Growing up I listened to cassette tapes. Back then the quality sounded great to me, I liked how sturdy they were, and I loved to write the names of every single song on my mix tape cover. If I ever bought an album on cassette, I also had to listen to much more of the whole album - simply because rewinding and fast forwarding were a bitch. This in return made songs that you initially didn’t care for, grow on you. By the end of the week, you were also into that one song before your favorite song on the album. Take Appetite for Destruction by Gun’s N Roses for example. If you bought the album for Sweet Child O’ Mine, there were probably times where the tape would continue on to the next track, You’re Crazy without you even noticing. You might not even like the song, but because you don’t wanna rewind again, you listen to it. Soon, you realize that You’re Crazy is a great song too.

Fast forward to the 90’s and CD’s. When I first got into CD’s it was all about skipping tracks. With the press of a button, you could get to the very beginning of any song on the album. As a result however, if I wasn’t into a song, I would just skip it. Whereas cassette tapes forced me to get into ALBUMS, CD’s, for the most part, got me into SINGLES. So why even listen to albums anymore? Well, CD albums usually had about 3 good singles, and you couldn’t get all three of them on a “singles” CD. And so I’m stuck with buying albums. Unfortunately those suckers were typically anywhere from $13 - $18… I couldn’t afford to buy all my favorite artists’ albums, although I was getting sick of albums much quicker.

And finally we have the new century and iPods. Remember how CD’s were too expensive? Now I can have any song from any album for FREE. Every song I instantly like in this little white box put into “shuffle” mode. The album is officially dead. Why would my attention span suffer to “grow” to like certain songs? I can listen to any song that I like the moment I hear it. Don’t like this song? Skip it! Don’t like the album? Skip it!

This brings up a couple of questions. Is it weird for me to be a little scared by this? I guess I’m so used to the notion of “albums” that I can’t help but feel like we’re losing something good here. Maybe it’s natural selection and we’re weeding out the bad songs, even artists, from the good ones. What about on the artists’ end? Musicians will have to rethink the concept of “albums” as well as how to make money off of one single song, let alone standing out amongst a sea of other artists who have music available for FREE. It’s an exciting time, the revolution has begun, but a government hasn’t been established yet. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.