I love music. As an avid music fan/collector, I remember back in the ’80s when CDs first started showing up on the shelves of my local record store. Many people lamented that they no longer had that smell of new vinyl and that the artwork has been reduced to a small piece of paper crammed inside a plastic shell. It didn’t take long for the vinyl LP to disappear from the store shelves altogether as people embraced the CD. To this day I still know people who prefer vinyl. Now we are starting to see another shift in attitudes as music sales go digital.

A recent survey of 750,000 members of Napster UK shows that 150,000 no longer buy prerecorded CDs. In my opinion, this is the beginning of the demise of the prerecorded CD being sold in stores. I imagine the shift won’t take long to happen. As broadband becomes the standard, people will migrate over to buying all their music over the Internet. Artwork will be downloaded and the masses will shift over to storing their music digitally. Artists will begin to offer songs individually instead of having to write and record an entire album at once. Just as the lovers of vinyl miss those days, I imagine there will be many saddened by this shift. Don’t get me wrong, I, too, have embraced MP3s and buy digital music. But a collection of songs on my hard drive just doesn’t give me the same feeling or connection to the music that the physical presence of 1000+ CDs and albums in my collection does for some reason. Maybe I’m showing my age, but I don’t think I’ll be alone when I think back fondly on the days of buying my music in a physical form.