Virtual or actual?

Dear Heart and I have a lot of CDs and DVDs. We even have some cassettes and the odd bit of vinyl (remember the messages that were sometimes scratched in run out groove?) lying around. I’m not certain we actually own a working cassette player and we certainly don’t have a record player. No matter how many storage boxes and cabinets we have our collection always seems to keep outgrowing the available space.

We don’t buy enormous amounts of CDs and I sometimes wonder if the storage issue was an underlying thing behind this.

One of the things that we really liked about iTunes was that the music was virtual. It lived on the computer and iPod and you didn’t need to worry about housing it. It also meant that you’d never open the case to find the CD missing and then have to wonder which of the hundreds of other cases it could be in. I wouldn’t have to spend time organising the cases in to alphabetical order only to have Dear Heart, in the best rock ’n’ roll style, show total disregard for this and put them back any where.

We’ve gleefully downloaded tunes that we recall from our youth and that we thought were gone forever (except in out memories). We’ve bought albums on the spur of the moment because we suddenly realised that we needed to hear them.

But I’ve realised that I miss album inlays. I like looking at the band photographs. Even better I like looking back at old inlays and remembering how cool I thought the band looked. Now I sometimes wonder why they thought it was a good idea to wear what they did and why I thought it was a good idea to copy them.

I like to read the bits where the band thanks everyone they ever met. You wonder what it was that ‘Matty at Anslow’s Donut Place’ did that got them a mention. And isn’t it every music fan's secret fantasy to have the inspiration for a song credited to them on an album inlay?

I like to read lyrics. Pulp’s inlays always contained the instruction “please do not read the lyrics while listening to the recordings”. Lyrics are an area that Dear Heart and I have endless discussions over. We both have a history of mishearing song lyrics. We also have debates over what the lyrics actually say. Our latest bout in this regards ‘In these arms’ by Bon Jovi. I’m certain that “the poet needs the pain”, Dear Heart thinks he “needs the pen”. Surely pain sounds so much better. We purchased this one from iTunes so we can’t check for certain.

This has lead to us deciding to purchase things by artists we really like on CD and purchase work by groups we are less interested in virtually. However I’ve now hit a little snag with this. Alice Cooper’s new album Along Came a Spider is something I would buy on CD but I think that the iTunes version has bonus tracks.

I suppose I’ll buy the iTunes version and hope that someone in the near future invents that downloadable inlay which goes beyond the cover artwork.