2018-08-21 at 3:38 AM UTC
When I was 15 and 16, my small little cd collection was my whole world.
Those few albums I owned, I cherished them like a religious person would for relics of their superstition or their holy bible.
Albums such as Things Falling Apart, the Paranoia Agent soundtrack, Merzbuddha, Rabies etc weren't just discs with music on them, they were more like stories and auditory movies.
The listening sessions to me were like rituals, I wasn't just listening to the music, I was partaking in an experience.
Then 2007 came along and I started ripping my albums to FLAC and AAC for itunes, suddenly I was spending more time listening to my albums on the computer, then I discovered blogspot blogs with links to various albums and in 2008 I got heavily into torrenting.
From the years of 2009 onward I really felt something was amiss, I felt this strong emptiness and depression listening to music over the computer ... each and every time I would pirate a new album and insert the tracks into fb2k I felt sad and sadded, I realized that I was losing the intimate and personal touch with music I once had, the intensity of the experience was gone.
For years I struggled with this intense depression from no losing that physical experience with music, but at the same time I wanted access to the entire world of music and the ease of piracy was too hard to resist, I would amass over 100,000 songs around 2010 - 2011, one day I got so fed up with it I deleted my entire collection, only to redownload everything and repeat that process five or ten more times.
Finally, in 2018 I got a job and can now afford to own music and with that I have been saved from the mental torment and slavery of piracy and digital files.
I never once had the special feeling I got from physical with digital, it was always less than, the tiny artwork and text on a screen never grabbed me like physical did with venturing to a store, picking up the album and slowly building my collection over time.
The anticipation and release from collecting physical can never be had with digital files and especially streaming.
I feel sorry for the new generations that will grow up having never experienced physical, those children will listen to an album once or a few times and move on to the next thing, their brains will grow around that way of consumption and with it music will suffer dearly.
Imagine a couple decades from now in a world where these people are adults, having never owned music, most who maybe never even listened to an entire album, they only consume the immediate songs that stick out to them, it will probably be a world even more vapid and soulless than the pop scene of today.
