Back in the day there were records. They were round and flat and scratched. But they played music. My first recollection of music on demand were the forty-fives I played on my little record player. My parents recorded me on audit tapes when I was young. I have two of them still in the attic today, although the quality of the recording has degraded with the magnet strip tape after all these years.
Then there were CDs. I remember my first CD player and first CD. I thought I was buying a lot of CDs, but when I look at the totality of the music I collected after high school, college and beyond, it’s really not that much music when compared to music collections today.
For a while there was iTunes or Napster once music was more easily stored and played electronically. Enter the era of the MP3. I collected music during that time, some of it was my own music but a huge portion of the music I had was from other people or sources on the Internet. My collection got larger and larger. There was so much it was hard finding what I liked, what was okay and what was not at all to my tastes but had somehow gotten into my library. It was an organizational mess.
But it was my collection. Once I started storing things in iTunes, which was fickle to say the least, I was able to categorize most things. I was still collecting, but by then there was so much available to collect it was overwhelming and almost not worth the bother. If I really wanted a song or album I could find it pretty quickly.
But I did keep a playlist of the songs I liked the most. These were mostly big hits or albums where I liked most of the songs. That playlist, named, “All New” so it would sort alphabetically at the top, would get bigger over time. Hits would become old hits in my mind. Each year at the beginning of the year I’d make a copy of the All New playlist and rename it to the year just past. Now I had a playlist from, 2012 or 2013 or 2014, etc. Then I’d clean out All New and start fresh for the new year.
Only we don’t really have music collections any more today. Music is all streaming-based and on demand. You can play a station of top hits or alternative hits or Lindsay Stirling songs. You can even do it by just asking Alexa to play something for you. If you like a song you can have it played over and over and over again (not that my children would ever play the ‘Poop’ song repeatedly, no sir, not my children).
Collections are gone. I don’t even know where my music library is that I worked so long and hard to collect and coordinate is. Somewhere on my computer, but why bother looking for it, because I can just ask for, “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes by Paul Simon” and have it play three seconds later.
On demand streaming is nice, I just don’t know what is “my music” versus everyone’s music anymore.
The Big Boy Update: My son came home with his work plan today with two things crossed off. He explained, quite vehemently, that he didn’t agree to do those work things (giving reasons why that netted out to him not wanting to do them). We had a conversation with him about how it was his teacher’s responsibility to be sure each student gets a complete education and that sometimes he would have to do things he didn’t want to do or didn’t agree with them. Tomorrow he has a chance to make up the lack of work today by completing his full work plan as well as the two items he didn’t want to do today. Why did he not want to do them? There were sentences to write that he didn’t want to do because he didn’t want to waste paper to save the trees. He didn’t want to do the word problems because they were “so easy”.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter came home with a fever today. She’s on the bed now, listening to a show on her iPad. She always wants the dog to be with her but Matisse rarely wants to lie up against her—except now she does. She won’t leave my daughter alone, trying to get as close to her as possible and chew on a bone at the same time.
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