Audio: Listen to this article.
Vinyl was before my time. The first music I owned was purchased on cassette, followed by compact disc. As an eight year old in 1983, I saved up all my money to purchase Def Leppard’s Pyromania on cassette at Knollwood Mall in St. Louis Park, MN. I listened to that album start to finish for weeks on end. I read the liner notes front to back, more times than I can remember. I knew all the words to all the songs and appreciated even the deep cuts, as if they were more important than the hits.
Later that year I found a tear-out flyer in Circus Magazine for the Columbia House mail-order music club. Let’s set aside the conversation about what an eight year old was doing reading Circus Magazine and entering into a binding negative option billing contract, for the moment. The Columbia House flyer promised eight cassettes for one penny. My eyes grew to the size of dinner plates. Amazing, I thought.
I took a penny from my dad’s change jar, scotch taped it to the postage paid flyer, and walked it straight down to the mailbox at the end of our driveway. As a free range kid without much supervision, I then hopped on my BMX bike to meet some friends in the neighborhood, probably stopping on the way to get a refreshing drink out of some random garden hose. Those “free” cassettes were forgotten the moment I bunny-hopped the curb.
Six to eight weeks later, a box of cassettes arrived, surprising both my parents and I, for vastly different reasons. To this day, I couldn’t remember a single band or album name listed on one of those cassettes. The only memory I have is using a brown paper lunch bag for my new cassette collection. Yet, l have vivid memories of saving my money to purchase Motley Crue’s Shout at the Devil on cassette from Down in the Valley, in Golden Valley, MN at the end of 1983. Playing the cassette start to finish, reading the liner notes front to back, and endless hours of enjoyment soon followed.
This story repeated later in 1989 when I purchased my first compact disc, Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever, and subsequently signed up for the Columbia House CD club to bolster my collection. I have no clue which ten CDs I received for the price of one at something like $18.95 plus shipping and handling.
Hopefully members of the Audiophile Style community see a bit of themselves in this story, and see where I’m heading with it. The medium doesn’t really matter. It’s about working for something, scarcity, and focus, among other things.
I started streaming music as soon as it was available. Sure the quality sucked, but the amount of music for essentially nothing, was amazing. Call the $9.99 monthly charge whatever one wants, I call it essentially free. We all know how the story went in the ensuing years. We eventually got unlimited high resolution streaming for, hang on I have to look it up because it’s that insignificant, roughly $10-$20 per month. As high resolution catalogs increased, our collective amazement of what we were witnessing only grew. We asked for everything and we got everything. But, has the dog finally caught the car?
Now that we have everything at our fingertips, for essentially free, we should be enjoying this unlimited music collection more than we ever enjoyed our limited collection of cassettes, CDs, and perhaps vinyl records. I accept that some people are happier than ever with this situation, and I’m happy they are happy. However, over the last couple years I’ve rediscovered how much more enjoyable it is to purchase music rather than stream it. Wait, what? Yes, I can’t believe I’m writing an article about my increased enjoyment of purchased music and a somewhat inverse relationship with unlimited streaming services.
A gallon of fresh lake water in Minnesota, a gallon of salt water in Hawaii, and a bucket of sand in the Sahara all have something in common. They are essentially everywhere in those locations and free. In other words, worthless. One could make a similar argument about streaming music from all the major services today. Not even the video streaming services can claim this amount of worthlessness because none of them off everything for nearly nothing. Yet, the music services give us everything, everywhere, for either our time listening to commercials or a tiny monthly fee.
I would never have realized this until I put together my immersive audio system and started buying music that can’t be streamed. We can’t stream lossless immersive audio or even the four channel quad releases of the 1970s. As such, I’ve purchased every release in Rhino’s Quadio series, nearly every Atmos Blu-ray in the Super Deluxe Edition surround series, tons of lossless Atmos releases from Immersive Audio Album, and even more physical Blu-ray releases from individual artists (Pearl Jam, Frank Zappa, and yes the Def Leppard Pyromania lossless Atmos release). I literally have stacks and stacks of purchased digital audio, and I value it much more than anything I can stream.
One example of this arrived last week. I received the Bread album Baby I’m-A Want You in quadraphonic and two channel stereo, in 24/192 PCM on Blu-ray. It was part of the latest four album release from Rhino that included Bread, Duke Ellington, Graham Central Station, and Bette Midler, all in four channel quad on Blu-ray.
I’d only heard of the band Bread in passing. Couldn’t previously name a single song from the band, and would never have taken the time to listen to Bread in the past because I had a zillion albums to stream for free. Why listen to Bread when I can listen to ten seconds of a bunch of albums I’ll never listen to again? Only kidding, but there’s some truth to that statement.
Since last week I’ve listened to this Bread album probably 15 times, start to finish, read the liner notes, and looked up more information about the band. I’m now invested in the band and its music, and I’m enjoying it 100% more than I ever would’ve through streaming. I’ve found songs on this album that I totally love for the music, and the sound quality. At the same time, I think I’m neglecting the other four releases that arrived last week, and can’t wait to dig into them. But, I’m on a roll with Bread and will get to Ellington’s New Orleans Suite shortly.
Not only am I enjoying this music more because I purchase it and it has meaning / worth to me, but I’m also discovering just as much or even more music than when I only streamed from the firehose of free music. Looking over the list of albums I’ve purchased in just this Quadio series, I’ve never listened to 75% of the bands and 99% of the music until I purchased it. In addition, I don’t know the last time I listened to The Doors, prior to getting the newly released Atmos version on Blu-ray. The same goes for many other artist and albums.
I still struggle to believe how much more I’m enjoying the music I’ve purchased over the last couple years, over the unlimited buffet I was previously used to from streaming services. I still subscribe to Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal, but they aren’t nearly as enjoyable as ordering an album, waiting for its arrival, opening it up, pressing play, reading the liner notes, and doing it all over again when a new release is available. I highly recommend other music lovers try this, if they haven’t already. Perhaps I’m just late to the party. At least I’m here and I love it. Now back to Bread.
About the author - https://audiophile.style/about
Author's Complete Audio System Details with Measurements - https://audiophile.style/system
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