AMN Opinion: I Don't Want a Collection

While Avant Music News has been all about the news and I’ve made an attempt to avoid too much opining, we’re going to try an opinion piece today. Feel free to comment if you agree, disagree or have anything to add. Remember, it is just an opinion and you need not take it too seriously. :)

Often in my late teens I would drive an hour or more from Eastern Long Island to record stores close to New York City in order to take advantage of their superior selections. This was before I was aware of mail order, before online stores such as Amazon, Wayside and the like, and far before the advent of the MP3. I would typically purchase 5-7 CDs, which was all I could afford, and then head home. If I had the luxury of being the passenger rather than the driver, friends would note how I fondled the CDs in anticipation, reading liner notes and studying cover art. At home I’d add my new acquisitions to a growing collection, which was meticulously sorted. I fantasized of having a much larger collection, perhaps several hundred or thousand CDs, as if that somehow would bring happiness, prestige, bragging rights or just enlightened contentment.

Twenty years later, I’m heading in the opposite direction faster than I thought possible.

With collecting comes the overhead that I will call “collection management”. This refers to the tasks associated with maintaining a collection, such as sorting, organizing, categorizing, and filing. Not to mention finding bigger and better methods of filing and storage, as well as possibly cataloging the collection in order to determine gaps and missing albums, or to create and update sale and want lists. None of the above includes listening, though in fairness these activities do not preclude listening while taking part in them. Note that none of these activities are absolutely necessary, though the undesirable alternative usually takes the form of dozens of random stacks of unsorted CDs. I’ve tried the latter and it just doesn’t work for me, as it seems to make me not want to listen to music, defeating the whole purpose of a collection.

Collection management requires large amounts of time, and this time commitment scales roughly with the size of your collection. If you have the time, collection management can be a reasonable and even enjoyable activity. But if you don’t have the time, it becomes an unbearable annoyance. Combine the relatively mundane tasks of modern life, such as holding a job and spending time with your family, with the hectic pace of our era and you find that you need to make a sacrifice somewhere. You can either have a well-managed but static collection, or a poorly managed but vibrant collection. Add a little work-related travel and other hobbies, and the situation rapidly degrades.

I’m looking for another option.

I have not bought a CD in over 18 months and do not plan on ever buying one again. I stopped reading liner notes or putting any sort of importance on cover art better than 10 years ago. Between online stores such as eMusic, net labels and other free sources, as well as borrowing from friends, I can fill all of my listing time with an ample amount of new music, and then some. Digital media can be stored effectively in a very small footprint. My storage system, including a full backup, will hold over 4500 “CDs” in the room required for two medium sized books. Collection management consists of acquiring the MP3, OGG or FLAC files, putting them in an appropriately named directory, and filing them on a giant external hard drive. Done. End of story. Thousands of albums ready at the click of a mouse. Compared to the three $500 CD cabinets that I bought to store my CD collection of around 2400 items, this is a major convenience and a bargain as well.

But it can get even better.

Why “own” media at all? The digital world does not require ownership. Rather than download, listen, categorize, store and back up a digital music collection, let’s un-ask the question of how to manage a collection and let’s not even have a collection.

The alternative, which does not exist currently but is becoming technically feasible, is to have a purely on-line model of music listening. This requires that all music is easily available digitally over the Internet. Nothing gets stored on your PC, laptop or MP3 player for any significant period of time. If you want to listen to an album or a track, you type identifying information into a search engine, follow the reference to a download page, download the music and listen. If you’re going to be in a place without Internet access for a period of time, you copy it to your portable player. With recent advances in wireless networking, a few years from now there may not be too many areas left without sufficient high-speed coverage to even require the latter.

The advantages to the consumer are many-fold. Easy access to new music from anywhere with Internet connectivity, a broadening of one’s listening horizons, no need to back up music, and no need for collection management, period.

So rather than own media, you download it on demand from your on-line library of the world’s total recorded output. What needs to be done to make this a reality? The technical barriers are rapidly evaporating, as high-speed wired and wireless Internet access is readily available in most countries. The low cost of storage would not inhibit the massive amounts of space required for redundant copies of high-fidelity digital recordings in data centers. The business barriers, however, may make my personal utopia unachievable.

The music industry loves DRM. In order for this model to work, music would have to be DRM-free, so that customers are not locked into certain players or hardware (sorry, Apple). The pricing for such a service would have to be flat rate, so that it would appeal to both serious and casual listeners. I’ve not done a financial analysis, but as a user I would happily fork over $50-$100 a month for such a service. The pricing would have to be high enough so that the service provider makes a nice profit while low enough that piracy is deterred. The payout to artists would have to be based on popularity (i.e., downloads), in order to encourage competition, so such usage information would need to be tracked. These payouts would actually have to happen as well, which is not always the case in the business today. And all players, labels, artists, and distributors, would have to shake hands and agree to make a collection-less world a reality.

In the mean time, I wait and do my minimal collection management. I try not to think of double-fault scenarios where both drives in my redundant storage system fail, or of house fires, or similar disasters that would wipe out my collection. Whether or not having an un-collection would bring prestige or bragging rights, I will brag if I manage to achieve it, and it will help me achieve happiness and contentment, enlightened or otherwise.