What we have lost along the way

To mark the 10th year of the commercialization of the first few MP3 player, cnet.com has a good article about what we have lost when we move from listening to CDs to MP3. The title of the article is '98-'08: What we lost along the way. Here is part of the article:

Borrowing music
I know this may sound weird considering all the P2P music "sharing" going on these days, not to mention music-focused social networks such as Last.fm, but I miss borrowing CDs from friends. Like lending out a good book, lending music used to mean the lender actually gave up something, and that sacrifice imbued the music with personal meaning. Borrowing physical media also involves face-to-face interaction, oftentimes leading to great conversations. The modern age of copying, uploading, and linking to music has allowed me to discover new music at a much faster rate, but those discoveries seem much less personal.

Album artwork and liner notes
As far back as I can remember, whenever I brought home a new cassette or CD I would pop it in my stereo and immediately look over the album artwork and liner notes. Back then, I remember feeling ripped off if a group didn't include printed lyrics, but these days, I don't think twice that most of my music collection exists as a grid of basic metatags. Sure I can always jump on a band's MySpace page or Wikipedia entry if I want to know where they're from, what they're singing about, who their drummer is, or what their album cover looks like at full size, but I wish that information was still a part of the "product."

Used music
I spent more than two years of my life working in a new and used record store in Sacramento, where used CDs outsold new CDs about four to one. Used CDs not only offered our customers an inexpensive way to acquire new music, it gave people who were bored with their music a way to put money back in their pocket.

Putting aside my nostalgia for used music stores, I think we forget that MP3s are the first music format consumers cannot legally resell. Maybe I'm weird, but over the past 10 years, I've been happy to find myself on both sides of the used music economy--selling CDs to make rent, and buying great old records at garage sales. iTunes has never helped me pay the bills, and aside from illegal file sharing, there's no way to put your MP3s back into circulation after you're tired of them.

Music as furniture
I've known people with CD and record collections that take up an entire room of their home. Personally, I love going over to a friend's home and seeing what's on their shelves (books, CDs, DVDs). As our music collections disappear from our shelves and become entombed in our computers and iPods, something gets lost. Sure, it means dinner guests can no longer judge your bad taste in music, but it also means that when you want to hear Nick Drake on a on rainy Sunday afternoon, you'll need to boot up Windows Media Player or scroll through your iPod. Personally, I miss having Nick Drake live on my shelf as a tangible part of my life, and I miss seeing friend's music collections laid bare for me to analyze and admire.

The very same thing had already happened for mail. Books is in the making, and movies is the next and hopefully the last thing to go virtual. But still, I admire people who incline to buy CDs and stick them into some proper CD players. If I am settle, I will go for CDs also (maybe this is only my excuse of being a cheapskate.)