My hour commute to and from work each day gives me plenty of time to think and today I started thinking about the problem with downloading music. It's not the usual problem that most people talk about when they talk about downloading. My thoughts involve the quantity. When people go buy a CD in the store it is unusual, but not unheard of however, to buy more than maybe 5 at a time. But for the sake of this argument lets say on average you buy 2 CDs at a time. When you buy those CDs you rip off the plastic and pop one in your car and listen to it over and over for several days maybe weeks. You learn all the lyrics and song names, flip through the booklet, discover every bass drum hit and guitar solo. You listen to it until you are sick of it (love it or hate it the first time around).
Now lets look at downloading, in the span of an hour or two (depending on your download speed) you can have 4 albums and many other single songs. Three minutes to pop those onto your iPod and off you go. However, with the thousands of other songs on your iPod those albums get lost. You are too easily distracted and skip to another song or shuffle the songs with everything else. That experience is lost when you download. This is not true for everyone, every time they download and I try my darnedest to appreciate the whole album but its easy for things to get lost.
So my advice, for myself and everyone: Try a little harder, don't download 500 just to say you have them. Appreciate the music...all of it.
