I’ve discussed before, BOOKS MUST BE SMELL-ABLE and I will never change my mind on that.

Google Image result for "messy CD pile"

But the truth is, since I took the leap and ordered my first “album” digitally from Amazon, I don’t particularly miss having broken jewel cases all over the house. Or discovering that one of my favorite albums of all time now skips. Or paying $15-$20 for something that probably cost 3 cents to make.

So really my only remaining concern is that in a couple of months or years, something will come along that makes even Spotify seem clunky and hard to use, or some competitor will clobber it and I’ll have to start re-making all of my playlists.

Or at least that seems to be the pattern in this this fickle social media world.

Players Only Love You When They’re Playin’

Just in the time between 2006 (when bullet number one, below, occurred), I went from:

• listening to my first-ever online radio station, WOXY.com, which was really cool but apparently went broke and closed up shop, to
• subscribing to La La.com, which was a pretty nifty service but ended up getting pooped on/obliterated by iTunes, to
• Last FM, which I tried because I heard lots of other people make reference to it, but which eventually annoyed me for reasons I don’t really remember but seemed to have to do with annoying navigation and/or freezing up my computer, to
• Slacker Radio, which C-Nor recommended and which I still like, (but which I’m betting will probably also fold, now that Spotify is stomping across the nation like a giant thing from Ghostbusters), to
• the Amazon Cloud Player, (for saving all the MP3s I had been purchasing), because it launched just at the time I really needed it–i.e., moving from one house and job to another and discovering just how many files I had stored in different places (and couldn’t access–shame on you, iTunes), to
• the aforementioned Marshmallow-Man-huge service.

So, tell me, has the web revolution caused you any musical moral conundrums?

Do you use Amazon Cloud, the new Google music storage system, or something else entirely? Or are you still buying 8-tracks at garage sales on your block, (as well as copies of microwave cookbooks)?

Please tell me about your own musical-ownership evolution–and what on earth I should do with those cassingles–below.