My Head In The Cloud Storage

...last Wednesday, I had burned a hole in a few albums while at work. Or I would have if they were both actual albums. As I have extolled the virtues of Spotify in the past, it is akin to having access to almost all music in any presentation one prefers. If you like individual songs, build a playlist to your heart's content. Combine some Hall & Oates with a little Pestilence and a side of Iron & Wine. Give it a hilarious name (I call mine Angioplasty Of The Emotions). If you are an even more passive listener, start a station based on Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers a la Pandora Radio. Or, if you're like me, find an album or a discography and soak in one band for two hours. Spotify is an online music playground.

When I find something new on Spotify that I really like, I have a tendency to wear the virtual grooves to a nub. At this point, it becomes time to actually spend a little money to own the album. In the past, I would have drove over hills and through valleys until I found the album on vinyl, preferably on colored wax. As my vinyl collection was put on freeze, it was a shift to hitting Best Buy or Threshold on release dates for the CD. Then it was ordering the CD online as the stores either closed or began carrying less and less.

The problem I have run into at this point is spatial. At one point, even as I would sell CD's I either did not like or could live without, I seemed to always manage to carry about 800 CD's at any given time. I have whittled it down some in recent years, but I still find myself with more boxes of CD's than I would prefer to move around.

In addition to downloading, I have begun putting my physical CD's into those large CD books. In the past, I would have shaken my fist at the sky at such a thought, compromising the J-card insert artwork in such a careless manner. You want me to throw out the plastic jewel case and the back cover insert of the shirtless band members covered in fake prop sweat? How dare I even consider such blasphemy?!? Rather, as I have been doing the same thing with my DVD's, you find out very quickly how little you either miss these things or even give thought to them. Considering the plastic being recycled in this case, you can even pat yourself on the back for being eco-minded while un-cluttering one's own world just a bit.

Even now, there is a fundamentalist record collector inside of me screaming "How could you do this?". In more hopeful and idealistic times in my life, I might daydream a little of having a physical display of my vast and varied film and music collections as conversation pieces. I'd imagine get togethers of friends and acquaintances, drinking homemade cappuccino while commenting on my numbered limited edition 3-disc Suspiria on one shelf while another might notice my penchant for special editions with obligatory bonus tracks. In reality, much as my brother's wall display of music and movies, it goes mostly unnoticed and covered in dust.

Now, I find myself in constant search of space to move around and putting my mostly unwatched movies and music into these Case Logic-style books has proven to be a solid idea. I have even considered going a step further and eventually investing in the removable hard drives with cloud storage that enables one to access their film and music library from anywhere. In short, you might say that I am throwing in the towel and learning to embrace digital and streaming technology. As much as I once thought myself quirky for owning a bevy of Herschell Gordon Lewis splatterfests, it hardly resonates with no space for anyone to maneuver and no one around to see them.