Day 116 - The Sound of Music

Opting for Digital Downloads Instead of CDs

I'm only 35, but in my lifetime I've seen many different media used for music. When I was a kid we had a groovy Hi-Fi stereo that played LPs and 8-Tracks. When I was a teenager, I got a stylin' walkman that played all my favorite Duran Duran tapes. Then, sometime in my drunken twenties, they came out with CD's -- which looked like records, but were smaller, shinier and promised to be THE absolute pinnacle of music media.

Last June I got an iPod.

Now MP3 files are the only way to go -- for me, at least. I believe that this format actually will be the final form of music. Sure, the file type may change, but digital downloads won't. (OK, make a note of that prediction so you can fly back here in your space hovercraft in 2048 to tell me what a fool I was) I LOVE that I can buy just the single song that I want, as opposed to the whole damn album. But more important, I will never go back to the wasteful packaging, the shiny plastic disks, and the transportation required to get them to me.


Savings:

Before my iPod, I would have purchased or otherwise created about a dozen CDs per year. As we all know, I'm as average a person as you can get, so let's imagine that say, 25% of Americans out there do the same. What would happen if we all decided to stop building a huge, visible CD collection and opted for a small hard drive of music files instead? Why, we'd save over 900 MILLION discs per year.


Difficulty Level: 1 out of 5

It's easy to not buy the CDs, the hard part is to not go overboard shopping at iTunes. But knowing that I'm saving all that plastic and fuel? That's music to my ears.